world I intend at present to be Mr. Grant. The fulfilment of the bequests of my will may hereafter necessitate the revelation of who I really am; but I trust that may not occur during my lifetime. And, even in the alternative event, I doubt not the revelation could be so managed as not to incommode anyone."

"Well, Mr. Grantley," said the lawyer, taking up a pen and turning it between his fingers, "your attitude iş unexpected and, so far as my information would lead me to judge, unaccountable. But that is none of my affair. I need only put it to you whether you feel so secure in that attitude as to warrant a belief that the directions of your will have a reasonable chance of getting themselves fulfilledwhether you feel confident that third parties may not interfere to thwart your intentions ?"

"On that point I have no misgivings whatever," replied Mr. Grantley, with a slight smile. "My only apprehension would respect the principal legatee."

"I will not attempt to understand you," said Fillmore, smiling also. "If you please, we will proceed to the particulars."

Hereupon the two entered upon a prolonged discussion, into which we shall not be obliged to follow them; since what is of import in it will appear in its proper place. At a few minutes after four o'clock the colloquy ended, and Mr. Grant, after shaking hands very cordially with the lawyer, bade him farewell and went downstairs.

(To be continued.)

I

PRISON GOVERNMENT.

PRESUME that it will not be till the end of time that the great question of Prison Government-of what to do with our criminals will be finally disposed of. Royal Commissions do not settle it. Model prisons have not effected any good, and Carlyle's severe scorn of them in his Essay of 1850 might have been written in this year of grace, so apposite is it to time and circumstance. That wonderful essay has no old-fashioned ring in it whatever; and his prophecy of some thirty years back, that no good could come of our system of prison government either to the criminal or to the world which studied him so much, is surely verified in almost every particular. We have improved the condition. of the convict; we have studied him, his health, and his comforts; we have attempted, by feeble preaching and possibly still feebler experiments, his moral improvement, but he flourishes amongst us vigorously, and seems to increase and multiply by the grim law governing human fallacies.

That this is the fault of the authorities is not very easily proved but that they go the right way to work is scarcely evident even in this present year of grace, with such a background of lurid experience to work upon, and with such danger-signals-red as blood— gleaming from the shadow-land, wherein our "dangerous classes" lurk. Thomas Carlyle had but little sympathy with the prisoner-but little faith in anything tending towards his better life. It is almost evident I say not completely so, and I hope not completely so-that he had a supreme scorn for the well-meant efforts of philanthropists to bring about a higher moral condition of the convict's mind. He had little, even no faith in "the whitewashing of scoundrels," he was for "justice" short and sharp with them; the expression of sympathy in their case was "mournful twaddle;" institutions in connection with their regeneration were "universal sluggard and scoundrel protection societies;" the man who did not believe in hanging them was "Mr. Hesperus Fiddlestring," and John Howard was, to the mind of the Chelsea seer, only "Solid Howard," a dull and dreary man, chewing the cud of his placid reflections!"

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Still, there is no question that Carlyle's visit to one of our chief London prisons impressed and startled him-set the busy brain. pondering on the great problem-was for a long while a picture ever present to his mind. He could not see how all this order and rule, this care of the prisoner, could exercise any moral good and he did not believe the prisoner was worth caring for in any such way. And he was surely right, speaking for the good "old crusted" iron-clad ruffian, whose simple profession is burglary with violence, or murder with promptitude and despatch. Thomas Carlyle in his prison journey doubtless saw many of this class of low-browed, sinister, dangerous animals, men whose faces have so dark a story to tell; and his sturdy common sense assured him that the extracting of any light, or hope, or faith from such as they was for a more fanciful world than ours, where all strange theories may possibly live and flourish by the rules of contrariety.

Sydney Smith, in an article contributed to the Edinburgh Review in 1821, had also his fling at the prisons of his day, and his remarks are still à propos of the present time and rules.

"It is impossible," he says, "to avoid making a prison in some respects more eligible than the home of a culprit. It is almost always more spacious, cleaner, better ventilated, better warmed. All these advantages are inevitable on the side of the prison. The means therefore that remain of making a prison a disagreeable place are not to be neglected; and if neglected, the manner of sentencing a man to prison would be this-and it had better be put in these words ::

"Prisoner at the bar, you are fairly convicted by a jury of your country of having feloniously stolen two pigs, the property of Stephen Muck, farmer. The Court having taken into consideration the frequency and enormity of this offence, and the necessity of restraining it with the utmost severity of punishment, do order and adjudge that you be confined in a house larger, better, better aired, and warmer than your own, in company with twenty or thirty young persons in as good health and spirits as yourself. In passing this sentence, the Court hope that your example will be a warning to others; and that evil-disposed persons will perceive, from your suffering, that the laws of this country are not to be broken with impunity.""

But still the great, grave question that the world cannot answer yet-the riddle that no philosopher, or humanitarian, or man of science, or man of the world has hitherto solved--that no satirist VOL. CCLII. NO. 1818.

UU

has laughed aside out of his way-lies before us, with its terrible significance year by year more marked, and with its awful truths day by day becoming more prominent and soul-depressing: "WHAT TO DO WITH THESE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT?" Thomas Carlyle, it is said, was not so ready with his suggestions as to the right method of action, or the right remedy for an abuse, as with his fierce declamation against wrong or human stupidity or error, and this has become somewhat too much of a "cuckoo cry." The Chelsea seer generally points out-if at times in an indirect fashion-what to do, and in his article on Model Prisons he states this very plainly of the scoundrel.

"The one method clearly is that, after fair trial, you dissolve partnership with him, send him in the name of Heaven whither he is striving all this while, and have done with him."

Certainly, it is not quite possible "to have done with him;" he is not to be done away with very easily. We cannot always hang him; and there must be some poor wretches to watch him, and have the shadow of his lost life cast eternally upon theirs. Carlyle would have had him set aside as much as possible-taken out of the model prison and the hands of the sham Samaritans and universal tract-distributors-taken away as completely from the world as it should be possible to do without taking the life from him. But he adds, remember, one fair trial first—always one fair trial even to the man tried and condemned already by a judge and jury, and shut away from honest folk. One fair trial to make something of him even yet!

And this brings us to the question, what fair trial shall it be within this prison-world of his ?—and in case of failure, what shall we do with him who has failed?—the outcast who will have no good done to him, but will go on in the devil's name, and as fast as he can to the devil?

After no little study of the subject, it has often been a matter of some wonderment to me why there were not more divisions and subdivisions of this complex prison-world, and for what particular reason-except the saving of a few thousands of pounds-is it that each of our prisons should be on so colossal a scale, and the prisoners heaped in such solid masses, and on some general system, which as regards this poor wretched humanity, I might say, is invariably a failure.

I do not believe in this lumping together of the "devil's regiments of the line," and no moral drilling will work effectually in that way. Surely, if it were possible to classify our prisoners a little

more-I do not mean after the old No. 1, No. 2 Badge system, as I believe it is called-some little good might be effected here and there, although one cannot be particularly sanguine of any astonishing results. I think our prisoners might be sorted and sifted into various degrees of criminality, and I do not see any great reason against, and certainly no "just cause or impediment" to, this separating of our convicts into classes.

Government has now its penal wards for the worst class, and its labour cells, or association cells, for the best; but it puts good and bad, weak and strong, together, and as much evil is learned in the prison as has been acquired outside of it. Why should there not be a special gaol for the young, as well as a reformatory for juvenile offenders? It would be here that the good seed might be sown and bear fruit, if the prison system were individualised, and there were a few true and earnest students of human nature in the wards.

In the last report for 1880, issued by the Prison Commissioners, it is stated that 58.9 per cent. of the whole male prison population were between sixteen and thirty years of age, whilst the whole male population of our country between sixteen and thirty years of age is only 41.4 per cent.; demonstrating very clearly "that men take to crime in the earlier rather than in the more mature periods of life, and that means for its effective repression are to be sought much more among the agencies for securing a good training of the neglected part of our population in their early years than in any form of punishment which can be devised."

The board schools are doubtless doing good and valuable work amongst the neglected portions of our people. But the teaching of these children comes not within the scope of the present paper. Let us imagine that the school-days are over-or have never been begun -and the prison gates are opening wide to receive for the first time the juvenile criminal-the poor, shivering, pallid, horror-stricken lad, who has filched his neighbour's goods.

There should be no common gaol for him who sees a prison for the first time; there should, I think, be one strong and mighty effort made, in a specially constructed gaol, to reclaim this new offender against society, to see if it be really impossible or not to snatch him from the gulf, to teach him the gospel of work as well as the Gospel of Christ, to subject him, if you will, to severe discipline-to prison discipline, hard labour and coarse fare-the wages of his sin; but to let him see, for the first time possibly, that honesty is a good policy, and at least point out to him some little footpath across the rugged