metella being a standing form of punishment. Penal labour was sometimes carried out also in quarries; and in Cicero's charge against Verres we have a powerful description of the latomiae, or prison quarries of Syracuse, whence the stones were taken to build the town and harbour-works: they seem to have resembled, in external characteristics, the convict establishment of Portland, with its quarries and breakwater.

To how little an extent the prison, in the modern meaning of the term, was used by the Romans, is evident from the great historical importance attributed to the one remaining relic of a Roman prison in the subterranean chambers known to the present day as the Mamertine Caves. They consist of two vaults, an upper and an under. The former covers an area of 33 feet by 22, the other a semicircle at a radius of 22 feet. Supposing these to be very ancient, as Italian antiquaries maintain that they are, they coincide aptly enough to the descriptions of old writers, who speak of the caves as lightless, airless, and impregnated with deadly odours. In such a place no considerable number of prisoners could have been confined,—no one prisoner could have lived long. The prisoner committed to it was put there in fact not to be imprisoned, but to undergo the punishment of death. Often he was merely detained there while the preparation for his execution went on outside; in other instances the place itself was left to do the work of death, accomplished partly by starvation, partly by smothering in foul air. We are told by Livy, that Ancus Martius, an account of the growing wickedness and audacity of the citizens, built a prison overhanging the Forum. If the upper vault was a part or the whole of this prison, the lower is attributed to Servius Tullius, after whom the prison was called the Tullian. Above these vaults was raised a lofty erection called the Rostrum, which seems to have been a gigantic tower or scaffolding of oak, from the top of which criminals were precipitated, as others were from the Tarpeian rock. It was in the Tullian that Ju-gurtha was starved to death. Lentulus and the other abettors of Catiline were strangled, according to Sallust, in the prison called the Tullian, as you ascend to the right, where there is a depression of the ground,—a place terrible for its darkness and evil odours. There is yet another stage in the celebrity of these rude caverns. The apostle Paul, who tells us that he lived in Rome in his own hired house, in charge of a centurion, is held by the traditions of the early church to have been afterwards put in prison along with St Peter. This belief having been once established, there was no other place which could be assigned as their prison but the old Tullian. Hence the caverns are consecrated ground, and have received the visits of many devout pilgrims.

A set of very significant buildings, scattered over the Roman empire, called ergastula, must sometimes have had considerable resemblance to very bad modern prisons. They were used for the punishment of criminal and refractory slaves, but also, and probably to a far greater extent, as places of safe custody for newly-acquired slaves, or for those who were too much in excess of the free population of the district to be safely allowed freedom of motion. When we remember the large bodies of men, taken often from the higher ranks of society, endowed with great daring, and expert in the use of arms, who were drafted into the ever-accumulating mass of the Roman slaves, we must suppose that these ergastula were often buildings of great strength and well guarded. But like the property they contained, they were of course chiefly in the hands of persons who administered them according to their own private will and judgment. It is indeed in this great offensive feature of Roman society that we shall find the reason why the penal department of the law could even with bare safety be so lightly passed over. The institution

of slavery threw into private hands the performance of by far the greater part of this department of work, and to a corresponding extent relieved the state. The administrators of the imperial law had little further trouble with the offender who had reached the condition of slavery. To be committed to slavery for a fixed period, as offenders are now committed to prison, was, were it practicable, never thought of. Hence there was no measure of the punishment to the offence, and no distribution of separate punishments for separate offences. The slave was permanently doomed to his fate. The criminal slaves thus became a class into which men were drafted rather for their general character and conduct, than to be punished for specific offences. Personal influence or eloquence would do far more to save from such a fate than innocence. It becomes at once clear that when there were such opportunities for removing criminals beyond the management of the state, there was little inducement to the state to trouble itself, as it now does, with the discussion of niceties of prison discipline. An arrangement which professes to put the bad part of the population into the hands of the good as their owners and masters, has always fascinated by its simplicity and its apparent efficiency. It caused the late master of positive philosophy, August Comte, to maintain that the institution of slavery was the greatest single step in the progress of human civilization, since it superseded a great amount of slaughter, with or without cannibalism. The same spirit influenced the English vagrancy laws of the reign of Henry and Elizabeth, and we shall see how deeply it tainted the earlier stages of the transportation system. Nay, its history and tendency are rendered worthy of attention, through efforts partially to revive it in our own country at the present day, by projects for abandoning to some extent the strict just principle of English jurisprudence, which always finds an offence committed before a punishment is awarded, and for subjecting all persons of bad character and habits to a partial slavery to the police authorities.

The manner in which this absolute slavery of the Romans was pressed out by the modified serfdom of feudalism, which in its own turn gradually merged into the freedom now enjoyed by a large portion of Europe, is an interesting historical problem, having so far reference to the present matter that it is intimately connected with the origin of prisons. It will be seen, indeed, that these institutions, now among the most important objects of politics and jurisprudence, arose quite fortuitously in the hands of men who never dreamed either of repressive or reformatory discipline, and scarcely ever formed to themselves the rudest notions of afflictive punishment. We shall find that thus modern Europe was covered with prisons long before it occurred to any one to think that there was some determinate object to which they should be applied. This is a fact remarkable and important, because, although it is upon the prison—either in a pure or modified shape—that the eyes of all penal reformers ever rest as the means by which repression and reformation are to be carried out, yet few remember that it has not been by any process of induction, or from a general examination of all known or possible methods of repression and reformation, that the prison thus exclusively occupies the field, but because some fortuitous events in feudal history brought the building so named into existence as a feature of the social system of Europe.

This feature did not make its appearance until long after the fall of Rome. In the properly dark age—the period of transition—edifices built for safe custody were probably still more scanty than in ancient Rome. The temporary and fragile structure of the houses of that period, and the character even of the fortifications, which were only similar houses surrounded by ditches and mounds or low ramparts, were not consistent with the existence of strong stone chambers.

That great movement throughout Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries, sometimes called the migration of the Normans, created the baronial or feudal system, and at the same time established prisons. It was then that the castle became a distinctive feature in the social system, and it is the peculiarity of the castle that it is in combination a house, a fortress, and a prison. In the Roman empire the institution of slavery was, as it now is in America, a vital matter, ever affecting the safety of the mighty machinery of the empire, and demanding the utmost vigilance and energy of the executive to keep the upper hand, and prevent the slaves from entering on a death-struggle for mastery. Hence the slave-owner had the whole force of the executive at his back to support his power over his slaves. But the feudal lord was in a great measure left to himself, both for protecting the lands of which he was the feudatory, and for coercing his vassals; and for both purposes the prison castle was to him a useful institution. Under the earliest Norman kings England was covered with castles, and the invasions of their successors scattered them over Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. All of these edifices had a more or less amount of prison accommodation; and we take the term dungeon, generally employed towards a prison as a term of censure, from the donjon, or principal tower of a Norman fortress. As there were castles of all sizes, from those of an independent monarch or a reigning duke downwards, so were there prisons; and even in the humblest square tower, built by the petty landowner who had two or three over-lords between him and the crown, the dungeon or prison-vault was an indispensable feature. In the ruins of old castles on the Rhine and elsewhere the dungeons are ever a well-known feature, interesting from the romance naturally attached to them. Perhaps the most remarkable remains of the kind are those under the new palace of the dukes of Baden at Baden-Baden. They form a series of vaults in the rock far below the ground, smoothly cut, and dry; and they have this remarkable feature, which makes them terrible almost to the visitor going through them with a guide, that the door of each is a mass of solid stone swinging smoothly on a pivot, and closing so as scarcely to leave a perceptible trace of its outline.

In the later stages of the feudal system, the existence of any asserted right of imprisonment was, like many other prerogatives, the object of contention between the greater and lesser feudatories. It was jealously guarded, by those who could hold it, as a material symbol of power. It was largely exercised by the church, and was stoutly arrogated by the municipal corporations as a privilege belonging to their station in the feudal hierarchy. Even in this country at the present day traces might be found of the arbitrary distribution thus made of places of punishment through their feudal origin. The actual vaults in which the abbot or the baron of the sixteenth century confined his victims would not now be tolerated as places of punishment; yet, almost down to the present generation, the feudal castles were the actual prisons in such places as Oxford, Cambridge, Norwich, Lincoln, Lancaster, Worcester, and Caerlaverock. In Scotland there was, until lately, a crowd of little prisons, which, although existing in towns, were the appendages of some feudal estate, holding rank as a barony or regality. Their dungeons, like other portions of their fortresses, sometimes excited the fastidious attention of the princes and nobles of the middle ages; and the chief object of this attention was to bring their potency for cruel infliction up to the highest possible point. There were many eccentric inventions directed towards this end, such as the kind of iron cage in which Louis XI shut Cardinal Baluze and the son of the Duke of Alençon. In such dens, too, if the ordinary sources of history are to be credited, Edward I shut up the sister of Robert

Bruce, and that Countess of Buchan who had assisted at the Scottish king's coronation. Of receptacles like these few vestiges of course are preserved; but the dungeons which remain, built of solid stone or cut into the living rock, are often of a character to make those who have any respect for the promulgated laws of vitality question that human life could have found support in them. Such are the pozzi or wells in the ducal palace of Venice, described by Sir John Hobhouse in his note to Childe Harold. In these, and such as these, however, pits in solid masonry or the solid rock, with no circulation of air, it seems certain that many a captive dragged out a protracted existence. There were other smaller pits, which have been called oublielettes, generally bottle-shaped, with narrow mouths, broadening downwards, in which it is certain that the victims could not live, and into which, indeed, they must have been dropped to die by suffocation. These were favourites with the church as a means of death without bloodshed, and received the name indicative of their deadly purpose—vaude en pace. The next and more humane stage was, building the victim into a niche in a wall, where suffocation would be much more speedy.

It would obviously be a vain task to estimate the amount of continental practice of cruelty and injustice executed through the edifices constructed for oppression thus thickly scattered over Europe. The instances revealed in general and local history, and in criminal trials, only suggest the existence of a far larger crowd of victims, whose unknown fate will remain so until all secrets are laid bare. It is one of the many instances of that marvellous sagacity with which the liberty of the subject has ever been guarded, and its lurking enemies detected, in this country, that the earliest proceedings of a constitutional character seek to provide remedies against arbitrary and illegal imprisonments. The protection of the subject from imprisonment, otherwise than in due course of law, is one of the requisitions of the great charters, and the object was pursued with ceaseless vigilance through the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act in the reign of Charles II., down to the almost perfect system of protection possessed at the present day. Our familiarity with this system lessens its importance in our eyes, and we are apt to forget that it is a national peculiarity. It consists of two distinct parts. One is the rule, that no person can be committed to a prison unless a warrant for his imprisonment has been granted by a magistrate. An accused person is liable to detention by the officer of justice who apprehends him, but he is in the personal custody of the officer, even should he use a strong-room or lock-up to assist him in the detention. It is the policy of the law to offer such a custodian few facilities for long detention, that he may the sooner bring his captive before a magistrate, and especially he cannot place him within the walls of an actual prison until such a warrant is obtained. The next security is the habeas corpus, or right to demand a trial, and have the advantage of innocence, or be subject to the fixed legal punishment of guilt, as the result may be. In no other country do such safeguards appear to have presented themselves, though occasional attempts have been made to imitate them. Where there are such constitutional protections, the proper registers of admissions and liberations, with every particular necessary for the identification of each prisoner, and his enjoyment of his legal rights, cannot be neglected without great peril. In countries where there are no such constitutional safeguards of liberty, the best devised systems of official routine will sometimes go wrong or be neglected, and acts of injustice will be unwittingly committed; but in despotic countries it has often been matter of state policy that all means of identifying persons immured in prison should be erased, so that from the moment of their apprehension they cease to belong to the living world, and their actual death is no event to any human being but the prison officers surrounding them. One man thus mysteriously isolated came from incidental circumstances to be an object of much interest—"the man with the iron mask;" and several books have been written, in the vain attempt to discover who he was. This prisoner was confined in the Bastille, which, with the lettres de cachet, or royal warrants by which prisoners were received into it, became as the type and representative of arbitrary imprisonment, odious both in France and Britain. Yet in this great state fortress the registers seem to have been preserved with more than usual care, and it was less likely than many others to be the living tomb of men committed to oblivion. These registers were found when the Bastille was destroyed, and much instructive matter was derived from them. Nor was severity always the rule in this dreaded fortress—it was the scene often of luxury, gaiety, and dissipation. What chiefly excited indignation towards it was the reckless, easy manner in which the fatal lettres de cachet were granted, to gratify the ambition of mistresses, or to further personal malignity or caprice.

There are traces at early periods in French history of attempts to obtain judicial checks on the power of imprisonment. In the reign of Louis XIV., a promise was extorted by the Parliament that the case of every prisoner should be brought under judicial cognisance within twenty-four hours after his committal. The first revolution was inaugurated with strong resolutions against arbitrary and indefinite imprisonments, which produced no better practical result than the release of the sufferers then in bondage. France has never possessed any such thoroughly practical a protection as our habeas corpus. There, as well as in the other great European states, there are doubtless enlightened regulations emanating from central authority for obviating any sufferings from the enmity or the carelessness of the inferior officers of justice. But there are no checks on the central power itself; and this is still the only country where there is in the law a power separate from the executive which can open the door of every prison. Through these means the liberty of the subject has among us from time immemorial been zealously guarded by constitutional checks on the power of imprisonment.

The next stage is the protection of the prisoner from defects in neglect and cruelty after he is legally within the walls of English a prison; and there is reason to fear that in this department we were long behind those governments where everything is managed by official routine, springing from a central authority. At all events, from the mere want of responsibility and control, it is certain that there have been scenes of lawless violence and of cruelty in British prisons, which have been as pregnant with suffering to the victims as any enforcement of the decrees of a tyrannical autocracy in a secret dungeon could ever be. In the reign of George I., a rumour spread in which the keepers of the chief prisons of London were charged with cruelty. Colonel Oglethorpe brought it before the House of Commons, and obtained a committee of inquiry. The committee went straight to the prisons themselves to make their examination. Hogarth has a picture representing them in a grated dungeon of the Fleet; they are seated, some of them in court dress, at a table hastily adjusted for the transaction of business. Some hideous instruments of torture are lying on it. A half-naked prisoner, with one of these instruments on his head, is under examination; and the keeper Bambridge stands before them as a detected criminal, angry and terrified. Bambridge was a man of a savage and grasping nature, who, on whatever condition of life he had been cast, would have never permitted humanity to interfere with his interests. He bought the office of warden of the Fleet, and wanted to make the most of his bargain. His chief victims were among the debtors who had anything to part with; and if they resisted... his rapacity, as many of them did, he used the power unfortunately in his possession to carry on with them a war of extermination. But it was not the rapacity and cruelty of one man that created the abuses of these London prisons, but a general absence of control, and the like cruelties were practised in them throughout. The committee stated it to have become a general practice of the keepers "unlawfully to assume to themselves pretended authority as magistrates, and not only to judge and decree punishments arbitrarily, but also to execute the same unmercifully." Among these unmerciful exercises of an illegal power, the following may be taken as a specimen from the committee's report:—A general attempt had been made to escape from the Marshalsea, and those implicated in it were taken to the marshal's lodge for examination and punishment. "One of them was seen to go in perfectly well, and when he came out again he was in the greatest disorder; his thumbs were much swollen and very sore; and he declared that his being in that condition was that the keeper, in order to extort from him a confession of the names of those who had assisted him and others in their attempt to escape, had screwed certain instruments of iron upon his thumbs so close that they had forced the blood out of them with exquisite pain. After this he was carried into the strong-room, where, besides the other irons which he had on, they fixed on his neck and hands an iron instrument called a collar, like a pair of tongs; and he being a large lusty man, when they screwed the said instrument close, his eyes were ready to start out of his head, the blood gushed out of his ears and nose, he foamed at the mouth, the slacker went down, and he made several motions to speak, but could not. After these tortures he was confined in the strong-room for many days with a very heavy pair of irons, called sheers, on his legs." (Parl. Hist. viii. 740.) Such a narrative occurring in the report of a parliamentary committee after the accession of the House of Hanover, is at variance with popular notions of the progress made by England in humanity and civil liberty. The committee were deeply excited by the iniquities which they had to expose, and perhaps exaggerated them. But the instruments of torture—the thumb-screw, the collar "like a pair of tongs," and the "sheers"—existed, and had doubtless been made that they might be used. The committee, indeed, accused these keepers of still deeper acts of cruelty, and amongst others of a like kind, brought against them the following charge, which reads like an imitation of the classical model of Mezentius, who chained the living to the dead. "One particular instance of this sort of inhumanity was of a person whom the keepers confined in that part of the lower ward which was then separated from the rest, while there were there two dead bodies which had been there four days; yet he was kept there with them six days longer; in which time the vermin devoured the flesh from the faces, ate the eyes out of the heads of the carcases, which were bloated, putrid, and turned green during the poor debtor's dismal confinement with them." (Parl. Hist. viii. 741.) Bambridge and another keeper were tried for murder, and acquitted. The advisers of the crown naturally hesitated to bring the whole weight of a bad, neglected system on even the worst of the mere instruments who carried it out. The blood of the English people was up, however, and individual prosecutors pursued these men with relentless tenacity. They were subjected to the rare and peculiar action of "appeal for murder," and in the end narrowly escaped with their lives.

It is probable that after this inquiry the keepers of prisons became cautious, and avoided illegal cruelties; but nothing was yet done to mitigate the ravages, physical and mental, of which the very structure of the prisons rendered them instruments, until the days of Howard, whose labours and their results are a historical epoch in prison discipline all over the world. (For an account of his mission we refer to the article Howard.) Perhaps the portion of his revelations which not the least astonished his countrymen was the superior cleanliness and order of those places of detention in continental despots, which our national pride could only think of as noisome dungeons, where the victims of tyranny groaned in their chains. His visit to the prisons of the Dutch was a real luxury to Howard. That thoughtful, industrious, and humane people had, without promulgating any great leading philosophy in prison discipline, gradually found their way in simple practice to institutions which in their features of industry, order, and cleanliness, bear a closer resemblance to the best prisons of the present day than any others have done.

But in England the reform, even after Howard's exposure, was so slow and partial that there are prisons around which some of the evils condemned by universal acclamation, when he exposed them in 1774, still linger. We have an account, more dreadful even than his, because more picturesque, from Mr Buxton, of the result of inquiries into the condition of English prisons, published in the year 1818. Along with a statement of corroborative facts seen by him in the various prisons, he gives the following description of the position of a person—guilty or innocent—whoever misfortune it is to be committed for examination to a London prison:—"At night he is locked up in a narrow cell with perhaps half-a-dozen of the worst thieves in London, or as many vagrants, whose rags are alive and in actual motion with vermin. He may find himself in bed, and in bodily contact between a robber and a murderer; or between a man with a foul disease on one side, and one with an infectious disorder on the other. He may spend his days deprived of free air and wholesome exercise. He may be prohibited from following the handicraft on which the subsistence of his family depends. He may be half-starved for want of food and clothing and fuel. He may be compelled to live with the vilest of mankind, and, in self-defence, to adopt their habits, their language, and their sentiments. He may become a villain by actual compulsion. His health must be impaired, and may be ruined by filth and contagion; and as for his morals, purity itself could not continue pure, if exposed for any length of time to the society with which he must associate." (Buxton's Inquiry, p. 17.)

The renowned crusade of Mrs Fry at this time afforded the world an astounding glimpse into the condition of the London prisons. It was on the female department of Newgate that her energies were concentrated. There she found nearly three hundred women, tried and untried—some sentenced to death—in two rooms. "Here they saw their friends, and kept their multitudes of children; and they had no other place for cooking, washing, eating, and sleeping. They slept on the floor, at times one hundred and twenty in one ward, without so much as a mat for bedding; and many of them were very nearly naked. She saw them openly drinking spirits; and her ears were offended by the most terrible imprecations. Everything was filthy to excess, and the smell was quite disgusting. Every one, even the governor, was reluctant to go among them." (Buxton's Inquiry, p. 126.)

Mrs Fry's Christian efforts to instruct these poor creatures, and impart to them the consolations of religion, are well known. It was believed at the time that her personal risk was literally the same as if she had gone into a den of beasts of prey, and she is entitled to the full honours of the courage she displayed, although later experience of the prison world may render us less surprised at the thankfulness and docility with which she was received. Among criminals in a prison, with their many sources of anxiety and terror, their over-stretched nerves, and their hopeless feeling of dependence on the will of others, whoever appears

Prison Discipline with the character of authority and beneficence is likely to be welcomed with thankfulness and homage. When the danger was encountered; and the unexpected results were made public, it was a natural fallacy to suppose, that the impassioned penitence and eager craving for religious consolation represented a change of heart, and the simple way had at last been found for taking by storm the secret fortress of crime. When services such as Mrs Fry's, however, were more uniformly performed, their influence, though of eminent importance, was found to have its limit. That such meteoric efforts should have from time to time fed the public and the fashionable world with episodes of lively interest, is one of the saddest reproaches to our prison administration. What Mrs Fry did for these prisoners, with a great heroic effort, was what should be always quietly doing in every prison by those to whom it is a fixed duty.

Long after this period, from the indifference or self-willedness of the local managers, a large number of the English prisons remained almost unaltered. The prisons of the metropolis continued to be the most conspicuous for mismanagement. In their first report, issued in 1836, the inspectors of prisons said of Newgate:—“The association of prisoners of all ages and every shade of guilt in one indiscriminate mass, is a frightful feature in the system which prevails here; the first in magnitude, and the most pernicious in effect. In this prison we find that the young and the old, the inexperienced and the practical offender—the criminal who is smitten with a conviction of his guilt, and the hardened villain, whom scarcely any discipline can subdue—are congregated together with an utter disregard to all moral distinctions, the interests of the prisoners, or the welfare of the community.” And nine years afterwards they say in their tenth report:—“We are compelled by an imperative sense of duty to advert, in terms of decided condemnation, to the lamentable condition of the prisons of the city of London—Newgate, Giltspur Street Compter, and the City bridewell—in which the master-evil of goal association, and consequent contamination, still continues to operate directly to the encouragement of crime.”

It is remarkable that in the present year (1859), it was officially announced to the world, that in the male department of the prison of Newgate arrangements were at last made for keeping the inmates apart from each other. The ordinary, in his first report after this resolution, to the lord mayor and aldermen, said,—"I find the result at present to be not only the entire suppression of the corrupt and demoralizing effect of indiscriminate association, but a peculiar seriousness of demeanour is produced by separate confinement, which, except in a few instances, I never witnessed before.” It still remains to carry this improvement into the female department—the scene of Mrs Fry’s labours.

The English prisons did not in the meantime remain free from the suspicion of abuses more positive in their character than the mere neglect to reduce them to proper discipline. In many instances it was said that the prison, by the known profusion and luxury prevailing in it, not only failed to terrify the criminal, but proved a disheartening and deteriorating example to the honest, frugal workman. In other cases it was maintained that prison officers, feeling the absence of strict control, indulged in violence and cruelty. So lately as the year 1853 the borough jail of Birmingham encountered formidable charges of this kind, and the difficulty of establishing the truth was a memorable illustration of the necessity of a powerful external control over the conduct of prison officers. In this instance the investigations of the visiting justices and of the inspector of prisons were alike ineffective, and at length a commission of inquiry brought out the facts. At an earlier period the governor of the prison was a man who had obtained eminence for promulgating principles of prison discipline which possessed many good features, but were supposed to require too confiding a reliance on the latent goodness of the criminal class. The visiting justices of Birmingham entertained a suspicion that their prison was made the experimental laboratory of an amiable enthusiast. A reaction took place, and they displaced their governor, appointing a man of different character. He was a navy officer, passionate and imperious, who carried to his duty the one ruling principle, that he was not to be contradicted or baffled, but that what he willed should be enforced, at whatever cost. Hence he endeavoured to break the resistance of obstinate prisoners by sheer cruelty. His conduct was investigated, and narrated at length by the commission of inquiry. One form of infliction described by them, carried out by means of stiff neck-stocks, may be taken as an example:—“They were of various sizes, but those which appeared to have been most commonly used were about 3½ inches deep at the deepest part in front, somewhat more than 13 inches long, and rather less than a quarter of an inch thick, made of leather perfectly rigid. Very speedily after their introduction into the prison, they appear to have been converted into ordinary implements of punishment for non-performance of prison labour or breaches of prison discipline; the prisoner being first muffled in the strait jacket, having his arms tied together on his breast, the leather stock fastened tightly round his neck, and being, moreover (when the punishment was inflicted by day), in almost every case strapped to the wall of his cell, in a standing position, by means of strong leather straps passed round the upper parts of the arms, and fastened to staples or hooks in the wall, so tightly as to draw back the arms into and keep them in a constrained and necessarily painful position, at the same time compressing them. . . . So strapped to the wall, prisoners—chiefly boys—were kept for periods of four, five, or six hours, and in some instances for a whole day, by way of punishment for the non-performance of the crank labour, and for other prison offences chiefly of a trivial character. This mode of punishment, which was of ordinary and indeed daily occurrence in the prison during the year 1852 and the early part of 1853, which was unquestionably altogether illegal, and was of a very cruel, painful, and irritating nature, was adopted and practised by the governor, Lieutenant Austin, entirely of his own authority, without the sanction of the visiting magistrates, and to a great extent without their knowledge.”

The first legislative step in prison reformation in England was taken in 1773, by the passing of two acts, the first-fruit of Howard’s labours, one of them for abolishing sums in prison fees, and the protracted confinement of prisoners in these were paid; the other for improving the sanitary condition of the jails. Five years afterwards, a still more decided step was ostensibly taken in the passing of an act (19 Geo. III., c. 74) for the establishment of a penitentiary. It was the joint production of Howard, Sir William Blackstone the commentator, and Mr Eden, a great authority of that period in all matters connected with crime and pauperism. The object, as emphatically laid down by Blackstone, was, “by sobriety, cleanliness, and medical assistance, by a regular series of labour, by solitary confinement during the intervals of work, and by due religious instruction, to preserve and amend the health of the unhappy offenders, to inure them to habits of industry, to guard them from pernicious company, to accustom them to serious reflection, and to teach them both the principles and practice of every Christian and moral duty.” This act, however, remained dormant. Its immediate object was to meet, by a penitentiary system at home, the difficulties occasioned by the stoppage of transportation to America. The Australian system was, however, substituted in the manner stated farther on, and the project of a penitentiary was abandoned. The idea was afterwards taken up by... Bentham, and urged with untiring zeal in his *Panopticon Penitentiary-House* and other works. He had a great love and reverence for Howard, whose pupil he professed to be in matters of prison discipline. But his publications teem with original ideas and practical inventions of his own, and he grouped them together so as to present the world with every feature which such a building should possess, and every rule applicable to its discipline and working, down to the minutest particular. It is denied to the human intellect to possess the faculty of absolutely forecasting the results of experience, and proving, step by step, where they are to lead; and hence the systems of discipline to which the world has groped its way, through slow experiment, have in a great measure differed from Bentham's anticipations. But there is, at the same time, between them a sufficiency of coincidence to bestow on these a character of marvellous sagacity, and to make them profitable reading to the practical disciplinarian. Bentham offered to enter on a contract with government for the detention of 1000 convicts; and an act of Parliament was passed in 1794 to carry out the project, but again the act remained dormant. In the meantime there were many parliamentary inquiries into prisons and prison discipline. The building of the great penitentiary of Millbank, which now contains accommodation for 1300 prisoners, was begun in 1819. In 1822 a committee was appointed to revise the whole of the law as to jails in England and Wales, and the act 4 Geo. IV., c. 64, still the leading statute for the English local prisons, was passed. By that act a direct communication was opened between the secretary of state and the several administrators of prisons, over whom he has continued to exercise a limited control, and returns were periodically required to be made to him relative to the discipline and condition of the various prisons, which were laid before Parliament. An act was passed in 1835 (5 and 6 Will. IV., c. 38), giving a further central control over prisons. Among other provisions, it gave the secretary of state the power to revise and alter the rules of all prisons. It provided for the appointment by the crown of inspectors, authorized to inspect periodically and to report upon all places in which persons can legally be confined—one of the most important of the safeguards against irregularity or abuse which the legislature has hitherto created. Soon afterwards, the gradual decrease, and in the end the almost total abolition of transportation, rendered necessary the large convict establishments to be subsequently referred to. With great deliberation, and after much inquiry, the plans of the prison of Pentonville were adopted in 1842, as those of a model prison, calculated to meet all the requisites of prison discipline which the science of the age had devised. Parkhurst had been established in 1838 for young offenders; and to these were added the establishments of Portland and Portsmouth, Dartmouth, Chatham, and Brixton.

It is proper, as part of this brief history, to state that from an early period the deficiency of prison accommodation for convicts before their removal had rendered it necessary to find some other receptacle for them, and unfortunately none better suggested itself than the hulls of old abandoned war-ships. It was necessary subsequently not only to detain in them convicts awaiting their term of removal, but convicts for the shorter periods, such as seven years, during the whole period of their sentence. In the hulls numbers of the most hardened offenders were herded together for years, with such consequences as may be readily conceived. There is scarcely any defect in penal discipline of which these establishments were not flagrant and steady examples. A professed necessity kept them in existence during a long period of public condemnation, which was almost universal. They have only lately been abandoned, and their example is not likely to be again followed.

In the meantime, in Scotland, almost all the characteristic defects of the English jails flourished in an exaggerated shape. A parliamentary inquiry into the state of the Scottish prisons occurred in 1826, but the first legislative relief was accomplished in 1836, when the prisons were brought, like those of England, under the eye of a government inspector. Mr Frederic Hill, the first person appointed to that duty, summed up in the following terms the defects which he found:—"Want of the means of separating prisoner from prisoner, and of preventing intercourse from without; want of employment, and of provision for teaching the prisoners a trade or other occupation, by which to earn an honest livelihood when restored to society; want of mental, moral, and religious instruction, insecurity, the luxurious diet, and the life of ease in some prisons when compared with the food and labour of the lowest class of honest and industrious people; great expense of many of the prisons; incompetency of many of the keepers; want of female officers; want of the means of inspection; want of cleanliness and ventilation; sloth and injury to health, induced by the long time the prisoners pass in bed, and want of a uniform system." Escapes were very frequent. From a national distaste at the infliction, as well as the endurance of restraint, there was a laxity about external communication, which would have seemed strange in England, even before the improvement of prison discipline there. The inspector in his second report, in reference to one of the northern prisons, after mentioning that a prisoner had been allowed to attend a public meeting, said,—"It is stated that prisoners were sometimes allowed to go to supper parties, and this with the key of the prison in their pockets, in order that they might return without disturbing the jailer. A gentleman whom I met sometime after leaving Dingwall told me, that happening to be at that town once on the market-day, and standing at the window of the inn opposite the jail, he was amazed to see a large fish apparently running up the wall of the prison. The fish having reached one of the upper windows, disappeared; and it then occurred to the astonished spectator, that the fish owed its ascent to the assistance of the inmates, and in this view he was confirmed by the sight of a cord with a hook at the end, which he saw descending from the prison window. A boy who was stationed below took hold of the hook when it got within reach, and, watching his opportunity when a fishwoman was looking another way, fastened it in the gills of one of her fish, which instantly rose in the air."

It was determined at last to make a sweeping reform of the Scottish prisons, and it was accomplished in 1839 by the act of 2 and 3 Vict., c. 42. The varied and multitudinous bodies, chiefly municipal, which had authority over the prisons were suppressed, and a local board was appointed for each county, to act along with, and to a certain extent under the direction of, a general board for the kingdom. The number of prisons, which amounted to about 170, was speedily reduced to about 70. New prisons were built suited to carry out the separate system, which is in force in every prison in Scotland, with the exception of casual and temporary instances, where sufficient room is not found for it. In strictness and completeness of control, the Scottish system is now nearly as far above as it was formerly below the English; and it may safely, for instance, be held, that in that part of the empire the abuses which were revealed in the jail of Birmingham in 1854 would not have been permitted to occur.

It will readily be supposed that the prisons of Ireland had not advanced beyond those of the other parts of the empire. Legislative improvements in that country generally follow the model set by England; and on this principle an act was passed in 1826 for regulating the prisons of Ireland, 7 Geo. IV., c. 74.

It will be easily seen from the preceding statements, and Prison discipline is indeed well known to every one, that there are great diversities in the practice of prison discipline, and in the manner in which different prisons are managed, even in this country. It is not the object of this paper to lay down a canon of prison discipline, by setting forth that system which is to be held sound while all others are unsound. It is rather the object to trace the progress which the science has made through the suggestions and experiments of its masters, and to describe the practical character of the discipline which at the present day is sanctioned by the greatest amount of practical authority. We shall most conveniently find our way to the character of this modified system by glancing at some experiments in which extreme systems were tried and found wanting.

The experiments which for several years have been abundantly made in prison discipline have dealt with three chief elements.—1st, Solitude; 2d, Silence; 3d, Labour. Other adjuncts, in themselves more important, such as education and the ministrations of religion, are not properly mere elements of discipline, however urgent it may be that the opportunity of captivity may be taken for endeavouring to impart them to those who otherwise are denied participation in such blessings. Solitude and silence have been experimented on separately and in combination. Solitude has, from accident or design, often of course been an aggravation of imprisonment before people thought of such experiments; but solitude, as an element in prison discipline, means solitude carried out towards whole classes of prisoners, however numerous, by arrangements which are costly and troublesome, and are intended to promote good ends. A prison on the solitary system must have a cell for each inmate. This system, which was carried to perfection in America, was also practised in the Gloucester penitentiary towards the end of the eighteenth century. Afterwards it was adopted in the bridewell of Glasgow, but in a modified shape, since the solitaries received moral and religious instruction in their cells. It was in Philadelphia that the system was emphatically developed. The Quaker population in that state succeeded in 1786 in their long struggle for abolishing the punishment of death. All punishments involving corporal violence, such as mutilation and the lash, were abolished at the same time; and in looking round for some passive infliction, which should go as far as possible to supply the place of these abrogated terrors, the enemies of bloodshed and violence fell on the practice of continued solitude without labour, hooks, or any means of occupation to mind or body. On this principle the Walnut Street prison was first built with thirty cells. The idea being welcomed as the simple solution of all difficulties in prison discipline, was presently followed in Maryland, Massachusetts, Maine, New Jersey, and Virginia. Whatever imperfections appeared in it were attributed to the limited scale of the experiment, and the Pennsylvanians resolving to give it more scope, built the prisons of Pittsburgh and Cherryhill. New York at the same time arranged to carry out the system on a great scale in the renowned penitentiary of Auburn, founded in 1816. It is clear that, however easy it may be, at sufficient cost, in such a place, to isolate the tenant of every cell, yet to render this solitude entire and uninterrupted from day to day, and month to month, is scarcely possible. Though machinery may be made to convey to the prisoner his food, and to remove what it is necessary to remove, it is scarcely possible but that, from some accident, the attendant warder may be for a moment seen or heard. The Americans, however, before allowing doubts to be thrown on their idea, pushed it to its utmost conclusions with a relentless rigour, which in this country would not be tolerated. One who had a favour for it in moderation says,—"A trial of solitary confinement, day and night, without labour, was made at Auburn in the year 1822, for ten months, upon eighty of the most hardened convicts. They were each confined in a cell only 7 feet long, 3½ feet wide, and 7 feet high. They were on no account to be permitted to leave the cell during that long period on any occasion. They had no means of obtaining any change of air, nor opportunities of taking exercise. The most disastrous consequences were naturally the result. Several persons became insane, health was impaired, and life endangered. The discipline of the prison at that period was one of unmixed severity. There was no moral nor religious instruction of any kind communicated within its walls, nor any consolation administered by which the convict was enabled to bear up against the cruelty of this treatment. Nor was a trial of the same description which took place in the state of Maine conducted under more advantageous circumstances. The night-rooms or cells at this prison are literally pits entered from the top by a ladder through an aperture about 2 feet square. The opening is secured by an iron grate used as a trap-door. The only other orifice is one at the bottom about an inch and a half in diameter, for the admission of warm air from underneath. The cells are 8 feet 9 inches long, 4 feet 6 inches wide, and 9 feet 8 inches high. Their gloom is indescribable. The diet during confinement was bread and water only. Thus immersed, and without any occupation, it will excite no surprise that a man who had been sentenced to pass seventy days in one of these miserable pits hung himself after four days' imprisonment. Another condemned to sixty days also committed suicide on the twenty-fourth day. It became necessary to remove four others who were unable to endure this cruelty, from the cell to the hospital, repeatedly, before the expiration of their sentences." (Crawford's Report on the Penitentiaries, United States, p. 16.) In fact, it was a normal result of this system, that the over-tortured mind found refuge in insanity; and so it came to pass that a body of benevolent Quakers, seeking to abolish bloodshed and violence, had by one simple idea discovered a more efficient and protracted system of torture than the ingenuity of all the tyrants of the world had enabled them to devise.

The other great experiment—the silent system—was also devised by the Americans, who drove it to its utmost system. It was adopted at Auburn as a resource against the destructive influence of the solitary system, and was afterwards brought to perfection in the no less renowned penitentiary of Sing-Sing. The principle of absolute solitude was still enforced while the prisoners were in their cells; but they were drafted out into large rooms, where they worked in common. In these, the characteristic feature of the discipline was carried out by their working in total silence, never looking to each other, or making any sign, and never even glancing at a prison officer or a stranger visitor. To see a hundred desperadoes thus pursuing their silent labours under the vigilant inspection of no more than five or six officers, gave the visitor an emphatic notion of the control which discipline is capable of achieving over those who are so little under their own control. If it did no other service, the silent system taught confidence to prison disciplinarians, and made them aware how futile all danger from their wayward subjects might be rendered by method and firmness. It has been maintained, and seems probable, that this system of relentless restraint was little less destructive to the intellect than the absolute solitude it superseded. But it was found accompanied by necessary conditions fatal to its success. The only method of carrying out the discipline was by giving the free use of the whip and the rod not only to the superiors of the prison, but to the humblest discipline officers. Messrs De Beaumont and De Toqueville, who were partial to the arrangement, say in their celebrated Report on the American Penitentiary System,—"At Sing-Sing, the only punishment for those who infringe the established order is that of the whip. The application of this disciplinary means is there very frequent, and the least fault is punished with its application. For various reasons, this punishment is preferred to all others. It effects the immediate submission of the delinquent; his labour is not interrupted a single instant; the chastisement is painful, but not injurious to health; finally, it is believed that no other punishment would produce the same effects." In a note to this passage, the authors say, that "no register is kept of disciplinary punishments." Mr Crawford states that a rule had existed prohibiting the infliction of more than thirty-nine lashes at a time, unless in the presence of an inspector; but the punishment was thus found to lose its prompt efficiency, and the restraint was removed. "The quantity of punishment is entirely dependent on the will of the overseer, against whose acts there is no appeal." The very principle of the establishment, indeed, precluded not only all appeal against it, but all knowledge of the fact that punishment had been inflicted, unless such as the officer inflicting it might think fit to reveal; for it was a crime for a prisoner to speak either to a stranger or an official visitor to the prison. There was thus established in the heart of a republic probably one of the most perfect models of irresponsible power by man over his fellow which the world had known. The nature of such a power may be best judged, not by the abuses charged against it, for no one can tell how much exaggeration there may be in such charges, but by an instance of its moderate and legitimate use. An assistant keeper was charged with cruelty to a pregnant female convict. There was no witness but himself and the convict; and his own statement of the case—a statement on which he was acquitted and retained in his office—was as follows:—"Mr Parks told me to flog her. I then took a cow-skin and went into a room, telling the two blacks to watch, and if she came at me with any dangerous weapon, to defend me. She then went and sat down upon the bed, appearing to me to be somewhat frightened, and told me if I whipped her to death she would not move. Her convict frock was open and large, so as to leave her shoulders bare, it being warm weather; and I struck her about three or four blows on the shoulder, and I think not more, and on the naked skin, and then stopped and admonished her as to her conduct." On receiving from her some abusive language, he says,—"I then gave her three or four strokes with the cow-skin. She sat firm, and seemed determined to brave it out, swearing that she would not submit. I ceased again; and observing that the blows left marks upon her shoulders, and fearing I might break the skin, and as she continued to rave, I struck her a few blows above her knees, and in front, as she sat." The woman's account of her chastisement was of course more formidable. She died, and it was certified on medical authority that the whipping had caused her death. The managers of the institution thought otherwise; and on the man's statement of the way in which he had used it, retained him in his irresponsible power. They did so apparently for the purpose of maintaining some rigid principle, and the general tendency of the inquiry is to show that they had intentionally deprived themselves, by the rules they had adopted, of the means of ascertaining whether their officer was guilty or innocent. (Crawford's Report, 18, 19.)

It is questioned whether the silent system, when carried out with the highest skill and the most implacable rigidity, accomplished its purpose of precluding communications among the prisoners. All who are practically acquainted with prison discipline know that, under repression, the faculties left available—and there will always be some—attain an abnormal power and sensitiveness, as the remaining senses do for the service of those who are blind or deaf. It is almost impossible to anticipate what may be achieved in this way among hundreds of restless creatures all bent on one object. The keepers of prisons, where much more effective means than the silent system have been available for intercepting communications, have remarked, that it seemed as if some supernatural agency were at work in the rapidity with which prisoners make themselves acquainted with facts supposed to be beyond their possible knowledge, and communicate them among all their brethren. The inspectors of prisons on the silent system, approaching however noiselessly, and peeping through an inspection-hole covered with coloured glass into a workshop, would, by a certain flutter in the demeanour of the prisoners, see that their presence there was known; and discoveries were sometimes made which showed a thorough understanding of some concerted plot in the penitentiaries of America. It is understood that in that country the silent system is no longer observed in its integrity. It had its admirers in this country, who, however, had no opportunity of carrying it out with a like rigour. It was long avowedly the system of the Cold-Bath-Fields prison; but this building, containing 1400 prisoners on short sentences, ever coming and going, had in reality little in common with the sepulchral silence of Sing-Sing.

This American experiment performed one eminent service. It gave the first emphatic practical testimony to the value of labour as an element in prison discipline. Perhaps the earliest work in which labour is spoken of not as a punishment, but rather as a corrective and resource, is in an Essay on The Prisons of the Religious Orders, by Mabillon, a work in which there is an amount of practical sagacity available even for the present day, which it is strange to owe to a Benedictine monk of the seventeenth century, whose chief studies lay in antiquities. (Ouvrages Posthumes de Mabillon, iii. 321.) Employment in productive industry stands prominent among the prison reforms both of Howard and Bentham, and it had been practised in the rags-houses and spin-houses of Holland. Now that it has thoroughly established itself as a fundamental principle of prison discipline, and is in fact almost the only large operative principle about the value of which there are nowhere two opinions, it seems marvellous that the inhabitants of our jails should so long have been driven by forced idleness to spend their time in ribaldry, mendicancy, trickery, mutual corruption, and all available vices. Labour draws the prisoners off from mutual communication when they are associated, and is the best solace and safeguard to the mind against the ravages of solitude. It teaches the criminal, while he is in custody, that lesson of duty and service which he has not learned, or has not practised, in freedom; and if his captivity be long, it may even communicate to him the means of earning his bread by honest industry. Nor, while thus beneficent in its operation, does it tend sensibly to decrease the terrors of imprisonment; for, however much the criminal may feel the blessing of occupation after he is immured, it is not one of the characteristics of his class to look forward to labour as a boon. It is a further though secondary advantage of prison labour, that it economizes the expense of punishment. To make prisoners self-supporting is an object which has been frequently pursued of late, but without much success. It was accomplished, however, in the American penitentiaries under the silent system, and was one of the boasted advantages of assembling the prisoners together in large bodies, where they worked under the discipline of terror. In Belgium it was at one time the practice to farm the produce of prison labour to contractors, who were allowed to hold out inducements to the prisoners to work hard, and thus plied them with spirits and tobacco. When prisoners are kept in separate cells, and the discipline proper to their condition is deemed more important than the value of the work done by them, the produce of their labour never repays more than a small portion of the cost they occasion. This is to be understood of criminals kept within the walls of Prison Discipline

Convicts who are undergoing in this country a substitute for the transportation to Australia which used to be their lot, can be gregariously employed in labour, of many very effective kinds; but it has hitherto been found most expedient to apply it to docks, harbours, and other public works.

The efficiency of labour as an element of prison discipline has sometimes been estimated so highly that it has been deemed all-sufficient for the sole object in view. A criminal, as the case is sometimes put, has incurred a debt to society, which he is bound and should be entitled to work off by the results of his industry. Such a debt would fall upon the debtor with a weight very inadequate to its proper magnitude; for great criminals, who are often very clever men with extensive practical resources, could be rapidly reducing the debt against them while their stupider and perhaps less guilty neighbours would find the effort entirely hopeless. The established systems of prison discipline in this country, far from admitting the principle, that the prisoner's labour is exacted as a material payment of his debt to society, sometimes exact unproductive labour where that debt is greatest. The application of "hard labour," or unproductive and purely afflictive exertion, is one of the least satisfactory problems in prison discipline. The shape in which it was first practised on a large scale was the tread-mill,—a great cylindrical wheel turned on its axis by the tread of a certain number of prisoners. To this form there was the objection, that it could not be modified to the strength of individual prisoners,—all must take step after step together upon the wheel as it revolves, and bear the infliction, great or little as it might be, of mounting a certain number of steps. A form of hard labour has been introduced in the military prisons, called the shot-drill, consisting in the piling, removal, and re-piling of pyramids of heavy shot. The standard form of hard labour, however, in the ordinary prisons is now the crank. It consists of a small flaked wheel, a little like the paddle-wheel of a steam-vessel, which, as the prisoner turns a handle outside, revolves within a box which is partly filled with gravel. The continuous shovelling up of the gravel, as a paddle-wheel tosses up the water, is the labour performed. The amount of strength necessary to each revolution can be regulated to the utmost nicety by the quantity of gravel raised. An external register records the number of revolutions made, and it is usual to place the register outside the prisoner's cell. Prisoners are not set to this hard labour at the discretion of the prison authorities; they are condemned to it as part of their sentence by the court which tries them. This kind of afflictive labour is not a beneficent element of prison discipline, and many are the plausible arguments launched against it. But it has the stern support of practical effectiveness. It was devised to increase the odiousness of the prison to the criminal, and stimulate his efforts to keep beyond its walls; and, by the testimony of practical men, it has had this good effect.

Founded on the experience of the great experiments just referred to, there came into practice, by a sort of general assent, an arrangement which has been called "the separate system," although in reality it is not so much a system promising positive results from itself, as a practical compromise, keeping clear, on the one hand, of blind negligence, and on the other, of those absolute principles, such as silence and solitude, which were found to be so destructive. The first object of this system is to keep the prisoners from contaminating and criminal communication with each other. From the old jails the youth who had just entered the borders of crime often went forth an accomplished depraved. While the experienced contaminated the young, they planned in the dissolute idleness of the prison-yard, new depredations. Altogether there could be no doubt that, whether or not the terrors of punishment restrained from crime, a residence in a prison generally made a man more vicious. To extinguish at once this cause of deterioration, the separate system provides a cell or room for each prisoner. The arrangement is costly, but its cost must be met by those who think its advantages worthy of being purchased. In his cell the prisoner is supplied with work and books. Since he is not to keep company with his fellows, and yet is not doomed to the horrors of solitude, arrangements must be made for furnishing him with a limited amount of improving society; and this also is costly. His most valuable visitor will be the prison chaplain or the clergyman of his own faith. If there be in the callous bosoms of the reprobate any seeds of faith and goodness, the decorous repose of a well-ordered prison, and the judicious admonitions of a zealous minister, will give them their best opportunity for quickening. How much hypocrisy may often be developed on such occasions,—how many times the deceitful heart is reconciled to virtue only so long as the opportunities for vice are distant, are questions it is unprofitable to ask. The opportunity should be given liberally by a proper supply of able and zealous chaplains, though the results must remain in impenetrable secrecy; for to investigate the statistics of penitence and reward professions of reformation, would obviously lead to the grossest acts of deception and hypocrisy. The clergyman's efforts are aided by the teacher, who probably imparts even to the old offender the first rudiments of civilized knowledge. The visits of the physician come at intervals, and the discipline officers are instructed at stated times to enter each cell. More rarely his cell will be entered by the chief of the prison; and at longer intervals a government inspector or a director will visit him. Such are the usual provisions for removing the character of solitude from separate confinement. Besides its influence in obviating contamination, some have sought, in a very rigid rule of separation, so far to isolate prisoners that they shall not be aware of each other's presence under the same roof. It is desirable certainly, that if a man becomes penitent, the full amount of his iniquities should not be known to the companions who are likely to seduce him from reformation; and it is still of far greater moment that the fresh offender, who desires altogether to cancel his connection with the world of crime, should not be seen within the prison walls, and afterwards recognised by the hardened criminal. Whenever it is safe to dispense with this pedantry, as some call it, of the separate system, there are countervailing advantages to the discipline. A considerable quantity of vigorous daily exercise is essential to prisoners under long imprisonment. If they take this exercise wholly unseen by each other, it can only be in narrow yards, where they spend a listless hour; while, if paraded in common on a wider space, life and energy may be communicated to their motions. For worship, and sometimes for instruction, association without communication has many advantages over rigid separation. But these, indeed, are all matters at present under experiment and discussion, and it is difficult to get further, without crossing debatable land, than the general principle, that the old, free, corrupting communication among imprisoned criminals should be suppressed.

Among minor adjuncts, the cleanliness of modern prisons, though occasionally it may be laughed at, is never directly arraigned. It is essential to health, and its moral influence is beneficial. At the same time, it is no seductive luxury, for, much as well-conditioned gentlefolks would feel the blessing of a clean, well-ventilated modern cell as a substitute for the filthy dens of last century, the criminal classes are little susceptible to the privilege, and it may be questioned if the cleanness and comfort of the cell awaiting him in prison ever crossed the thoughts of a criminal to reconcile him to his actions. Ventilation, dryness, and an abundant supply of light, are adjuncts of a similar character. Nothing, indeed, is generally more surprising to one accustomed to associate safe custody with massive gloom, than the cheerful lightness of the galleries in a well-built modern prison, and the absence of those features of exaggerated architectural strength which belong to the traditional idea of the castle dungeon. Small prisons, where there is no systematic organization, still depend on their structural strength; but where there is a large staff and many prisoners, the chief reliance is on the discipline; and it is considered wholesome to let prisoners feel that they are not an object of terror, requiring very formidable precautions. The harsh, fierce manner which characterized the turnkey of old is now little known in any well-regulated prison. The officers, in exacting obedience to the daily routine of discipline, should be unimpassioned as fate; and the criminal feels himself all the more helplessly prostrate before the strength of the law, that he is an object neither of fear nor of wrath.

It is scarcely necessary to say that the material means of luxury, intemperance, or sensuality should be absolutely unattainable. To graduate the restraints upon the appetites, however, so as to render all sufferers in the same degree is impossible. The regulation food, for instance, cannot be rendered other than a luxury to some; and, as a general rule, prisoners, after a certain period, gain appetite, enjoy their meals, and improve in physical condition. It is impossible to avoid this unless the dangerous doctrine were admitted, that it is proper to deteriorate their physical condition. The prison dietary is, or should be, adjusted to the lowest quantity of plain food which will preserve the human being in his normal condition. The criminal at large deteriorates this condition by his vices, but within the walls of the prison he is not permitted to do so; and thus the world is sometimes invited to see the ludicrous contrast between a criminal fattening within a prison, while the honest workman, who is only a little careless and dissipated, is wasting under the influence of intemperance, filth, and unwholesome diet, just as the prisoner was before he was committed.

Such are some of the chief characteristics of a well-regulated prison, according to received modern notions. In estimating their efficiency, it must be kept in view that they are, so far as their effects are visible, elements of prison discipline only. They provide for the punishment and for the good conduct of the prisoner. In doing so, they save him from the contamination which he would have caught in a prison under the old system; but nothing is more dangerous than to assume that his conduct in prison is the outward sign of inward regeneration. The most orderly and plaint under good discipline may be, and often is, the most hardened villain within the walls. It is necessary to look this unpleasant truth in the face, and to see in it the proper boundaries of the function of prison discipline; but it is right to remember that close imprisonment is a punishment, among us at least, of comparatively short duration. It seldom reaches, and scarcely ever exceeds, two years. The careful scrutiny to which prisons are now subjected has suggested that the separate system in its most approved shape cannot be long enforced without the deterioration of the prisoner. As will be hereafter told, the greater criminals are now to be subjected to years of training instead of years of transportation, and it remains to be seen whether prison discipline, directed into this new channel, will accomplish new and enlarged effects.

Besides the adoption of a sound form of discipline as a standing rule, there are many safeguards and precautions necessary to the government of a prison. It is a place of restraint where men must to some extent be under the absolute authority of their fellow-men. The most elementary knowledge of human nature teaches that the kind of man has not yet been found in this world, who can be trusted with power absolute and uncontrolled over his fellow, and the history of prisons is an emphatic commentary on this text. On the amount and character of the control which shall best exact a due responsibility from prison officers, there have been as many differences of opinion as upon the various methods of discipline. Publicity, so valuable and so largely drawn upon in this country, naturally suggests itself; but there cannot be primary simple publicity in a prison. Though crowds might be admitted within the walls at certain times, they could not be always present, while the prisoner and his master are there at all times of the day and night. Confluences of miscellaneous visitors, indeed, while they woefully disturb the influence of a proper discipline, can see or know scarcely anything of what is really enacting within a prison. The old London prisons, in their worst days, and the prisons on the silent system in America, received visitors freely. The visits of strangers to a prison must of necessity be limited, and instead of a fallacious theory, that all the world are entitled to the privilege, it is better fundamentally to draw a line which shall limit it to the class of persons who are least likely to be enticed by idle curiosity, and most likely to use the opportunity for beneficial purposes.

The most important visitor, however, who can enter a prison is an official inspector who is independent of the rulers of the establishment, while he is entitled to investigate all their proceedings, reporting the results of his inquiries to the supreme government, through whom, in this country, they find their way to Parliament. A large portion of the prisons of the United Kingdom are governed by local bodies of a corporate character, who are under more or less responsibility to the government. The most important of the prisons, however,—those in which convicts are detained,—are, as we shall see directly, under official control. In a country where there is so much parliamentary responsibility, such official control is not considered constitutionally dangerous, and it has great advantages in its efficiency and systematic regularity. Still there are distinct appreciable advantages in a certain amount of prison management being vested in independent men of the country gentleman and retired citizen class, were it merely that they may check the extreme and intolerant development of official theories, and give discussion and ventilation to projects of prison discipline, both before and after they are brought into practice.

The practice of imprisonment for debt must not be wholly overlooked in tracing the progress of prison discipline in this country, though the peculiarities which at one time communicated to it a too intense interest have become obsolete. It will be noticed that many of the grossest irregularities and worst cruelties in the British prisons were concentrated in this department. These irregularities and cruelties were characteristic of the early defects in our prison system; of the shyness of control and interference, and the consequent latitude to all persons to inflict or suffer to any extent, provided the infliction and the suffering were according to law. As affording scenes of tyranny, suffering, recklessness, profligacy, and villany, the debtor's prison has been a favourite with English writers of fiction; and those even of the present generation will hand down pictures from this favourite field of study which will doubtless excite the indignation and astonishment of posterity. A revolution has been almost noiselessly made in this department by the re-adjustment of the laws of debtor and creditor. Formerly the creditor was denied access by form of law to the debtor's estate, and he took vengeance on his person; hence the industrious man might be kept idle, separate from the means of supporting his family, or even paying his creditor; and on the other hand the man of fortune might live in jail, spending his money, and defying his creditors to touch his estate. The procedure for realizing and appropriating the property of the debtor has now; however, been rendered more complete and effective. At the same time, the honest and fair debtor can obtain a speedy discharge under one of the bankruptcy or insolvency statutes. It hence arises that those who are now long detained in prison for debt are in some measure criminals as well as debtors, having been guilty of fraud or culpable recklessness. There is thus less reluctance to subject them to the rigid discipline applicable to criminals, with its cleanliness, order, and abstinence. The prison tavern, a fixed characteristic of the old debtors' prison, if it now exists anywhere, must do so in defiance of authorized regulations against it.

Having thus followed the practice of simple imprisonment down to the present day, it will be proper to glance at those other forms of punishment which have always been more or less connected with it, in order that we may see more distinctly the sources and character of the mixed form of penal discipline which has lately come into operation in this country. It is obvious that detention within the walls of a prison is a very costly punishment, which a cruel or penurious government will abandon for a readier and cheaper. Afflictive therefore as its practice has been in England, its extensive use there is yet a testimony to the national moderation and clemency. Nowhere else, unless perhaps in Holland, did its use preponderate so much over more violent methods of punishment. Although our criminal code was eminently sanguinary, actual executions were more rare than in most other countries. Excepting banishment and transportation, to which we shall presently come, almost the only other forms of punishment much in use in this country were the stocks and the pillory, which, in addition to a certain amount of painful restraint, subjected the victim to the brutality or spite of the miscellaneous public. The brutalizing tendency of the pillory, the proper sphere of which was generally some public marketplace, is at once obvious; and, dependent on the immediate impulses of a mob, it sometimes elicited cruelties which ended in death, and at others was turned into an ovation which reversed the object of the punishment. A popular publisher, in George III.'s reign, stood in the pillory with a laced footman on either side attending to his wants, and an obsequious crowd offering him homage. These forms of punishment, along with that of public whipping, have been long disused. Whipping has been lately restored in another form. It is, except in some special cases, only applicable to boys or very young men, and is administered privately in the presence of responsible officers.

The barbarous punishment of mutilation was not quite unknown in Britain, although the occasions for its legal infliction were peculiar and rare. Torture, which was largely used in other countries, was always very offensive to the national feeling, and never established itself as a fixed institution. By far its most extensive use was in examinations of persons charged with witchcraft. Wherever that word was employed, all concerned seemed to be driven by a panic of terror and hatred entirely out of the bounds of reason and humanity, and things were done by people of station and good repute which cannot be excelled by any cruelties on record. Apart from this one blot, it is ever a remembrance of proud satisfaction in this country that, careless as the administration of justice sometimes was, and afflictive in its carelessness, our ancestors would not attempt to perfect it by introducing the horrors of the "question," or probationary torture. The vindication of this infliction has ever been, that the object is to spare life by exciting through torture the certain evidence of a confession. But apart from the numberless instances in which the confession so extorted must have been false, the torture itself, which generally reduced the victim to utter helplessness, was a punishment far worse than death. We may form a notion of what it was, only too painfully distinct, in the celebrated cases of Urban Grandier and the Calas family. Slavery at home is a form of punishment which has ever been inimical to the constitution and habits of this country. Though we have now forced labour in the convict establishments, the form in which this punishment has been carried out among our neighbours, by the convicts working here and there in chains on streets, quays, or other public places, was nearly as offensive to our people as slavery. Among the continental governments, the mines have formed the easiest form of punishing by slavery and forced labour. This, as we have seen, was a method of punishment among the Romans, and it is possible that there are mines in central Europe which have never ceased from their time downwards to receive convicts. There is no kind of place of custody whence escape can be rendered so hopeless, and none so secure from stray inquiries after the fate of those who have been dropped into them, and left there to perish forgotten. The Russian empire has the reputation of possessing in its mines the most terrible places of punishment in the world.

A well-known form of punishment in some European states was the galleys. They were almost peculiar to leagues countries bordering on the Mediterranean, being unsuited for more stormy seas. They were ill-shaped, narrow vessels, with benches for rowers. To these benches the galley-slaves were chained. Fixed to their benches day and night, the state of filth and brutality in which they existed is at once understood; and yet, with the free air around them, their condition was less to be deplored than that of victims of a higher rank, whose privilege it was to occupy dungeons. Galley slavery was introduced into France about the fourteenth century. Its head-quarters were at Marseilles, where there was a renowned fleet of these vessels. France sometimes engaged to take prisoners from other countries into her galleys, which had a high repute, and sometimes portions of the fleet were let for the service of some Mediterranean power. The neighbouring states on the coast of Africa imitated the happy idea, and kept fleets of galleys manned by Christian captives. In 1748 the galleys were abolished, and the convicts were confined in bagne, which were either buildings or old hulks. There they were, as formerly, chained to a bench; and though sometimes required to work, they were in general left in idleness. The natural taste of the French for ingenious efforts of handicraft was remarkably developed among these men, who made the bagne of France famous for the quaint toys and bijouterie fabricated in them. After the first revolution, the traveaux forcés were adopted, and the convicts were kept at systematic labour. The removal of the convicts to these depots was both offensive and dangerous. At any great prison, such as the Bicêtre, when a sufficient number of convicts had accumulated to make what was traditionally called a chouarme, they were rivetted to a long chain, and sent off to walk to their destination attended by guards: "Woe," says Vidocq, "to the females whom they met, or the shops which they came near. The women were assaulted in the grossest manner, the shops stripped in a twinkling." This method of transit was not abolished until 1836. The Memoirs of Vidocq, the celebrated secret agent of police, give a lively description of the scenes in the prisons of detention, in the passage of the chain, and in the bagne. If his own attempts to vindicate himself may be discredited, there is no occasion to question the general fidelity of these accounts, which are equally characteristic and horrible. There is nothing too abominable for belief in places where 600 convicts were after their labours herded together in one great hall or apartment, with sentinels around to bar exit, but no attempt at order or discipline within. France subsequently produced many able expositors of prison discipline, and the bagne were by degrees improved. They were abolished by the present imperial government in 1832; and the system of transportation was adopted in France just as it had virtually come to an end in this country. To those who were already condemned it was thought fair to make transportation an alternative at their choice. Books were opened for volunteers at the bagnes of Rochefort, Brest, and Toulon. The result was the converse of what was lately exhibited in this country when transportees were required to stay at home. A rush was made on the books, and 3000 names instantly subscribed. (Berenger, De la Répression Pénale, i. 378.) It might have suggested itself as a question, whether a mode of punishment which convicts adopted for themselves so zealously would be likely to meet the legitimate purposes of punishment. The French convict settlement is in Guiana.

Before the date of this experiment Britain was the only modern European power which systematically practised transportation. It was long viewed with distrust, as infringing on an old constitutional rule against inflicting punishments on British subjects beyond the realm,—a rule suggested by the continental possessions of the Plantagenets, and the opportunity which these afforded to the crown of evading the English laws for the protection of the liberty of the subject. An interval elapsed after this danger had passed away before the possession of colonies opened up the means of administering punishment abroad in places over which Parliament and the law had rather more control. Something like transportation is enacted in the celebrated vagrancy statute of 39 Elizabeth. It provides that where the said rogues "shall be dangerous to the inferior sort of people," or shall remain incorrigible "in their roguish kind of life;" after the discipline of the act has been applied to them, they may be committed to jail to await the quarter-sessions, where the justices may ordain that they "be banished out of this realm, and all other the dominions thereof," and "be conveyed into such parts beyond the seas as shall be at any time hereafter for that purpose assigned by the Privy Council unto her Majesty." The earliest known enforcement of this law is attested by a letter of King James I., written in 1619, and addressed to the treasurer and council, commanding them "to send a hundred dissolute persons to Virginia, whom the knight marshall shall deliver to them." (Chalmers' Pol. An. of America, p. 46.) The term "transportation" was first used in an act of a similar tenor passed early in the reign of Charles II. It was adapted more systematically to the purposes of punishment by an act of 1718, which authorized the criminal courts in clergymen's offences, or those which were nominally but not really punished with death, to give over the offenders to contractors, who engaged to transport them to the American colonies. The contractors were vested with a property in the labour of the convicts, for seven or fourteen years, and this right they sold, generally by auction. These convicts became valuable to the planters in those warm southern states, where the unwillingness of the inhabitants to devote themselves to any kind of toil, and the consequent temptation to exact labour by force, have ever been inimical to the interests of freedom. Hence, before the greater attractions of Negro slave labour were felt, there was much competition for the convicts. Their value, indeed, led not only to stretches of the law, but to an organized system of kidnapping along the British coast. Young lads thus seized and carried off were passed through the ceremonial of an apprenticeship, but the planters were under no responsibility, and virtually these apprentices were white slaves. These practices were suppressed about the middle of the eighteenth century, but the legitimate traffic in convicts continued to be vigorously pursued until the American war of independence closed the market against it. Governor Philip, when employed to find a substitute for it, remarked that "the benefits of this regulation were various. The colonists received by it, at an easy rate, an assistance very necessary, and the mother-country was relieved from the burden of subjects which at home were not only useless but pernicious; besides which the mercantile returns, on this account alone, are reported to have risen in later times to a very considerable amount." This he estimated at L40,000 a year, being the price of 2000 convicts sold at an average amount of L20 a head.

In looking over the world to find a spot fitted to succeed Africa, the American colonies as the receptacle of convicts, the west coast of Africa was the first to attract attention, and a few criminals were actually sent thither. There were many reasons, however, against such a selection; among others, was the insalubrity of the district; and although there were people who thought it no objection to the place chosen for a criminal population that it was one where they might be short-lived, it was for the consideration of these, as well as of others who thought it improper to subject convicts to a form of punishment which might prove capital, that the penal stations were to become important colonies, and should be fitted for the permanent residence of free immigrants. The great island-continent of Australia, newly made known to the world by Captain Cook, was at length adopted for several reasons; among others, because it was remote, it was salubrious, and it was believed to possess undefined elements of wealth, among which a large prosperous community would arise capable of absorbing the criminality of Britain.

There probably never was an occasion in which hopes Australia were so fully entertained that the solution of the great difficulty had been found, and crime was on the eve of extermination, as the juncture of commencing transportation in this new shape. And as these hopes were the fruit of much earnest reflection and discussion, they were undoubtedly so far justified that the new system was a vast improvement on the old. When convicts were sent to settled colonies exercising a certain amount of free-will, the convenience and profit of the colonists could alone be consulted. Now the colony was to be made for the purposes of carrying out penal discipline, and the free emigrants who chose to go to it must take it as they found it, and make their convenience subservient to its primary objects. The chief feature in which this difference became at once distinct was that, while the transportees to America were handed absolutely over to individual owners, those sent to Australia were to be put into the hands of a responsible public officer—the governor of the colony.

The new system was officially organized by orders in council dated 6th December 1786, issued under the powers of an act which vested the selection of the proper place in the hands of the king and council. The first fleet, as it was termed, sailed in March 1787 from Plymouth, conveying 600 male and 250 female convicts. There was immediate evidence that, with whatever deliberation the quarter of the globe had been selected, the subsequent proceedings were rash and hasty; for so little preparation was made for the reception of the colony that it had actually to search along the coast for a proper site. It was supposed that Botany Bay, of the fertility of which there had been a glowing description, was to receive the new convict colony; but the governor, Captain Philip, found a better site within the heights of Port Jackson, where he founded the town of Sydney.

It appeared to be supposed that, going to a fruitful early country, the convicts would soon be able to provide for themselves. They were accompanied by a staff of agricultural superintendents, who were to direct them in the cropping and general management of the land, as if they were a body of agricultural labourers entering on possession of a few established farms at home. But it was found that the convicts could not do farm labour if it had been duly set to their hands; and that the agricultural superin-

It was of course deemed necessary to provision the colonists until they could raise food for themselves; but so imperfectly was this accomplished, that a famine placed them, from the governor downwards, on starvation allowance, and only the prudent firmness of the governor kept them from extermination until the arrival of a second fleet with convicts and stores brought temporary relief. A large portion of this second detachment died by the way; and it was said that this mortality, by lessening the number to be fed, saved so many lives on shore which must otherwise have yielded to privation. Of the general condition, moral and material, of the infant colony, the select committee on transportation in 1838 afford the following brief description:—

"The community was composed of the very dregs of society,—of men proved by experience to be unfit to be at large in any society, and who were sent from the British jails, and turned loose to mix with one another in the desert, together with a few task-masters who were to set them to work in the open wilderness, and with the military who were to keep them from revolt. The consequences of this strange assemblage were vice, immorality, frightful disease, hunger, dreadful mortality among the settlers; the convicts were decimated by pestilence on the voyage, and again decimated by famine on their arrival; and the most hideous cruelty was practised towards the unfortunate natives. Such is the early history of New South Wales."

It was maintained at the time that this new form of transportation created a lively terror among the criminal population. Little was known about the actual fate of the shiploads of convicts despatched from time to time, until Colonel Collins published his account of the colony in 1804, but the little that transpired was a history of calamity. No element as yet appeared in the arrangement attractive to the minds of criminals. The mysterious disappearance of their friends into a distant wilderness raised appalling prognostications, which were aggravated by an opinion current among the favourers of the scheme, that somehow or other it would be found that those who were sent out would never return, and that this indeed was the most hopeful feature of the scheme.

It was not intended, however, in the formation of the new colony, that the convicts should continue to be dropped on the barren shore of a wilderness. There was to be a mixed colony, of which the convicts were to be a portion; and in the further stages of the experiment we have to look to the position of the criminals, as affected by that of the free colonists. But while it was contemplated that the convicts should form merely one element in a miscellaneous settlement, all the primary preparations were made for them alone. The first step in free colonization was taken in the year 1791, when the governor made three grants of land to free settlers, giving at the same time one grant to an emancipated convict. For some years grants of land were given occasionally to free settlers or to emancipated convicts, or emancipists, as they were termed. There was no rule of preference, and the distribution appears to have depended on the immediate expediency, in the eyes of the governor for the time being, of making or withholding grants. The placing of the convict in a position in which he could hold property by emancipating him, was in the same arbitrary position,—depending on immediate circumstances and personal opinions or predilections. Writers who have entered on the local politics of the colony have severely criticised the grounds or motives on which classes of the population or particular persons were encouraged or discouraged. Without entering into these discussions, it is sufficient to note them among other indications, that from the beginning there was no effort to mark distinctly the condition of the transported offenders. It became known that many of them had suffered hardships which rendered their sentence a cruel and protracted death; it was soon afterwards known that some of them were comfortable landed proprietors, and that others were making fortunes. In the year 1810 Governor Macquarie, who was charged with increasing the encouragement given by his predecessors to convicts, appointed an emancipist named Andrew Thomson to the magistracy. He vindicated this action on the ground that he intended in an emphatic manner to restore the man to respectability because he had earned it by his good conduct; but on the other hand, it has been maintained that the man was made a magistrate merely because he was active, clever, and successful. Soon afterwards, three emancipists, backed by a recommendation from the governor, applied to the supreme court for license to act before it as attorneys. The application was strenuously resisted by Mr Bent, the head of the court, who was presently afterwards recalled by the home government. Thus, in the earlier stages of the system, the convict was either a captive in the hands of the government, who kept him in imprisonment, or at most allowed him the limited freedom of a bondsman employed in public works; or, when there was any relaxation of this condition, the convict might be in the way to make his fortune or to become eminent and influential.

In the meantime, however, the influx of free settlers operated as a relief, by creating a middle stage, and rendering it no longer necessary that the convict should be either a prisoner or a landed proprietor. The system of the assignment of convicts to the free settlers commenced. At first it was necessary to bribe them with privileges to take convicts off the hands of government; but as the several Australian colonies increased, there came to be a competition for assigned convicts, rising in eagerness according to the order of their usefulness. This was a restoration of the American system, but with a large difference. The assignee held the convicts, not in his own right, but as representing the government, and under the conditions imposed by the government. Among these there was a restraint on corporal punishment, which could only be inflicted by a magistrate. The punishments for offences against discipline were severe, and were very readily inflicted by a magistrate on the master's statement; but often the distance from the magistracy nullified the right to punish, and the only hold on the convict was the risk of his being sent to one of the penal settlements, where the irreclaimable, or, more properly speaking, those who could not keep control over their vicious propensities, were kept under strict and severe discipline. The assignee, in fact, did not, like the American purchaser, obtain an actual property in the person of the convict, which he might dispose of by sale or let out on hire.

It happened that the peculiar nature of the Australian lands afforded, for a long time, facilities for advantageously working assignment as a medium of penal discipline, such as no other tract on the face of the globe, except perhaps some portions of Russia and Northern Germany, could have afforded. The available parts of the country were covered with a natural pasture, very thin, but valuable from its vast extent. It took five acres to feed a sheep; but countless millions of acres were obtainable. This gave the greatest facilities for slave labour—that is to say, it gave, to the utmost extent, those conditions in which a mere human being, existing and placed upon the spot, is of value, independently of his expanding industry or ingenuity. Not only were many shepherds and neatherds required to take charge of the stock on these pastures, but a still humbler class, called hut-keepers, were employed in numbers, to keep watch in the

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1 See the statements and quotations in Lang's Hist. of New South Wales, ch. v.

The convicts assigned to this discipline function lived far apart from each other, and at great distances from all resorts of man. Thus they could not be spreading contamination or concocting crime, unless they deserted and became bush-rangers. Their luxuries were tea and tobacco; of the great incentive under which most of them had become vicious, ardent liquors, they had none, from the difficulty of taking such a commodity so far inland. It is said that under no possible circumstances could liquor be conveyed to the distant stations, because, the carriers being convicts, and excessively addicted to drinking, no concealment could elude their vigilance, and no bribe or punishment would induce them to spare the liquor committed to their keeping. But as the colonies increased in population and affluence, other less beneficial sources of assignment opened. Among these was domestic service, almost the only means, indeed, which offered for the disposal of the female convicts. There arose by degrees considerable industrial establishments, engaged in building, mining, shipping, and curing the fat and skins produced in the grazing districts. In these it was of great moment to have skilled workmen, clerks, and book-keepers. The practice in the assignment of convicts was, that on a convict vessel being reported to the governor, they were removed respectively to the male barracks or a female penitentiary, where the superintendent of convicts classified them according to their several occupations and capabilities. They were then apportioned out according to the privileges, and, as far as these were consistent with each other, the wishes of the settlers. It was naturally a great prize to a man embarked in a difficult and lucrative business to find, as he sometimes might, a clever criminal trained to it. To the full services of such a person, when assigned to him, he was of course entitled; nor would he be bound to pay for these services more than rations, and other allowances settled by regulation. But there is no such thing as skillful and valuable labour extracted through pure slavery. Though nominally a slave, some of the rewards of this kind of labour must go to the worker before he will give it forth. The expert housebreaker, and the receiver of stolen goods who might have caused the criminality of hundreds of thoughtless young people—the forger, long steeped in guilt—could be very useful, and give valuable service, which did not go without its reward. The poacher, transported for assault—the workman, who, in hard times or under the tyranny of a strike, had yielded to temptation, suffered the hardships and privations of transportation, while he saw these greater criminals rolling in luxury. Worse still: the honest, hard-working mechanic, who had emigrated from inability to combat with the difficulties at home, sometimes found that his own lot was little improved by the change, but saw the country seat and the well-kept carriage of some great notorious offender, and wrote home to his friends an account of what he saw. In the curious autobiography of Hardy Vaux, a London thief of great ability, who had been twice transported to New South Wales, it appears that through his abilities and plausibility he made himself very comfortable there; and from his description of the state of society, it is clear that any clever and expert criminal, if able in some measure to restrain the indulgence of his vicious propensities, could convert his punishment into a means of enjoyment and success. The Parliamentary Report already cited, referring to frauds of an oppressive and cruel kind effected by wealthy emancipists, states that "the instruments were drawn up by convicts; for in those days amongst that class only could persons be found qualified to perform the duties of the legal profession." A state of society, in which emancipist capitalists transacted their business through convict lawyers, is perhaps sufficiently suggestive of triumphant vice; but there are plain broad statements as to the condition of the convict colonies in the same report, a specimen at least of which should be recorded. Thus, among the evils of the assignment system are enumerated—"First, The assignment of convicts to their wives or other relations that have followed them to the colony with the proceeds of the offences for which they were transported, and upon which they have set up a profitable business, have become wealthy, and thus have held out to their acquaintances in this country strong temptations to pursue a similar career of crime. Second, The employment of convicts as clerks to the various departments of government, where they have had means of acquiring knowledge, of which the most corrupt and dangerous use has been made. Third, The employment of convicts as clerks to attorneys, with free access to the gaols, which has given rise in the colony to an unparalleled system of bribery and connivance at crime: at one time even the clerk of the attorney-general was a convict, and performed all the legal business of his master. And lastly, The entrusting to convicts of the education of youth in the various public seminaries."

Amid the evils spread by such a system among the free settlers, it is clear that little could be carried on in the shape and publication of the punishment or the reformation of the convicts. This is but one side, however, of the picture; the other represents the convict amenable to what must have been heavy punishment, if punishment can be entirely measured by the amount of pain, misery, and degradation caused by it. Of the convicts left with the government, or returned on their hands as useless or incorrigible, a large number were employed on public works, chiefly in the making of roads, the first public requisite of a colony. Generally desperate men in considerable bands, they were under strict military control. They were divided into two classes,—those who were in chain gangs, and those who were not. Of the former, the committee of 1838 say,—"They are locked up from sunset to sunrise in the caravans or boxes used for this description of persons, which hold from 20 to 28 men, but in which the whole number can neither stand upright nor sit down at the same time (except with their legs at right angles to their bodies), and which, in some instances, do not allow more than 18 inches in width for each individual to lie down upon the bare boards; they are kept to work under a strict military guard during the day, and liable to suffer flagellation for trifling offences, such as an exhibition of obstinacy, insolence, and the like; being in chains, discipline is more easily preserved among them, and escape more easily prevented than among the road parties out of chains." If it were asked why a method of superintendence so barbarous and cruel was adopted, the answer would be found partly anticipated in the concluding clause of the quotation. In a community where all were so bad, those above the average in wickedness could not be kept under the necessary inspection and restraint unless by force and terror.

These chain bands, however, only consisted of what might be called, in relation to the whole tribe of convicts, the inferior class; there was a stage of penal discipline still further on for the criminals—for those who were to the convicts at large what these had been to the ordinary run of the home population. Their punishment was accomplished by a second transportation to what were called the penal settlements: one, for the less aggravated cases, was at Moreton Bay; another was the rocky and wooded island of Norfolk; a third, for the Van Diemen's Land convicts, was Port Arthur, a sterile peninsula, reached by a narrow strip of land, on either side of which were chained a row of ferocious dogs. All who were practically acquainted with them seem to have had difficulty in expressing what they felt of the horrors of these penal settlements. A convict quaintly said of them: "Let a man be what he will when he comes here, he is soon as bad as the rest: a man's heart is taken from him, and there is given to him the heart of a beast." The reckless despair that came over these men was

shown in the fact, frequently attested, that they would commit murders on their keepers or their companions for no better motive than the excitement of the deed and the subsequent journey to the gallows, as a variation of the uniform misery of their lot, or for the simple purpose of earning release by the punishment of death. No force or vigilance could prevent them from making desperate efforts to escape.

The Report of 1838 says of a return of the attempts to escape from Macquarie harbour; a penal station then abandoned: "From that return it appears that, of 116 who absconded, 75 are supposed to have perished in the woods; 1 was hanged for murdering and eating his companion; 2 were shot by the military; 8 are known to have been murdered, and 6 eaten by their companions; 24 escaped to the settled districts, 13 of whom were hanged for bush-ranging and 10 for murder—making a total of 101 out of 114 who came to an untimely fate." At the end of the Report there is a narrative, taken from the survivor, of the escape and wanderings of one group of fugitives, describing with horrible minuteness the manner in which one after another was killed and eaten, until two remained watching each other with hungry and murderous eyes for days, until the opportunity came for one to strike his exhausted companion.

But terrible as such a picture is, it does not exhaust—it does not even reach—the deepest shades of Australian convict brutality. There were found to have spread practices more dehumanizing than cannibalism itself. It was long obvious that, in communities where bands of men were herded together, no vigilance or coercion could prevent some dire results; and although those who were the first to face the difficulties of the question by an inquiry into facts, must beforehand have anticipated with certainty some revolting details, yet it may safely be said that they were, in the midst of their inquiry, appalled both by the systematic extent and application of the evil, and the depth to which it had driven its roots through the colonial community. Those who did face the difficulty were the committee of 1838 already referred to; and though they were necessarily brief in their statements, it is clear that the tenor of their recommendations was founded on the knowledge not only that transportation, according to the system then pursued, must be abolished, but that no statesman, aware of the facts known to them, would ever re-establish it, unless some new form in which it could be effected—a form radically free of these terrible evils—could be found.

What rendered this, however, the less probable was, that although coercion drove the convicts to occasional violence, the crimes, which were the stamp of their deep degradation, prevailed, wherever the discipline was relaxed—wherever, in short, they were not rendered impracticable.

It was during the attempt of a well-meaning man, who was permitted for a time to try "the law of kindness" on the conduct of the convicts in one of the penal settlements, that their degraded habits were most conspicuously developed; these were found to have been deepening and expanding under an external varnish of contentment and improvement. The tighter the hand of the law was held over the convict, the better he was.

To modify the licentiousness of the increasing band of emancipists, the ticket-of-leave system was invented. In place of an absolute pardon, the convict obtained a ticket or license to be at large under certain restrictions, and to work on his own account. It could be earned only by good behaviour, and was revocable for misconduct. It could be obtained after four years by a convict transported for seven; after six years where the sentence was for fourteen; and at the end of eight years when it was for life. Thus, in some measure, the government got rid of the heavy charge of the convicts during part of the long periods of their sentences, and the convicts themselves had advantages to look forward to and to realize; while, on the other hand, a wholesome restraint was kept over them for a long time after punishment had ceased. The conduct of the ticket-of-leave men was found to be good in comparison with that of the emancipists; but that the extent of coercion to which they were subjected made them so, was one of the disheartening features of transportation. In the Report of 1838 it is said—"On the whole, it appears from the evidence taken before your committee, that assigned convicts conduct themselves better than ticket-of-leave men, and ticket-of-leave men than emancipists or expirees; and that, when transportation does produce orderly conduct, it does so by imposing restraint, and by the apprehension it produces of immediate and severe punishment. The orderliness of a convict increases, therefore, with the immediateness and severity of the punishment, and with the general restraint to which he is subjected, and at the same time decreases with the decrease of temptation. Thus a convict is best behaved while at the penal settlements, and his conduct deteriorates in proportion as he obtains more and more freedom, and is worst when he has obtained liberty by the expiration of his sentence."

These were conditions not conformable with the intended object of transportation. If it could only act through coercion and control, there was no occasion for seeking these transport agencies so far away from home. When the Australian transportation was expected to supply the place of the American on an increased scale and in an improved shape, it was believed that the criminals would be absorbed into the free colonial population. In reality the convict element predominated, and gave its mark to the condition of the Australian colonies; and that, although a larger free colonial population had arisen, from incidental causes, than the founders of the colony had contemplated. The convict connection—consisting of emancipists, ticket-of-leave holders, and emigrant families which had or formed connections with these classes—were strong enough to make a party, and sometimes strong enough to bear down the free settler interest. It was natural that principles not only loose but depraved should triumph with them. Those who had the immediate charge of the convicts—soldiers and civilians—almost became brutalized down to their level, and fit companions for them when they had earned their leave. In the families of decent emigrants there were horrible revelations of the corruption of the young from the employment of convict domestics. A local party at length arose whose bond of union was the extinction of transportation. It was joined by many wealthy colonists, and was gradually swollen by a large influx of middle-class emigrants. Another contemporary influx of a humbler class promised to buy out transportation, by rendering the convicts worthless as labourers. By the peculiar arrangements for disposing of the land in Australia, a portion of the considerable price paid for it was reserved as a fund for assisting working men to emigrate. Those obtained were not all well suited to their purpose; peasants of a docile, patient kind were wanted, where restless, clever, discontented mechanics were obtained; but on the whole they were more valuable than convicts. These ceased, from the rapid enlargement of the demand for labour, to be numerically important. It was announced in 1838 that the number of fresh labourers wanted was 10,000, and the number of convicts received in the ensuing year would be but 3000. Many of the squatters were still favourable to transportation, as a means of easily supplying them with the slave labour they desired. These, however, once the supreme aristocracy of the country, were declining in influence, from bad seasons and the preponderating influence of other interests.

A conviction in the meantime arose at home that transportation was a wasteful and ineffective punishment. The well-weighed Report of the select committee of the House of Commons, already referred to, repeating, on the foun-

dation of a close inquiry, defects which Bentham had anticipated thirty years earlier, strengthened this conviction. The committee, after showing how this punishment might, from arbitrary accidents quite independent of the guilt of the convict, oscillate through every conceivable grade, from sufferings beyond the endurance of the human frame at one extremity, to affluent prosperity at the other, made the following suggestive remarks:—“Exile is least dreaded by the most numerous class of offenders,—by those who may be termed habitual criminals, and who compose what is properly called the criminal population of this country,—namely, regular thieves, pickpockets, burglars, and all persons who gain their livelihood by the repetition of offences, and who consequently have lost all feelings of moral aversion to crime, and can only be restrained by fear. The apprehension which this class of offenders feel for the punishment of exile amounts merely to an aversion to breaking off their criminal habits and connections in this country; on the other hand, to them the consequences of abstaining from a life of crime would be, that they must equally separate themselves from their friends and associates of the criminal class in this country, and lead a life of honest industry in a country where wages are low and the price of food is high. To such criminals this course of life must seem almost as disagreeable as, if not more disagreeable than, the chance of exile to Australia, where they understand that wages are high, and that their condition will be a comfortable one; that at all events they will obtain plenty of food and clothing, and that they will meet a number of ancient companions in crime, some of them in the most prosperous circumstances. Consequently among such individuals, especially among London thieves and the like, the threat of expatriation produces little or no motive to induce them to abstain from criminal acts.”

In the year 1840 it was found expedient to suspend the transmission of convicts to New South Wales. The system of convict punishment was soon afterwards revised, with a view of bringing the number transported down to a proportion with the limited field for their absorption. It was resolved that the convicts, before being removed to a colony, should be subjected to preliminary discipline at home. When Pentonville prison was opened in 1842, the secretary of state, Sir James Graham, explained in a state paper that it was intended in that establishment to subject convicts to a system of penal discipline, which should not only be in itself a punishment in as far as it was a long imprisonment, but would train them so as to render them better fitted for their fate in a penal colony. They were to be detained eighteen months in Pentonville, and then drafted off to the penal colony most suitable to their disposition and condition. It was soon found, however, that the eighteen months’ detention would not reduce the number of convicts so far as to enable the remainder to be absorbed by the transportation fields, which were yearly narrowing. Accordingly, it was resolved to give a second stage of the convict’s sentence to labour in public works, and then to transfer him to the modified restraint of a penal colony. Such works were found at Gibraltar and Bermuda; and in 1846 it was resolved to create the great convict establishment connected with the Portland quarries and breakwater. Having first undergone a long imprisonment, and then a still longer discipline in the public works, the convict was to become an exile, subsisting on the fruit of his own labour in a penal colony, which he could not leave without rendering himself liable to the punishment of a returned convict. Events at the Antipodes, however, defeated even this modified use of the old transportation fields. The governor of Van Diemen’s Land—the only convict colony which still remained open—informing the home government that the ticket-of-leave and conditional-pardon men were there competing with the free labourers for a scanty subsistence, and that the colony would be overrun with paupers, the greater portion of whom also were criminals. It was useless to send to such a place men whose chance of restoration to virtue depended on their finding ready and lucrative employment. Hence, from the beginning of the year 1848, the transmission of convicts to Van Diemen’s Land ceased. Thus had the seemingly inexhaustible resources of the great Australian world, for the absorption of our criminal population collapsed with an embarrassing degree of suddenness. Some further efforts were made ere it was entirely abandoned. A new settlement for convicts was projected and nominally established in Northern Australia, but for many sufficient reasons it was abandoned. In 1849 it was proposed to land some convicts, who had undergone their probation in prison and public works, in Australia. The squatting interest, having a lingering partiality for convict labour, would have welcomed their arrival, but the indignant remonstrances of the rest of the inhabitants were effectual to prevent a landing. The opening of the gold diggings immediately afterwards rendered the whole region the most unsuitable place in the world for the reception of convicts in any stage of their discipline. An attempt was made to use the settlements in Southern Africa as a convict station, but it was effectually resisted. The isolated colony of Western Australia continued to receive a small number of exiles, but it now became clear that, in the meantime at least, provision must be made for detaining our worst criminals at home. Besides women, the government had then about 6000 male convicts, ever increasing, on their hands, and the task of disposing of them was serious. The first difficulty was to meet the fact, that the sentences of this large number of persons ordained them to be conveyed beyond seas, a judgment which could not be carried out.

To provide against the further accumulation of such sentences, the first Penal Servitude Act was passed in 1853, substituting for the old sentences of transportation sentences to the new denomination of punishment for much shorter periods. This act was in itself a standing admission that the government, if it required the transportees to take out their sentences at home, must in good faith materially abbreviate them. Each transportee, when sentenced, knew that though the period of his bondage was nominally seven or ten or fifteen years, yet, if he conducted himself well, the greater portion of it would be spent in the comparative freedom of simple exile. The only practicable arrangement was to remit a large portion of the sentences. The reception of this adjustment afforded curious evidence of the charms of transportation to the criminal world. The men received it with sullen discontent and remonstrances about breach of faith. The effect of the disappointment among the female convicts at Millbank was, as the directors reported, to make them, “without reason or provocation, suddenly break into acts amounting to frenzy,—smashing their windows, tearing up their clothes, destroying every useful article within their reach; generally yelling, shouting, and singing as if they were maniacs.”

In the arrangement for abbreviating those transportation Home sentences, it was deemed prudent that the government tickets of should not altogether relinquish the hold it had over the leave, criminal through the original duration of his sentence. Accordingly it was resolved that the remission should be conditional on good behaviour. When the time for the convict’s release came, he received, not a free pardon, but a license to be at large, from the secretary of state. The tickets, which he carried with him as a certificate of this license, informed him that it would be withdrawn, and he would be subjected to endure his original sentence, not merely if he lapsed into crime, but if he led a questionable dissolute life and kept low company. The men thus released, called ticket-of-leave men, created a renowned panic in the years 1854 and 1855. The public would not look at the fact, that the license was intended for their protection—that the men must have been released, since it was impossible to send them abroad in terms of their original sentences—and that the release was rendered conditional, that a control might be had over their motions. The public dwelt with morbid panic on every separate crime committed throughout the country, asserting that it was perpetrated by the hands of ticket-of-leave men, whom the government had designedly let loose upon the world. On one point the suspicions of the public had a plausible foundation. It was seen that the secretary of state was not in the practice of withdrawing the license when the convict had fallen into evil repute, unless he had actually been committing new crimes. In fact, the secretary of state felt, when he came to the practical exercise of the power vested in him, that it was questionable in a constitutional view, and disliked to take on himself the responsibility of visiting men with a heavy punishment on the ground of their mere repute, and of the opinion formed of them by police-officers.

The result of this public clamour was a very valuable parliamentary inquiry into the whole condition of the convict question. People could not see that it was impracticable, over the whole face of the globe, to have a new convict colony, and it was well to exhaust that question by practical inquiry. It was exhausted. Every man who had a scheme to propose for the absorption of our convicts abroad was invited to explain it. The result was, that no one could point to a colony, or to any other foreign community, where the convicts could be absorbed into society as they used to be in America, and were to some extent in Australia. On the other hand, it was easy to find places suited for convict stations; that is to say, places where great prisons could be built, and convict labour carried on either within the prison or in the open air. But it was not necessary that establishments like these should be placed at the Antipodes. On the contrary, the nearer they were to the centre of government, the more strict would be the control over them, and the more effective their moral influence over the criminal population of the country, who would know them to be real places of punishment, cleared of the atmosphere of attractive dulicity which is apt to surround far-off penal settlements.

In consequence of this inquiry, the act of 1857 was passed, abolishing sentences of transportation, and substituting for it, in all cases, sentences of penal servitude. What penal servitude is has never been defined, unless it be a definition of it to say that the penal serv is a public slave in the hands of the secretary of state for the home department. It may be carried into effect either at home or abroad, and is capable at any time, should the means become available, of being rendered the same thing as transportation. It varies from periods of three years to the whole period of life.

It will be seen that, although transportation to the Australian colonies came to an abrupt and unexpected conclusion, yet a concourse of circumstances had been gradually diminishing its extent, and opportunity had been given for finding a proper substitute. Thus for some time those chiefly concerned have had before them the weighty problem, how far the progress of the science of prison discipline is possessed of resources to meet the new burden thrown upon it. The country was clearly in a better position to meet the difficulty than on the former occasion, when America was closed. The prospect of having to throw the convict population on the resources of our prisons, such as they were in those days, was appalling. But the progress which had been made was, as has been already stated, strictly in the discipline of persons sentenced to limited periods of close imprisonment, and it remained to be seen how much of the science thus acquired would be available for longer periods of detention.

In this view, the effect of the discipline in the model penitentiary at Pentonville was closely watched, and the conclusion adopted was, that the separate system, however suitable it might be for carrying out the usual fixed periods of imprisonment immediately followed by release, could not to any good purpose be continued for the established periods of transportation or penal servitude. Pentonville was at first peopled by prisoners selected for their health and strength, and at the healthiest age, who were kept there for a limited period until they should be sent abroad. But as the transportation fields narrowed, it was found necessary to open the prison to all classes of convicts, and they were kept there for considerable periods, uncertain as to their future fate, and apprehensive in many instances that they would have to endure the whole period of their sentences in monotonous isolation. They became visibly deteriorated both in body and mind, and the number who lapsed into insanity became alarming; not only for the sake of themselves, but from the indication so afforded that a much larger number, who had not reached the length of insanity, were likely to be more or less mentally deteriorated. The visiting physician, Dr Owen Rees, in his report for September 1850, having observed that five cases of mania and eight of mental delusion had occurred in nine months, said that "these numbers would appear to render it probable that some cause for the production and development of insanity is in operation in the prison which did not formerly exist. This consideration, induced by the statistics of the prison, would not, however, urge itself so forcibly on the attention were it not that, in my inspections of the men, made from time to time, I had observed an irritability and discontent indicative of a mental condition very different to that shown by prisoners in former years; and, in more cases than I ever recollect before, a despondency and want of mental tone requiring the attention and calling for the anxiety of the medical officer." Another question at the same time suggested itself,—How far the separate confinement fitted the prisoners to go back into society with improved chances of well-doing? and this too reached no satisfactory conclusion. The obedience, docility, and general conformity with the discipline of the prison, which entitled a prisoner to the approval of his officers, were no test of his capacity for self-control. It was even found that the ready compliance which made an inoffensive captive, made a thoughtless, facile member of society, liable to be immediately seduced into his old practices when he found his old associates. It was perceptible that, when convicts were taken immediately from a long course of separate confinement to be associated in public works, they had lost part of the activity and capacity of self-management which is possessed by the humblest class of free workmen, and must be exhibited by them when they have to co-operate with each other in labour. Increased attention to diet, free air, and exercise, in some degree modified these injurious influences. Some convicts at Pentonville were set to garden-work avowedly as a relief to the monotony of the cell. A more comprehensive and effectual remedy was found in active exercise by walking round a considerable area, an arrangement which of course was so far an infringement on the rule of strict separation. It was at last, however, resolved to limit the period during which convicts were to be kept separate. A year was at first the limit fixed, but in 1854 it was reduced to nine months for males; the deteriorating influences being observed not to commence their work on women so readily, it was considered safe to subject them to the otherwise wholesome system of separation for a year.

This limitation only affected the class usually called convicts, and criminals sentenced to imprisonment might have to endure their whole sentence of a year, or even two years, in separation. But it was held that the same

deteriorating influence does not follow from the discipline when the whole punishment comes to an early conclusion, and that it was the prospect of a long continuance of punishment, uncertain in its nature and repressive of hopefulness, that made the separation tell so early on the convicts. It is proper to state that neither the policy of the limitation nor the sanitary opinions on which it has been founded have escaped dispute. No one questions that any system which deteriorates the prisoner either in body or mind is unjustifiable, but the deterioration has been questioned. In America it has been maintained that men who had been kept years in a cell without ever breathing the open air, as all prisoners confined for any considerable period in Britain do, had not deteriorated; and that, without associating them with each other, there are many sanitary influences available for the protection of their health. Those who thus believe it unnecessary, condemn the association as subversive of the good effects of previous separation, and a pernicious example to other prisoners, who know that the greater criminals nominally sentenced to higher punishments are in the enjoyment of privileges denied to themselves. Sir John Kincaid, after more than ten years' experience as a government inspector of prisons, says, when reporting on male convicts detained in the prison of Wakefield in Yorkshire, and on the female convicts of Scotland—"It appears to me that, so long as they are in separate confinement, and under the beneficial influences that are brought to bear upon them, they are generally contented, industrious, and, such of them as are endowed with minds capable of reflection, appear to be in a fair way of adopting an amended course of life; but when the time arrives for their being entitled to association, they are but a short time in it when they generally become more idly disposed, discontented, and excitable, showing that vices have been called into active operation which their previous separate confinement had tended to subdue or to eradicate. I am not prepared to say that prisoners sentenced to long periods of imprisonment may not require association; I am only showing the results of it after nine months' separate confinement. I am of opinion, in which I am supported by others well qualified to judge, that a prisoner in ordinary health will not break down on a two years' imprisonment in a suitable separate cell, provided he is allowed a fair amount of relaxation in air and exercise."

The chairman of the English convict board, who is in a great measure the author of the new arrangements, says in his report for the same year—"It may, however, be doubted whether the period of nine months, to which the course of discipline is now restricted, is sufficient for deriving the full benefits which attend its enforcement for twelve or fifteen months, which were the usual periods some years ago. Though other causes have been more obvious in relation to the falling-off in point of good conduct which has been noticed during the last two or three years, I believe that the less due preparation for being brought into association has had its share. An important period for reflection and instruction has thus been lost, and I should be glad, when circumstances permit, to see twelve months again established as the average period of detention in separate confinement." There is no doubt that the true medium applicable to this branch of convict discipline will soon be indisputably adjusted through a series of cautiously-tried and carefully-watched experiments, remote alike from the cruel carelessness of the old practice or the audacious empiricism which succeeded it.

So far, then, the substitute in a system of discipline at home for the punishment of transportation to the antipodes has been supplied by the system of discipline applicable to the criminals punished by imprisonment at home. It is now necessary to give a general idea of those totally new arrangements which have been adopted for carrying out the remainder of the convicts' sentence. It will be unnecessary to state chronologically the changes made in these arrangements, because they were at first influenced by the supposition that a portion of the convicts' sentence was still to be passed in a penal colony. It was seen at last, however, that even the sole remaining convict settlement, Western Australia, was unlikely to find room for the 600 which it was estimated to receive; while the number of convicts sentenced in the United Kingdom in each year amounts to more than 3000. Hence it was necessary to adjust the stages of discipline so that they could all be carried into effect at home. To meet this great difficulty, a new method of administration was adopted for England, where the bulk of the British convicts are kept. The convict prisons of Millbank, Pentonville, and Parkhurst had been managed by separate boards, each consisting of several statesmen and other men of eminence acting gratuitously. These were abolished in 1850, and the whole administration of the convict department was vested in a board of three official commissioners, appointed by, and responsible to, the secretary of state for the home department. Colonel Sir Joshua Jebb, who had long acted as surveyor-general of the English prisons, was appointed chairman of the board. Thus it fell to his lot to have the chief influence in the organization of the new system, and by his official position, as well as his zeal and ability, he may be said to hold the leadership of the practice of prison discipline in this country.

It was considered that the period of separation allotted to the convict as the first stage of his sentence would serve a double purpose. It would be in itself a heavy punishment, deterrent to evil-doers, and it would render the untamed human being amenable to order and discipline, and more manageable during the subsequent stages. The object of these stages is, by mixing other elements with that of punishment, gradually to adapt the convict for the life of a useful and, if possible, a religious and moral citizen; and if this should not be even to any extent accomplished, then at all events, to keep him alike from doing mischief to society and from deteriorating under the influence of prison life. As in the separate system itself, the most material ameliorating engine in this operation is labour. The kinds of work which can be conducted in a separate cell are limited and not very productive. A great deal of the labour in separate confinement is, as we have seen, intended to be afflicting only, and entirely unproductive in the economic sense. The convicts' labours have the greatest practical amount of productiveness in view. Being no longer conducted in solitude, they have the economic advantage of division of process, and at the same time they fit the men better for the real industrial pursuits of life, by far the greater portion of all hand labour being conducted in combination, as in the instance of the mason, the carpenter, the plasterer, the worker in metals, and the manufacturer of most of the textile fabrics.

The country being prosperous, there was less than might have been expected of the outcry which such projects have usually to endure about the hardships to the honest workman, who has to encounter the competition of the felon. To the general economic influence of this objection there is the conclusive general answer, that were the felons behaving as all good men desire they should behave, they would themselves be honest, industrious workmen, competing with their brethren, and reducing their wages, were it true that the increase of the number of producers, and consequently of consumers, does decrease the rate of wages. There could be no such general answer to the specific objection, that government, bringing the large capital invested in convict management into the market, might unduly press on particular crafts, especially the smaller and less powerful. But it was easy, practically, to meet the objec- tion by avoiding underselling, and by a discreet selection of classes of produce, and of markets, in which the trade driven by the convict establishments would be too trifling to be felt.

At the same time, there were many obvious advantages in sending the great bulk of the convict labour into channels where it would cause no competition with free labour. In this view, convict labour has been devoted to the executing of public works, which, though eminently valuable to the country, might not have been undertaken but for the opportunity thus afforded; and waste land has been reclaimed, adding a certain average to the fertile soil of the country, which would not have been added to it as a remunerative speculation, and consequently would not have given employment to free labourers.

The industrial disposal of convicts has been greatly aided by the works undertaken on Portland Isle, in consequence of the recommendation of a commission on harbours of refuge, "that a breakwater be constructed in Portland Bay, sheltering an area of 1200 acres." Subsequently fortifications were added to the breakwater and the harbour-works. The peninsula itself supplies the colite rock so well known as Portland stone for these works. Hence a quantity of labour of various kinds has been concentrated within one narrow corner to an extent rarely exemplified. It is the nature of the colite beds to require before the very fine grained, compact building-stone is excavated, the removal of masses of rough unequal stone. This, useless for other purposes, is dropped into the sea as the material of the great breakwater. There is thus a long gradation of labour, from the roughest and the hardest that is undergone by the most ignorant excavating navvy, up to the finest masonry, and the other operations necessary for the finishing of the fortifications and harbour-works. From the report for 1858 it appears that on the breakwater there had been executed work to the value of L31,836, being at the rate of L34 a man. On the fortifications the work was valued at L3165, 11s., or L31, 9s. per man. On the prison edifice masons and labourers did work set down at the rate of L25, 12s. 8d. per man. Others working in-doors, as tailors, shoemakers, cooks, and bakers, were estimated to have done work worth L21, 12s. 2d. each overhead. The greater part of this labour cannot undergo the market test; and it can only be taken for granted that the Convict Board have accurately estimated it according to the methods with which employers of constructive labour are familiar. It used to be estimated that the average value of the work of a convict in the hulks was about 2d. a day. That the labour, while increasing so much in efficiency, has also increased in its penal influence, may be inferred from the following remarks by Mr Dobie, the chaplain of the establishment:—"I think the working of the large quarries to provide stone for the breakwater meets the incorrigible offender by visiting him with very severe toll, and for such men scarcely anything could be more effectually deterring than this hard and incessant labour. The exertion with which the idle have regarded this compulsory toil presents the Portland prison as an important agent of terror to repress crime. Many men, on leaving, do not hesitate to admit that before they committed the crime which brought them hither, they had no notion that they should be subjected to so severe a yoke; and they have often added that they should warn their old companions of their experience of some two or three painful years." Slave labour is naturally meagre in results; and that labour should be exacted, not only productive, but oppressive, at once suggests that some operative cause, other than pure force, must have been at work. Its nature will be explained further on. At Portsmouth there is another convict establishment where the labour is to some extent similar. According to the governor's report for 1858, it consists, "in the dockyard, of coaling and ballasting ships of war, unloading colliers, removing and stacking timber, attending ship-wrights, &c.; in the Royal Clarence victualling-yard, of loading and unloading vessels, stowing casks, cleaning tanks, &c.; and about Haslar hospital, principally in works of an ornamental character." In the navy department convicts were employed "in scraping shot and shell, and performing various useful services in the gun wharf." Calculating the value of the labour performed by actual measurement, or where measurement has been impossible, then by approximation," he sets it down as L28,392, or L32, 8s. per convict. At Chatham a new prison, superseding the hulks, has been opened for above a thousand convicts; and it is stated that "their labour will be devoted to the extensive new docks, and other works which are proposed to the eastward of the present dockyard." It will readily be seen that these establishments afford a wide range of industrial occupation. The government, at the same time, hire vacant accommodation in county prisons, as at Leicester jail, and the house of correction at Wakefield in which there are usually about 400 convicts.

It is of course important that when a criminal has acquired any skilled occupation, it should not be wasted to the public, or deteriorated to himself, by his being set to the rough drudgery which the untrained can perform better. With the resources, however, at the command of the convict department, it will rarely happen that a man possesses mechanical skill which cannot be used. Overseers, clerks, and the few educated and professional men who find their way into the convict population, can to a considerable extent be set to appropriate occupation, chiefly in the details of the extensive businesses conducted by the convict department. In prisons where extensive works are conducted, there is the same economic advantage as in free workshops and manufactories, in the organization of the labour not being disturbed by the employment of the sick and aged, who may at the same time be fit for other and lighter work. The official staff who superintend the able-bodied convicts, cannot also do justice to the condition and claims of the disabled. Accordingly, the permanently diseased, the superannuated, and those overtaken by the premature old age brought on by the excesses, the privations, and the excitements of the felon's life, are provided for in separate prisons. One of these is the new prison of Working, which has been or is nearly completed: the inmates destined for it were removed from the hulks to a temporary prison at Lewes. The other establishment for this class of prisoners is on the breezy heights of Dartmoor, where they are to a great extent occupied in reclaiming waste land and in farming. The governor, in his last report, lamenting the death of an intelligent farm-bailiff, says, "this zealous and faithful public servant has, by his unceasing energy and great practical skill, produced inconceivable changes on this barren spot, rendering that which only a few years since presented a most sterile and forbidding character, now worthy of being compared with Devon's finest and most luxuriant farms." Convict boys are sent to the prison of Parkhurst, in the Isle of Wight. The chief occupation of the prisoners there is agriculture, but some are trained as masons, sawyers, carpenters, painters, tailors, shoemakers, and brickmakers. By a special statutory provision, the secretary of state sends boys sentenced to long imprisonment, as well as convicts, to this prison; and it is very suggestive, that the officers of the establishment, for the credit of their system of discipline, deem it necessary to draw a broad line of distinction between the conduct and general condition of the convicts whom they have for several years, and those whom, as undergoing sentence of imprisonment, they can operate on only for a period comparatively brief.

Such is a general view of the occupations of the male Indentured convicts in England. It will readily be felt that, if aments to healthy development of productive labour, accompanied by exer- that good conduct which is its necessary attendant, has been brought about by mere force, the phenomenon is new in the moral history of mankind. The stimulus of reward, and the still stronger stimulus of hope, have, however, accompanied the coercion. The rewarding of malefactors, or the mitigation of their sufferings, as the return for good conduct in prison, is not a novelty. Difficulties, however, have always been felt in the method and extent of the application of the principle. If carried far so as materially to affect the character and extent of a sentence, then it follows that the awarding of punishment, which is jealously restricted to judges bound by acts of Parliament, who pronounce their sentences under the highest responsibilities in the face of the public, would be shared by the administrators of prisons, whose functions are performed in privacy, and who would naturally act on such evidence or other operative inducement as might suit their own views and wishes. True, the rulers of the prison could only alter the sentence of the judge in the direction of mitigation; but even the discretionary possession of this power might indirectly be turned to the increase of severity, for the existence of such a power might be contemplated by the bench, and the prisoner might be sentenced to a punishment reducible by his future good conduct, while the reduction might be justly earned, and yet withheld. These considerations must always hamper the practical adoption of schemes, of which there are not a few, for adjusting the criminal's fate, to his conduct and the character he has acquired, after he has been convicted.

Wherever there is danger of discretionary power being abused, there is at least a partial corrective in a record of the circumstances which give a ground for the exercise of the power. A hasty or vindictive discipline officer, presuming him to be invested, without control, with the right of mitigating or increasing a criminal's punishment, would be checked in the unjust or cruel exercise of his power by the necessity of keeping a record of the events and circumstances which lead to its exercise. The merit of having invented such a record, in "the mark system," appears to be due to Captain Macomochie. This gentleman has suggested a bold and original scheme of prison discipline, of which, as it has not, save in one feature, met with practical acceptance, a criticism would, on the present occasion, be out of place. It may simply be remarked, that those connected with the practical application of discipline have, whether rightly or wrongly, felt that he proposes to appeal to motives, too refined and too closely resembling those by which only men of superior intellect and goodness are led, to be effective upon those coarse natures which have been led into crime by their signal deficiency in the very springs of action to which he appeals. His method, however, of recording the claims of prisoners by the mark system is now extensively applied. It can be carried out either by debiting the marks for misconduct, or by crediting them for good conduct. In either case, the character recorded to the prisoner is a fund on which he is entitled to draw. A certain number of marks gained within a fixed period entitle the convict to the privileges of a class or grade, which may be certified by a badge such as a sergeant's stripes. The rank so achieved is liable to be forfeited by misconduct.

It is the nature of criminals to be influenced by immediate results, and to be careless of remote consequences. In the loss of a step in a graduated scale, the consequences of misconduct are brought home with immediate emphasis. They are often brought home by immediate consequences; and this leads to the nature of the fund on which the convict's claims, as established by the mark system, enable him to draw. While he is in separation, the conditions under which he will be relieved from the dreary monotony of his confinement, to enjoy a limited converse with his fellows, may be made a powerful instrument of discipline; and so may the possibility of his losing this privilege after he has gained it. Other relaxations will follow. Pursuits giving interest and a modified excitement to the prison life may be to a certain extent introduced. Great influence may be exercised in adjusting the nature and the amount of labour required of him. Their food is generally an object of intense interest and anxiety to prisoners, and when they are actively employed, especially in the open air, they enjoy it with a relish to which they have been utter strangers in their outside life of dissipation. Even within a very limited gradation in the luxuriosness of their diet, and without the admission of any stimulants, a large range of reward and punishment can be reached. Another method of reward is the crediting of certain sums of money or gratuities, at stated intervals, forming a fund for the benefit of the convict on his release.

The most potent of all rewards, however, is release. It is the only one which, even at a distance, is strong enough to stimulate the prisoner in his immediate actions and conduct. But the largeness of the reward renders it one difficult to deal with. It has been seen already that an abbreviation of the sentences of certain convicts, rendered necessary by a concourse of circumstances, created great unpopularity under the name of the ticket-of-leave system, and was productive of considerable embarrassment. This occasion, however, afforded a valuable opportunity for testing, under close and skilful observation, the efficiency of the practice of abbreviating sentences as a means of influence and control over the convicts. After their first disappointment in the loss of the prospect of removal to Australia, the opportunity of earning a shortened sentence influenced their conduct, and gave an impulse to their industry. The act of 1853, which introduced sentences of penal servitude, made the duration of these much shorter than sentences of transportation, with the view of making the new punishment, which was to be endured at home, as nearly as possible equivalent to the removal abroad. It was determined at the same time by the executive authorities, that these shorter sentences should run their course, and that the punishment of the criminal, as pronounced from the bench, should not be subsequently altered except for some special cause. The proceedings of the Convict Board, and the reports made by their officers, show that they felt this rule materially to abridge their influence in training the men to good conduct and industry. In their last report, referring to the year 1855, when the numbers committed under the new form of sentence began to bear a considerable and noticeable proportion of the whole, they state that the change in the feeling and bearing of the men bore some resemblance to the old characteristics of the bulks, their object being to get through their time, and go away with "thank you for nothing," as they expressed it. In Portland prison it is stated that in the autumn of 1855, "a bad and insubordinate feeling was displayed by a number of men under the new sentence of penal servitude; these combined to strike work, assigning as a reason, that they were disappointed as to their periods of imprisonment; and stating that when tried, and in some instances since trial, they had been led to expect that, by good conduct, they would get part of their sentence remitted."

After the act of 1857, abolishing the name of transportation, and recasting the punishment of convicts in periods of penal servitude, the principle of remitting part of the sentence for good behaviour was re-adopted by the government. Care, however, was taken to leave no undue room for a discretionary exercise of the power. A scale of remissions was adjusted in proportion to the different lengths of the sentences, fixing the period to be deducted from each, in case of certified good conduct. For instance, the convict whose sentence was for five years, if he behaved well, was entitled to release after four years, and the convict sentenced to seven years after six. The scale of abbreviations, with an explanatory statement, was transmitted by the secretary of state to all the judges, who, in pronouncing their sentences, knew, and, if they thought proper, may have informed the convicts, that the sentence extended to a certain period, should their conduct while enduring it be pronounced bad, but that if they earned a good character it became a shorter sentence.

These brief notices of convict organization refer to the establishments for male convicts; but the discipline of convict women has, with some differences, followed the same course. Criminal women are fewer than criminal men, but they are more difficult to deal with. They are inapt to follow the sombre routine of discipline, and where they are collected in considerable numbers there are always a few of them in chronic rebellion against the laws of the prison, to which male prisoners of the deepest dye of guilt are giving implicit obedience. Even while some opening in the Australian colonies seemed to remain for the male convicts there was none for the female, and it was necessary some years ago to look in the face the alternative of detaining them in this country. The mark system and appropriate stages of discipline have been applied to them, but it is difficult to give them an equivalent for what the organization of the male convicts derives from public works.

To bring them a stage nearer to the condition of free persons than they can be brought in the prison, an establishment has been formed at Fulham for their reception, after they have passed through Millbank and the female prison of Brixton. It is called "The Refuge," and its chief peculiarity is, that its resemblance to an ordinary prison is as small as the necessary security admits of. The convicts being selected for their good behaviour, advanced to enjoyments which may be forfeited by misconduct, and approaching the conclusion of their sentences, require comparatively little restraint, and enjoy a corresponding freedom within the walls.

It is perhaps propitious to the progress of the important science of their discipline, that the convicts throughout the United Kingdom are not under one administration, but that opportunity may be given for testing the success of different methods of management, each conducted with a close observation of the others. The male convicts of Scotland are removed to England, but no women have been removed from Scotland since the summer of 1855, and those who have since accumulated have been under the management of the General Board of Prisons. They now amount to about 300. The system of advancement from stage to stage has been adopted towards them, so far as the limited accommodation at the disposal of the board has permitted; and new buildings, planned with a special view to their discipline, have just been completed as additions to the general prison at Perth.

In Ireland the convicts, both male and female, are under the administration of the directors of convict prisons there, a board established in 1854. They have several prisons,—Montjoy (with a male and female department), Phillipston, Grange-Gorman, and Spike Island where men are employed as at Portland, in fortification and harbour-works. They have made and put to use moveable iron prisons, which can be shifted to suit the occupation of the inmates in the improvement of land and public works. The arrangement resembles the old road gangs in Australia, and not least in the convicts sleeping in one apartment, an arrangement avoided in all other places of convict custody.

The Irish system of convict discipline has followed the English in general, but has gone further in the direction of relaxation, bringing the convicts nearer to the condition of free citizens. They are entertained with lectures and other intellectual and educational relaxations. They are permitted, too, after an advanced stage and evidence of continued good conduct, to pursue occupations beyond the bounds of the prison establishments, and are entrusted with messages and commissions in which they have to account for pecuniary transactions. The directors are very confident in the success of their method, and it will no doubt be fairly tested. The nature and habits of the people are different from those of the British, and the same methods of discipline may not suit both. Indeed, the adaptation of discipline to local and social peculiarities opens some of the most difficult problems of the science. In the instructive book of M. Berenger these difficulties are illustrated with reference to the varied population of France, where the degraded thief, and the Corsican assassin who is yet a gentleman and looks upon his honour as unsullied, have to be imprisoned under the same roof.

Every one who has paid even small attention to the prospects distribution of the penal population from twenty to thirty from new years ago, when one portion of them were kept at home, in ill-managed prisons, and another portion were hustled off to the opposite side of the world, will at once perceive how great is the change operated by late arrangements. Of the improvements in simple prison discipline we have the experience of several years. That there have been advantages in the improvement admits of no doubt; but they do not fulfil in many respects, the hope of sanguine philanthropists. Whoever obtains the opinions of the most intelligent officers connected with criminal administration, will find in them a settled conviction that there is at least one class, forming a large proportion of the criminality of this country,—the hardened professional thieves,—on whom prison discipline has had scarcely any reformatory effect, however much its terrors may have restrained them. The system of long isolation under training, which has but recently begun, and is an entire novelty in penal practice, has to prove its own results, and it would be premature to come to a conclusion on its efficacy. But it is easy to believe that four, six, or ten years, or more if necessary, devoted to suitable training, may produce effects to which imprisonments for like numbers of months were totally inadequate. It will be curious to see the influence of habit on the thief or swindler who has been compelled, during a long period of years, to turn his hand to productive industry. If there be elements of change in himself, there will be perhaps as much in the conditions by which he is surrounded. The criminal classes are ephemeral, growing prematurely old, and dropping out of their social circle from various causes after a brief career; so that when the convict returns to society after a long detention, he will find a new generation at work, who have opened new departments of criminal business with which he is not immediately familiar.

For such discharged convicts as are desirous to do well, the chances that they may find a clear path towards the means of living by honest industry form an anxious problem, not yet solved, to the authorities on prison discipline. There is a strong and natural dislike to them in the minds both of employers and fellow-workmen. Efforts to relieve them from the consequences of this feeling on the other hand are apt to incur the reproach of favouring the criminal above the honest labourer. In Ireland, it appears that convicts are not disliked as labourers, while the police look after them; but the habits of the rest of the empire revolt against this as a form of espionage, and the exprires specially looked after by the authorities would have less chance of employment than those left unwatched. The employment of exprires in establishments supported by the government has been spoken of, but rejected, as such assemblages of men, who at least were hardened offenders, would be a dangerous pressure on their resolutions to improve, and would afford them both the temptation and the means to relapse into crime. Among the French the system of

Patronage.—that is to say, of private persons who are wealthy and benevolent taking individual expriences in hand, and watchfully assisting them to gain an honest living,—has been recommended as the strongest available remedy for the evil in the meantime. A few societies having the same objects in view have sprung up in this country, such as the London Reformatory, the Elizabeth Fry, and the Discharged Prisoners' Aid Society. In some of these institutions the expriences are admitted for a time as to a place of refuge, whence they can look about and secure a safe retreat from destitution and crime at home or abroad; while others merely give council and pecuniary aid to enable them to commence their reformed life.

After the reformatory spirit in prison discipline had for years operated on the criminal population generally, and been to some measure wasted upon old offenders, it lately took a more hopeful direction by concentrating itself upon the young. When a man has been caught stealing, the chance is, that he is an irreclaimable thief; but a boy caught stealing may yet be trained to honesty. The usual material out of which the old confirmed thief is made, is the child trained in crime by the necessities of an abandoned infancy. Thrown upon the streets as orphans or the neglected offspring of dissolute parents, children find that they must live. Mendicancy and crime are the only means of achieving this object, and there are plenty to teach them these businesses. The more the child possesses industrial energy, the more actively and intelligently will he push his profession, and the more formidable a depredator will he become. It is in this way that the great family of crime is kept up. The parents are in prison or in the convict establishments while their children are learning their hereditary trade. Perhaps the parents may not have reached the sphere of systematic crime, but drunkenness, idleness, and general viciousness have gradually crept upon them, poisoning the sources of the domestic affections, and deadening the sense of duty; and so the next generation, entering early on professional crime, brings the race at last down to the grade of criminality. It has been shown by experience that such children, even if they have begun their career of vice, are not confirmed criminals; and if they are early enough taken in hand, the energies which they would have directed to plunder may be turned to productive industry.

If the adoption in different parts of the world of the same idea, without those who have started it receiving hints from each other, or knowing each other's proceedings, be evidence that the idea is true and just, the principle of juvenile reformatories has such a sanction. It has been adopted and carried out in many places, under the notion that it was quite original, though such institutions were flourishing elsewhere. How old they may be it would be now difficult to tell. The principle in some measure influenced the men who from time to time bequeathed fortunes to found great hospitals; but it is a sort of law of political economy, that what is thus vested to remain for perpetuity ceases to be available for destitution, whatever might be the founder's intention, and becomes a sort of property in the hands of the managers, who give its benefits to those having influence to obtain them. An institution for the really destitute must be under the watchful eye of those who contribute to or are taxed for it. The first reformatory proper, which has received much notice, was founded about the year 1813 by Johannes Falk, a native of Dantzig, whose heart is said to have been opened to the condition of the street children by the loss of four of his own within a few days. His establishment was avowedly a refuge for criminal children and the children of criminals. Several other small establishments of the same kind followed this in different parts of Germany, more than one "saving institution," as they were called, being promoted by Count Adalbert van der Reese-Vollmarstein. In 1824 a larger establishment, the "Society for the Education of Children Morally Neglected," was founded at Berlin. The Prussian government afterwards took the matter up, and several reformatories of different kinds, but all having more or less the training, support, and education of children of the destitute and criminal classes in view, were established under government auspices. In the meantime the principle had made great progress in the United States. In 1823 it was reported by the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in New York, "that it is highly expedient that a house of refuge for juvenile delinquents should, as soon as practicable, be established in the immediate vicinity of New York;" and in 1826 the state legislature passed an act "for incorporating the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the city of New York." This was followed by several others; and the Refuges became an important feature in the United States. They are not merely places of voluntary refuge, but children can be committed to them; a practice which was not adopted without considerable hesitation and objection, applied especially to the instances where children not charged with specific crimes were removed from their parents. (See Lieber's translation of De Beaumont and De Toqueville's Penitentiary System.) The French had for some time established a distinction between adult and juvenile offenders, those under sixteen being considered as unfit objects of punishment, from having acted without discretion. After various minor efforts in the same direction, the Reformatory of Metz for criminal boys, was established in the year 1840, by M. Demetz, who has worthily earned a high reputation by the skillful organization and great success of the institution.

In Britain there was a peculiar call for institutions of this kind, because even the reforms in prison discipline pressed it harder on the young. The jail was improved, but it was improved for criminals. The old bridewells and houses of correction did perhaps little for the reformation of their inmates, but they were considered as distinct from the felon's jail,—as places rather for the disorderly and the mendicant than for thorough criminals,—and committal thither did not involve the same infamy as imprisonment within the walls which, now under improved and uniform management, inclose all classes of the committed. The reformatory system had a small and peculiar beginning. The earliest noticed symptoms of its commencement were a humble school in London, and a rather larger one in Aberdeen, where the destitute children of the streets were induced to take education by at the same time receiving food. The example spread and became fashionable, ragged schools, as they were at first termed, quickly following each other. It became soon a serious consideration what was to become of their inmates at the termination of their attendance, when they might go forth with perhaps a smattering of education, and good moral and religious principles, but destitute of the means of self-support. The English poor-law commissioners had observed that when an untrained pauper boy was, according to the old practice, apprenticed off with a fee to a common weaver or other unskilled workman, he usually came back on the parish as a pauper adult; and they promulgated, and to some extent practised, the principle, that a training in skilled labour is necessary to keep a destitute boy from pauperism. This principle was rigidly acted on in the united industrial school of Edinburgh, where it was held better that a small number should be returned productive members to society, than a larger number merely supported and occupied in unskilled pursuits; and the example has been extensively followed elsewhere.

The industrial schools saved from their fate the children who were likely to reach the prison through the commission of crime; the next step was to make them supersede the prison by receiving juvenile criminals. To accomplish this end, it was necessary to make them places of coercion, where