Mme. de Staël captured him. I have met,' he then wrote to her, 'the second woman who has been capable of being all the world to me. You know who was the first.'

That, however, is another story, and a long one, not to be related now. The purpose of this paper has merely been to solve a mystery, and give Mme. de Charrière her right place in the variegated chronicle of Boswell's multitudinous amours.

FRANCIS GRIBBLE.

THE NEGLECTED CHILD IN NEW SOUTH WALES

A RECENT speaker has pointed out that the neglected child takes. a terrible revenge upon society when he grows into an habitual criminal.' No doubt the great wave of social reform in the treatment of the waifs and strays of the community which has characterised the last half-century, not alone in England but practically in every civilised country in the world, may in some measure have been due to a genuine altruistic feeling; but it seems to me that the recognition of the truth of the above statement was in no small degree one of the primary causes of the impulse to social reform. Up to the middle of last century society concerned itself with the developed criminal alone, without troubling itself to consider the question why he became a criminal. The judiciary apparently considered that its duty was done when the crime was sheeted home to the individual, and that the only thing that remained for society to do was to get the criminal out of sight either by incarceration in a prison for punishment at home, or by transportation to one of the penal settlements; and it will scarcely be believed that many hundreds of children of exactly the type now brought before our Children's Courts, and from thence sent to Industrial Schools, fined trivial amounts, or dismissed on probation to their parents after being simply reprimanded, were at that time condemned to penal servitude, and often to transportation to the convict settlements, many for long periods, and some for life.

A short time ago, while looking over some of the public records in the Mitchell Library of New South Wales, I found a book containing a report sent to the Admiralty by Dr. Andrew Henderson, R.N., which throws a very lurid light on the manner in which juvenile offenders were treated so lately as the middle of the nineteenth century. Dr. Henderson says that on the 19th of September 1840 he sailed from Sheerness for Hobart Town in the ship Hindostan, having under his care two hundred convict boys of ages varying from eleven to sixteen years, and no doubt his voyage occupied the usual 130 to 150 days; he had therefore ample time to observe the characters of those under his charge, and

this is how he sums them up: Ten were of 'most exemplary character,' thirty-three were exemplary,' nine were very wellbehaved,' six were 'in general well-behaved,' eight were of indifferent character,' while one was of 'very indifferent character.' As to the remaining hundred and thirty-three he makes no remark, probably parental neglect and evil environment had placed them in the category of very bad boys indeed.

Now as to the ages of these terrible criminals. Five were but eleven years, ten were twelve years, ten were thirteen years, fifty were fourteen years, fifty-five were fifteen years, and the remaining seventy were but sixteen years old. These unfortunate children were therefore of exactly the same ages and type as those now dealt with in our Children's Courts. Surely society must have breathed more freely when it realised that it had got rid of such a crowd of desperadoes!

As casting additional light upon the treatment of juvenile offenders in those not very distant times, I may cite another document, a despatch sent in 1840 by Sir John Franklin (then Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land) to Lord Glenelg, in which he reports upon the juvenile prison establishment at Point Puer; he states that there were there confined 494 prisoners, of whom 388 were between ten and eighteen years, and that of these no fewer than 400 were serving sentences of seven years, sixty-two of ten years, eighteen of fifteen years, and nine were imprisoned for life. He further states that 294 of these boys had received corporal punishment, the total number of stripes being 5741, and 677 cases had been subjected to solitary confinement. He adds that other boys of eighteen and nineteen years had been sent to Point Puer, but that they were too old to commence learning trades, or to be subject to the milder discipline of that establishment.

The transition from these brutal methods in England has been very gradual, and perhaps not less so in Australia. There the law-makers were apparently unable to realise that reformation and not punishment was the object to be desired, and therefore the legal enactments in relation to children, almost without exception, dealt with the fact of having done wrong rather than with a growing tendency to do wrong. In New South Wales, about the middle of last century, several so-called orphan schools had been established by the Government, which really were for the accommodation not only of orphans, but of neglected as well as vagrant and delinquent children; but apparently these institutions were entirely inadequate, for about the year 1855-56 public attention was drawn to the large number of deserted and destitute children for whom some effort should be made, who, as police office records and police reports show, are present in large

numbers.' This state of affairs was no doubt a sort of aftermath of the great stampede for gold which had taken place a year or two before, when large numbers of men abandoned their settled. occupations and rushed off to the goldfields; and no doubt there were many cases of both wife- and child-desertion as the direct outcome of these unsettling influences. The result of the agitation which followed was the establishment of a society for the Relief of Destitute Children. A large area of the public lands was granted to the society, and a barrack capable of accommodating no fewer than 900 children was built; in 1857 an Act for its incorporation was passed, under which power was taken to place children under its board of management, and a grant of a certain sum of money was made to aid the society in their maintenance, in the same way that such institutions receive aid in England at the present time.

During the next few years there does not appear to have been any movement towards social reform, or any attempt to deal systematically with the problem of children's vagrancy or delinquency; orphans or vagrants when brought before the courts. were usually sent to barrack institutions, while children found guilty of serious offences were often sent to the ordinary prison. The exact extent to which juvenile delinquency existed, however, cannot be definitely stated, and it is probable that, because of the reluctance of the authorities to hale little children before the ordinary police courts, and so expose them to the degrading atmosphere of such places, the administration preferred to ignore the delinquencies altogether. Thus the absence of proper legislative machinery led to the necessary reformative work being ignored at the very time when if undertaken the greatest chance of success would have been offered.

In 1866, however, the late Sir Henry Parkes, no doubt moved by the legislative activity in regard to children which took place in England at that time, introduced several Social Reform Acts-viz. the Industrial Schools Act, the Reformatory Schools Act, and the Workhouse Act (the latter happily was never brought into force, and it has long since been repealed), and establishments of both kinds were opened which to a certain extent had the attributes of ordinary prisons (as is the case with such institutions everywhere), and although there is a difference expressed in the Acts as to the nature of the cases treated by each, the distinction between them has generally been. a fictitious one. Theoretically, only positively criminal children could legally be admitted to a reformatory upon conviction; while destitute, vagrant, and neglected children, merely because of such conditions were supposed to be sent to Industrial Schools; but in practice the distinction has been by no means invariably

preserved. Actual malefactors were frequently sent alike to an Industrial School or a reformatory, and vagrancy when it showed criminal tendencies was also generally treated in a reformatory.

The barrack system continued to be the only method for the treatment of delinquent as well as orphan, neglected, and vagrant children until 1881, when, again, Sir Henry Parkes took the matter in hand, and passed a Bill through the Legislature authorising a new system, which was destined in a short time almost entirely to supersede the treatment of children of these classes in large institutions. The Act, while still retaining the reformatories for what were deemed really criminal children, placed the matter of dealing with all other classes in the hands of an honorary board called the State Children Relief Board, who administered the law on behalf of the Government. The board was authorised, with the consent of the Minister, to withdraw children from any charitable institution wholly or partly supported by grants from the Consolidated Revenue Fund, for the purpose of placing them in private homes as boarders or apprentices, or when so directed by the Minister to remove any child from a Reformatory School and cause him to be boarded-out in the house of a person licensed under the Act for any period not extending beyond the term of detention of such child.'

During several years following the children were gradually withdrawn from all barrack institutions wholly or in part maintained by the State, and in 1887 they were entirely emptied. And it is worthy of note that the remarkable diminution in the number of criminals in our gaols, to which I shall presently refer, began about that period, and has continued until the present time. I am not disposed to give too great weight to this circumstance, for many other causes have contributed, and in fact may have had a much greater influence in that direction; but experience has shown not only in Australia, but all over the world, that where large numbers of young people are herded together in barracks it is practically impossible to classify them effectually; and seeing that it is usually the worst and most unruly character that exercises the most influence, the effect produced by a few vicious ones is always bad.

No further legislation in regard to neglected children was undertaken until the year 1905, when the State Parliament of New South Wales passed the Neglected Children and Juvenile Offenders Act, which provided for the establishment of separate courts for the trial of offences committed by or upon children, and under which power was taken to remove children from evil environment, and so give them a reasonable chance of evading such disabilities as are the result of a degenerate parentage. The power to take such action had already been in principle