sentiment and partly as the "rights of man" advance in independent assertion. The world's whole history of government development from its Oriental cradle of paternal autocracy to the widest expansion of republican freedom, has shewn naturally this tendency. From the dicta of Solomon to Lord Beaconsfield's lament "that crime was vindicating its own impunity" the decline of penal discipline has accompanied the course of legislation. But the decline has not been steady. By fits and starts there come excesses of alternate severity and leniency. For instance, a period of brutal floggings in our army has led to nearly total disuse of a species of punishment of proved and sole suitability to certain classes of crimes in its proper application.

Criminal law, certainly, demands the greatest caution in alteration, both on political and moral grounds. It is creditable to the legislature to err on the side of leniency, as the legislators are chiefly of a class which is least tempted to incur its penalties. But there are principles of law which neither carelessness, nor good nature, can cause to be overlooked without the destruction of the law itself.

Some are now arguing that crime is a matter of epoch, and questioning where the responsibility for crime rests, whether on the criminal or his circumstances. This shews simple ignorance of the laws in discussion. Human laws are not of universal application as the moral law, but prescriptive of civil conduct in a State, only not repugnant to the moral law. Human judgment, also, is of limited scope, as it cannot deal with motives, but with facts in evidence.

The causes of, or ultimate responsibility for, crime is a consideration for philanthropic and remedial legislation, but not for the administration of statute law. Parents may be to blame for their sons' crimes, society itself may cause

infraction of the guards it has set up, sanitary neglect, want of education, faulty or unintelligible laws may engender crime against the State; but, all the while, the fact of a crime occurring must be met with punishment as closely and immediately connected with it as possible, or anarchy must result.

Criminal law is not a psychological problem, discriminating temperament or physical or moral motives, but an imposition of fences against its own violation.

True, penal reform has had two difficulties to contend with apathy unawakened by direct self-interest; and false theories of punishment.

Such men as Romilly found it difficult to rescue boystealers of 5s. from a shop from being hung, with a stone to their legs to make them heavy enough; and after long debates, to get midnight votes from diners-out, who told him "they were for hanging 'em all."

Such

The false theorists about punishment are now, on the contrary, for treating it simply as education, not as correction. They confuse medicine with dietary. doctoring would hardly be accepted for the body. Punishment is an incident to education, and in its process should, as much as possible, aid it. But its business is to check the recurrence of a specific offence against it. Education is a much larger process, ill-suited to penal treatment, which cannot be made attractive, as education should be, without losing its special effect; and which, to be effective, should be as short and close to the crime it is to check as possible. To make punishment of long duration for educational purpose is one of the grossest mistakes of present theories. Prisons used as schools, and schools as prisons, are the reciprocal blunders of present penal and reformatory legislation. Criminals are badly treated as pupils, and pupils are badly educated as criminals.

Relaxed notions of penal discipline have reduced the resources of punishment almost to exhaustion. Short of capital punishment, imprisonment almost alone remains. Corporal chastisement, while still recording its special efficacy in a few instances of suitable application, is a remedy well nigh sacrificed to senseless sentiment.

Fines cannot be generally applicable, and the only provision in the Bill under consideration relating to fines is a proportionate release from prison on part payment, but it is not said whence such part payments can come. There is nothing in the Rules on the subject.

Imprisonment, therefore, is the main topic in discussing penal discipline. Its primary requisite is that it be made a deterrent from the repetition of the crime. Its secondary requisite is that its process should be to the utmost conducive to education; to health of body as well as mind.

The number of re-commitments now replenishing gaols betrays corrective inefficiency in the present system, and this sign of inefficiency is shewn to have increased during the 20 years of Government prison control, from which the inference may be drawn, that with habitual criminals the treatment acts as a sustained inducement to repetition of crime, instead of a check to the criminal propensity.

The late Departmental Report confesses that upon our boasted advance of civilization the mass of habitual criminals is a growing stain. The Home Secretary stated, in debate, that 50 per cent. of our prison population were apparently incorrigible, yet he looks with hope to such improvements as are already being introduced in the way of discriminating the "Star class," and the greater use by magistrates of the "First Offenders Act." But even allowing greater discretion to the Secretary of State to make Rules regulating the mode in which sentences shall be carried out, and the classification and differential treatment

of prisoners, there will always be extreme difficulty in adapting this almost sole remaining manner of punishment to the variety of cases coming under it, maintaining adequate severity for some, and mitigating so far as possible the requisite amount of it to others.

The main difficulty in the problem of imprisonment lies between the principles of association and segregation of prisoners. The evils of both are manifest-the mutual contamination of the one, and the mental strain of the other. There are advantages also belonging to each mode of treatment. A careful association may have humanizing influence, and segregation gives opportunities for the exercise of individual kindness and advice.

The right solution of the problem is surely compromise between the two principles. I recollect years of anxious pains taken to obtain the abolition of associated imprisonment, and to get an entire provision of new buildings for substituting the cellular system. There is fear now of too great departure from one extreme to the other. The separate system has never been a solitary system. Constant attention of officials, some association in work, and a good supply of books, have relieved the strain of solitude. The Bill goes as far as is safe for penal efficacy, in proposing further mitigation by discretionary rules, and new classification. The Home Secretary in debate used almost dangerous phraseology in distinguishing "real criminals" from those "not really criminal" for different treatment in such matters as dietary, plank beds, &c. There should be as much of the disagreeable in prison life as is compatible with health, and even the least criminal can hardly have life in prison made safely "cheerful" as Mr. O'Connor demands.

The new division of misdemeanants, the discrimination of first-offenders, conditional remissions of sentences, and progressive stages, are mitigations coming up to the very

verge of introducing into punishment, that fatal defect -uncertainty.

For those juvenile criminals whose precocious malice must still be punished in prison, it is wisely proposed to have separate treatment. Others, as far as possible will be whipped, and sent to Reformatories in the true sense, not penal schools stamping all their childhood with criminality, but for education after punishment.

The Bill disclaims all intention of offering a complete new Code, and much is left to be added in the way of concurrent educational provision.

To omit any possible means and opportunities of moral influence compatible with the process of punishment for offences, is as wrong as attempting to make correction an entirely educational undertaking. In all recent reports deficiency and ineffectiveness of prison instruction are lamented, and improvement proposed. It is to be feared, from the Draft Rules issued, that the Government has failed to realise the absurdity of cellular teaching, which the Departmental Report of 1895 condemned as utterly useless, and has not yet organized a complete system of class instruction. The schoolmaster is not named in the new Rules except in one paragraph about juveniles, which it is hoped will be a vanishing class altogether.

The Report of 1895 also condemned the still existing rule by which only prisoners sentenced for more than four months receive any instruction at all! Even three months with a schoolmaster might be of some educational use; but education is now understood only to mean acquisition of science, and not mental and moral training, and the cost is the main consideration, with too little appreciation of the value to be received.

As to religious instruction the chaplain is, by one of the Rules, put in charge of the three Rs. Chaplains are miserably paid, as if any one was good enough to teach