prisoners, who of all men require the wisest and most careful advice, the want of which has mostly caused their crimes. The Bill, however, permits holders of benefices with cure of souls, to undertake these duties, it is supposed that some prisons are too small to justify the expense of a chaplain, or even to engage the interest of such an officer! This folly is probably a phase of what is called "the religious difficulty."

The increased use and powers of Visiting Committees is the most important improvement proposed. The kindly sympathies of unpaid local co-operation will supply the soul to the rigid body of Government officialism. Visitors know more of the prisoner's circumstances, and, may exercise kindlier influences.

Many a criminal has been reclaimed from evil ways by the first felt sympathy of visitors; and Discharged Prisoners' Aid Societies have often closed the prison gates for ever against the return of the hopeless.

There is a feature of our prison buildings which is capable of immense, and morally great, improvement. The places used for public worship are of the meanest kind; certainly unsuggestive of any reverential feeling which might do more to humanize criminals than any other educational influence. In a large circuit of prisons I only found one, at Wormwood Scrubs, that had a decent chapel, and that was due to the accident of an over accumulation of quarried stone at Portland, by which the public are not allowed to recoup themselves of the charge of profitless prisoners. The Governor considers this chapel his chief instrument of good, and says that it is so remarked on by all the most expert visitors, and especially by some American officials who had lately come to report on our Institutions.

Throughout this survey of the Prisons Bill there appears abundant difficulty in the problem of right penal discipline; the arbitrium of legislature as to what is crime, the

variety of judgments in sentencing, and the differences in mode of execution, added to human incapacity to discern the springs of action, must cause inevitable uncertainty and inequality in the incidence of punishment. Dogmatism is therefore out of place in discussion of the subject. But if general principles are observed, and the true object of punishment is kept in view, as neither retaliation nor vengeance, but simply the protection of society from the repetition of crime, the maximum of its possible adaptation to the case may be united with a minimum of allowance of discretionary application. One is glad to hear that this difficult problem is to be referred, for further consideration, to the highest authorities.

Uncertainty is the worst defect in punishments. The provision in the Bill for winning partial remission of sentence is a compromise between the dangers of uncertainty, and the usefulness of the incentive of hope. But laws must strictly define crimes, and assign definite punishment. Certainty is far more important than severity. More uniform and shorter sentences are recommended to increase the efficacy of punishment, and relieve the needless crowding of our gaols.

The increase of education in its true sense outside of prisons, and greater attention to the objects of correction within them, will lead, it is hoped, to a reduction of our criminals, which the improved system now about to be further perfected has so well begun.

NORTON.

IV.-DIVORCE AND JEWISH LAW:* A STUDY IN COMPARATIVE JURISPRUDENCE.

"MARRIAGES are made in Heaven," the popular

proverb of every European language, is only a variant of the more subtle saying of the Rabbi who, in response to the enquiry, "What has God been doing since. the work of creation was completed?" answered, "The Holy One has been sitting in Heaven arranging marriages." It may strike many as singular that this strange bit of folk philosophy should find its earliest source in Rabbinical literature, or that it should be recognised there at all; but this is not the only instance in which that little explored store of morals and jurisprudence is misjudged, or contemned, because it is unknown.

There is perhaps no subject on which Jews and their laws are more misunderstood and misrepresented than this of the estimation and status of women; and the Rabbinical regulations about marriage and divorce have long been the butt of the ignorant, as well as the scoff of the prejudiced. It is well, therefore, that this little book by a prominent member of the Philadelphian Bar, should have appeared, and that the work should have been done so capably; for there is henceforth no excuse for the English lay reader, and certainly none for the lawyer, to ignore the striking lessons in historical development, and philosophical discrimination which the Jewish Law of Divorce presents to the impartial student.

Here we shall find anticipated the refined analysis of the marriage contract which Bentham made the basis of the rules laid down by him on this subject in his "Principles of

* The Jewish Law of Divorce according to Bible and Talmud. By David Werner Amram, M.A., LL.B. London: David Nutt, 1898.

the Civil Code "; here the last word of Philosophy on the rationale of Divorce, as declared by Herbert Spencer in his " Principles of Sociology," will be shewn to have its counterpart in the learning of the Rabbis; here the inconsistencies of the English, the Scotch, the French, the American and other modern "systems" of marriage law will find a striking contrast in the logical rules which have been ignored in their haphazard and unscientific development.

Jewish Law, in which the fusion of ethics and legislation was carried to an extent which has never been secured by any other system, and in which every act of a man was regarded as an act of religion, escaped from the fluctuation of opinion in modern society between the view of marriage as a merely civil contract, and the contrary belief in it as a sacrament. It thus avoided the chaotic condition into which the marriage and divorce regulations of modern States have been reduced by the conflicting claims of (1) the old Canon Law, as interpreted by the clergy and modified in varying degrees by the principles of the Reformation; (2) the Common Law, as declared by its secular exponents on the judicial bench; and (3) the Statutes of Parliament, reflecting more or less current opinions on the moral and sociological problems involved, as affected by varying historical considerations.

It is only necessary to cite a few instances of rules from the Jewish Law to shew how much there is still to learn from it; and how great must be its value in the study of comparative Jurisprudence on which all improvements in future legislation must be based.

The ravisher may never divorce his victim.*

Conversely, the woman found guilty of adultery may never marry her paramour.t

* Deuteronomy xxii., 28 and 29.

† Mishna Sotah v., I.

Remarriage with a divorced wife after the intervention of a second marriage is forbidden.*

Childlessness after ten years cohabitation,† and the incurring of a loathsome disease, ‡ are valid grounds for divorce, so is joint consent arising from a mutual recognition of incompatibility.§

Turning to another aspect of the question and regarding the subject from the point of view of historical development, we cannot avoid the reflection that if Maine was enabled by his studies in Archaic institutions in the East to produce such epoch making books as his "Ancient Law" and "Village Communities," there lies open to the student of the always living and ever growing Jewish legal systemrooted as it is in the earliest antiquity, but influenced continually, by the changes in political and intellectual environment which accompanied its growth-a field of speculation and enquiry which cannot fail to be productive of lessons of the highest scientific value in modern legal evolution.

To take but one instance―the change from the unqualified power of divorce of the Patriarchal period to its strict limitation to divorce for "just cause," which is now as much the binding rule of the European Jew as it is of all other Western people, there can be nothing more suggestive than to trace the action and reaction of religious principles and political and philosophical considerations which have led in this, under the ever adaptive Rabbinical system, from one extreme to the other of the marriage scale.

*

(1.) Under the Patriarchal system a man's right to

divorce was absolute, as exemplified in the casting out of Hagar at the instance of another wife.

Deuteronomy xxiv., 4.

Mishna Kethuboth, vii., 9.

+ Talmud Bybli, Jebamoth, 65b.

§ Deuteronomy xxiv., I.