testimony. successful as a vagrant or thief; and who is tried, condemned, and transported, if he is detected or betrayed in the attempt? They "are treated as responsible who are not free agents. Calamity is condemned for guilt. It is still more unrighteous, it visits the grievance on a mental state as crime. Any direction of law is absurd that cannot be pursued. When could you stop? You punish the uneducated mind. What other mental habits and conditions will you punish? Be just,' is the rule of our Constitu- Injustice. tion."* A large portion of our offenders "are hereditary criminals; and the observations as to the culpable negligence of the State, apply equally to the fathers as to their children. They, too, were untaught when young; in their ignorance it may be, they offended; and then, perhaps, in a felon's gaol they were schooled in crime, and forced into the companionship of thieves."+ We know not a better official way of establishing the charge of cruelty, than by giving the opinions of persons who will be regarded as authorities on this matter. It is cruel and unjust according to the sentiment of the multitude. But if it be pronounced such, ex cathedra, surely there is an end of all controversy. "In my opinion," says one of large experience, "it is inexpedient and most cruel to treat children under a certain age as subject to the criminal law. Discipline, and not judicial punishment, appears to me proper to be applied in such cases. No one thinks of sending school-boys, for their not unfrequent petty larcenies, to the bar of criminal justice; and I think it imperative that the existing criminal law should cease to be applied to such young offenders for larceny. I am deeply impressed with the conviction that some amendment in the law and change in its execution, are essential." "They are the objects," says another, "of our deep commiseration. They are without education * Dr. Hamilton on Popular Education. + Rev. J. Field, of Reading Gaol. M. D. Hill, Esq. Official testimony 66 or instruction of any kind; they are ignorant of all good; continued. they are criminal, in many cases, from dire necessity, and more sinned against than sinning." They are not, therefore, to be visited with the same kind of punishment we inflict upon adult criminals. Nay, I hold it to be an acknowledged principle, that we should not treat as criminals those children who had no sense of right or wrong; and I very much doubt if we have any just right to punish children for breaking laws with which we have never made them acquainted, or for violating duties which we have never taught them to respect."* "It is to be borne con stantly in mind," says a justice of the peace, "that it is in a great degree from ignorance and the immatured state of their reasoning powers, that children offend, . . . and they are entitled to be treated with great indulgence, until they are able in some degree to understand the grounds on which the rules of right and wrong are founded; and a gaol, however well conducted, is, I fear, a bad school for them ; and it fixes too dark a stain on their characters."† Another, "who being dead yet speaketh," with strong emotions, said, "I know that the children are not moral agents; that they know no difference between right and wrong; that all that is good in them has never been developed, or has been systematically destroyed; and no effectual means exist, without our aid, of rescuing these children from worse than death." "I cannot help feeling," is the impassioned language of one who felt the solemnity of his position, "that our conduct towards them is most unjustifiable, and I trust that God will not visit us with his anger for the treatment of these poor, ignorant, sinning, yet unconsciously guilty creatures. We have given them justice-justice without mercy, justice without scales, for there has been no measurement of the cruelty * W. Locke. Mr. Rushton. + Justice Coltman. of our treatment of them."* The painful circumstances in which many are placed, whose official duties render compulsory what is revolting alike to their conscience and their heart, are betrayed in the confessions made publicly, and without hesitation, by judges, magistrates, and chaplains. "I need not assure you," observed the chaplain of Liverpool Gaol, “that I never look on one of these poor little saplings without feelings of the deepest commiseration. These children are, or have been as dear to their parents, as mine are to me, and I feel that when they are taken into gaol, for the purpose of punishing their crimes and reforming them, you have no right, I have no right, the country has no right, to put these unfortunate little ones in such a position as must inevitably issue in their utter depravation."+ Nothing, therefore, can be made plainer, than that in juve- Inferences. nile imprisonment reason is outraged, justice is violated, and every feeling of humanity and the principles of our common Christianity are utterly disregarded. There is no vicious child, as experience daily proves, who is prematurely wicked, that might not, under a well directed and religiously conducted system, still grow up an honest and industrious citizen. He was not born a vagrant; he was not born a thief. Our neglect made him a delinquent; our pernicious interference hardened him for the gallows, the hulk, or Botany Bay. Let a more rational system, conducted according to the judgment of men who have drunk deeply into the spirit of Christianity, be sanctioned by the Necessity for legislature, and it is yet possible to restore many a de- a change. formed soul into its natural and beautiful proportions. The prison is useless: let us pay for our folly no longer. The prison is expensive, and extravagantly so let us squander our resources no longer. The prison is cruel: let * Rev. W. C. Osborn, of Bath gaol. + Rev. Thomas Carter. the reproach of barbarism be wiped off, and our motto be, "Mercy rejoiceth against judgment." Like the hapless woman of old, the child stands before us, surrounded by the multitude of those who have dragged him before the tribunal. We naturally ask, as his traducers, "being convicted by their own conscience, have gone out one by one, beginning at the eldest, EVEN UNTO THE LAST," My boy, my unhappy child, "where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee ?” "No man, Lord," has been heard in every line we have been writing. Now let the Christian community eagerly catch the words as they fall from our Master's lips, and reiterate them long and loud, "NEITHER DO I CONDEMN THEE: GO, AND SIN NO MORE."* "Dare we condemn the hearts we leave To grope their way in abject gloom, "Shall we send forth the poor and stark And yet expect their spirit-bark "To work! to work! with hope and joy ELIZA COOK. *John viii. 3-11. CHAPTER VI. REFORMATORY INSTITUTIONS. "Many a schoolmaster better answereth the name paidotribes than paidagogos, rather tearing his scholars' flesh with whipping than giving them good education. No wonder, if his scholars hate the muses, being presented unto them in the shape of fiends and furies. Is there no way to bring home a wandering sheep but by worrying him to death?” DR. THOMAS FULLER. observations. § 1. It is a maxim in war to act on the offensive whenever Introductory practicable. To carry the war into the enemy's territories has advantages too obvious to need specification. In penand-ink warfare, the principle is as generally known as it is systematically observed. It is thus that while the giant alone constructs the theory, pigmies may attack and even overthrow. To find fault, is easy; to criticize, gratifying to the vanity. Hence, no scheme is without objections; and no system that has its promoters can long exist without having, also, its opponents. While, therefore, to expect no opposition to the principles of an institution, will assuredly result in mortification; the fact that objection exists must not be confounded with the assumption that, therefore, the thing objected to is worthless. It behoves, then, that we not only show that faults, numerous, diversified, and of a very serious nature, exist in connection with juvenile imprisonment, but, moreover, that P |