Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and of souls on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip! Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral death! The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling their condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness. The soul, going down stream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall resuscitate it?