A VERY SAD SUBJECT—CRIME.

T has been said that the English mind is always occupied by two things, politics and religion ; and at present the saddest kind of politics, those which relate to crime and religion are the most prominent questions, with this difference-that Colenso's attack on the foundations of our faith is sure to be forgotten and fade out, whereas this question of Crime will live perpetually, and our great-grandchildren will, in horsehair wigs, be judging and condemning rogues as yet unborn. Those gentlemen who believe in the perfection of humanity will shake their heads at this, and lament, with the immortal Jean Jaques, that we cannot all at once grow wings and bud into angels, but we cannot.

The peculiar phase of violent crime which is called "garrotting" is of course ephemeral. The rogues who took that fashion up-for crime has its fashions-adopted it because it was at once (to them) safe, expeditious, and easy. As soon as adequate preventives are adopted, the garrotter will resume his accustomed burglary, or take to another "line of business;" but the criminals will always exist. There is a regular

supply of them perpetually forthcoming: there are for ever fresh and new crops of those who say with the unjust steward, "I cannot (or will not) dig; to beg I am ashamed,” but who are not ashamed to take up with the lowest, worst, most dangerous, and most stupid way of gaining a livelihood. The pains and toil, the watching and the danger, which a thief undergoes to fill his pockets and his stomach, are, on the average, always more than those undergone by an honest man. It results, therefore, that the criminal is to be regarded as a fool-not necessarily a man without intellect or talent, but a fool-a man of perverse judgment, who sees and knows what is right, but believes in that which is wrong. Unfortunately, certain authors, and some of the lower class of tale-writers, have been troubled by a perverted vision, and have endeavoured in their works to exalt the thief or highwayman into a hero; whereas all good men should, at the time that they express a detestation of any crime, express also the contempt they have for the doer of it. No one knows better than the criminal what a fool he has been ; but both he and the good man are taught that, by a general law of nature, after a man has entered upon a course of life, it is hard, almost impossible, to go back. Fool as he has been, he may have a sensitive nature, a temper which will not bear rebuke, a sullen, sulky heart; and so he goes on from bad to worse, a curse to society and a curse to himself. If little boys who thieve, or take to bad ways, could be shown by some potent method the folly of crime, it would do much to reform them. The criminal population, without exception,

own their lives a gross mistake. The long struggle of a thief against the organized ranks of law and order always ends in the defeat of the former. It is true we have a few exceptions to this general rule in the hidden perpetrators of undiscovered crimes, but we do not know how many professional criminals may have been the culprits, who, having perpetrated, also suffered for others, and died without owning their extra guilt. Crime is folly, nothing but dangerous and gross folly: a criminal is a thousandfold worse than a lunatic.

In our treatment of convicted criminals two ends must be kept in view-first, the punishment of the crime; and, secondly, the reformation of the criminal. All punishment should have these ends. To look at it as mere vengeance because of wrong doing, to become cruel and revengeful, to go back to our old whippings, scourgings, brandings, burnings, and stocks, would be worse than a mistake—it would be a crime. Certain public writers, full of a foolish zeal, and carried beyond themselves by exaggerated reports of garrottings, have advised the public to do this; and even the judges on the bench have been moved out of their customary dignity into a spasmodic energy. This was surely unwise. Severity has been tried, and has failed. Crime may be now prominent, and is indeed very much so; but the vast increase of the population being taken into consideration, it has not increased. Statistics prove to us more certainly than our fears that the crop is kept fairly down to dream of utterly uprooting it is Utopian. We never can do that; but we may meet it, mitigate, and decrease it. It is the most

expensive matter in the world, just as Rousseau said it was the most "puzzling." We have to keep an army of judges, magistrates, lawyers, and policemen. We have to build prisons, gaols, reformatories; we have to set up tribunals and juries. We take away the prosecutor and witnesses from their business; we put the county or the country to a vast expense; and after the criminal is found guilty, we have a smaller army of gaolers and attendants to look after the man; we lodge him, feed him, and clothe him for nothing; and we employ him in tasks which are utterly unproductive, or in which, if productive, he manages to work so little, that, we are told on good authority, the result of the work of three convicts is not equal in amount and efficiency to that of one industrious, honest man.

This state of matters is sad enough, but to this we are reduced. When we teach convicts trades, we are met with the cries of honest workmen, who reasonably complain that the labour of the thief or the manslayer enters the market to compete with their own. Were we to condemn him to the mines, we should hear of experienced miners rebelling because he had become their competitor. Make him a mason, a quarryman, or even a scavenger, we should only displace the rightful and honest workmen in those branches of industry. In short, all the world is puzzled what to do with him; and a Scotch philosopher (?) has not hesitated to recommend a wholesale hanging for all the bad men, beginning at the worst, and then working up in the scale of guilt till society exterminates the "devil's regiment of the line." This, if a jest, is but a grim

one; if it be earnest, it is not only unphilosophical, but silly and cruel. Directly one hanging was done another would commence; and as crime is of perpetual growth, the gallows would have perpetual employment.

The system of mitigated punishments commonly called. the ticket-of-leave system is much decried. There is, as with every other public question, much to be said, both for and against it. If a convict be truly penitent, and determines to lead a new life, it is not only expensive, but it is unwise, to keep him in prison. Directly a man is convinced of his folly, and reformed, the end of punishment has been achieved. It is certainly a fact, that the convicts, knowing that Government has wisely determined this, assume a repentance, and accept a reward which they do not deserve. They receive their ticket, and again lapse into crime. It is but fair, however, to say that such a case forms the exception, not the rule. The majority of ticket-men earn their own living under immense difficulties, and may be regarded as Others turn again at once to crime, or resort to it after a short and feeble attempt to do better; but these exceptions should not be quoted as the rule. There is, however, a very grave question as to letting out convicts upon a thickly populated town: when loose, they are able to hide themselves, are afforded facilities of depredation, and are drawn again into the old vortex of their crime.

successes.

As the ends of punishment are, as we have said, two, so society resorts also to two methods to prevent crime: “first,” says Basil Montagu, "by exciting such a sentiment of horror

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