hills, from the summit of which he may see a glimmer of the dawn flecking with bars of light that darkness which he has called his world. Give him his one chance, and with his first offence let him in solitude-never in association or with a gang-be taught honest work, shown the bright example of honest lives, and at least for once be wound up and set going.

I fear the failures will be many and the successes few, but success there will be, and perhaps a fairer measure of it than this sceptical world is inclined to believe at present. There are even now many pleasant and touching stories of salvation in the records of "The Prisoner's Aid Society," and yet there has been the most unmalleable material to work upon. "All the harm I knew I learned at prison," is often said by the discharged convict; and at least here is one reform that should be attempted to be carried out-and which is not -that the prisoner, young or old, should not, under any circumstances, have the opportunity to learn an extra lesson from the books of the foul fiend. In large establishments the prisoners must meet, talk, conspire, lay plans for the future when they shall be "out of quod," and here the young prisoner is corrupted by the old gaol-bird whom nothing will ever save, and he goes away to a new estate ten times worse than the first.

I would have small prisons, then, unassociative prisons if possible, for all classes of male convicts, and I would divide and subdivide my black sheep according to the nature of the crimes for which they were working off their years of penal servitude. There should be also, as I have said, separate prisons for the young, and there is little doubt we are approaching the period when that experiment will be essayed on some broad and fair scale, and as a supplement to our numerous reformatories. And at the other end of the beam there should be the prison for the habitual offender, the man who has had his fair chance -his hundred chances perhaps-the hardened reprobate, the manmonster of whom no good, it is said, can possibly come, and whom we label irreclaimable, and, as Carlyle says, "dissolve partnership with." We will not trouble the philanthropist with him, or allow that gentleman to trouble us too much, knowing that here is barren rock, and that all the preaching in the world is not likely to produce one green blade of penitence upon it. This should be the last stage of convict life, to which the old offender-the prison-savageshould even look with horror; here should be stern laws rigorously enacted, the hardest work, the severest discipline, and the keenest watch upon these wolves. It should be a dark, silent, mournful prison-house, set away as far as possible from the active stream of

human life, another Broadmoor without any of the advantages attached to that prison for criminal lunatics-the last stage to which, very regretfully but firmly, we would consign all dark, profitless, purposeless lives. Carlyle shadows forth this in his Latter-day Pamphlets, surely: "Mark it, my diabolic friends," he says; "I mean to lay leather on the backs of you, collars round the necks of you, and will teach you after the example of the gods that this world is not your inheritance, or glad to see you in it. What has a Governor much to do with you? You, I consider, he will sweep pretty rapidly into some Norfolk Island, into some special convict colony or remote domestic Moorland, into some stone-walled Silent System, under hard drill sergeants, just as Rhadamanthus, and inflexible as he, and there leave you to reap what you have sown." And between the two extremes-the Alpha and Omega of shadow-land-why not a score or more prisons conducted (with all male prisoners) on the silent system, so far as conversation with a fellow-convict is concerned? Why not attempt to classify our various specimens, and, after a period of probation, get the half-good, the weak and wavering, into their various compartments, and the three-quarters bad, the violent, the dangerous, the irreclaimable, into theirs? and having subdivided them into their various little prisons-explosive moral forces always to be partitioned off, as in powder-mills and firework factories they separate their dangerous materials and minimise the risk-and set them to work-always plenty of work--the question arises what kind of labour shall it be? What is best for themselves, for the public weal, the public purse, and, above all, what is fair play to the poor trader struggling in the free world outside to live, and who may be in danger-has been often in danger-of the competition of prison-labour with his own?

It would be better to have extra taxation and the old windgrinding treadmill system than any efforts to make prisons pay. Working expenses should not be the one thought of prison directors and authorities in general; the balance-sheet will always be against the State; but let it weigh down twice as heavily, rather than the industrious poor should find in the criminal a dangerous rival to their simple handiwork. In a special visit paid to the great general prison at Perth some years ago, the writer found a large quantity of convicts employed upon mat-making, a large warehouse stocked from floor to ceiling with mats excellently made by the best tools and with the best materials, and these mats were disposed of to wholesale houses at a price with which it was impossible for any tradesman to compete. And the fair, honest mat-makers I came

across afterwards-and they were a numerous class once in Scotland— were wretched starvelings, desperately fighting for existence in loathsome garrets in the fever-haunted closes of the Glasgow Salt Market, and were working hard at their trade at two in the morning in order to make a day's work pay.

It is no light task to settle this pressing labour question so that it shall not clash with the workers in the open; even the Portland quarry-work must take a percentage off the wages of an honest quarryman. The tread-mill was particularly objected to in the old prison days; there was so much hard work about it, and it was so singularly like real work to the professional convict that his very soul abhorred it. There were terrible outcries against it at last, and some sensation scenes based upon it in our novels, and eventually the treadmill was given up by the Government as a bad job, although I saw it in full work at Worcester Gaol a little while ago, a relic of the "good old times," and doing an extremely good business,-grinding corn when it could, and air when it could not. An ingenious idea has been lately mooted in the newspapers to go back again to this tread-wheel system and on a larger scale than ever, and constitute it a motive power for the supply of electric light throughout the prison. There is something weird and strange in this conceit too-the offsprings of darkness, the bastards of the ragged fringe, supplying by their labour the pure and dazzling light to the wards and cells wherein they live! But I am afraid that until "storage of electricity" is more of an accomplished fact, this project belongs to cloud-land. The prisoners would have to work all through the long winter nights, and, as the power would be in their hands and feet to summarily cut short the electric supply, it is more than possible that the temptation to "douse the glim" would at times be almost irresistible. It is evident that convict labour should not, if possible, be put into competition with the every-day work of the English mechanic, and that the hardest and most unthankful labour should be at least the lot of the professional malefactor. I would have criminals reclaim waste lands, build their own prisons from the stones which they had previously hewn from the rock, be sent abroad, even as in the old transportation days, to some desert lands or Cyprus-kind of islands, and made to fertilise them at any cost or labour for the benefit of those better men who should follow when the soil was ready and a harvest could smile its first welcome to them; and then, when the land was prepared for the colonist, I would away with my blackmuzzled band of workers again, on a clearing expedition—a fertilising expedition-a South-African-swamp-improvement-expedition even!

and keep them working-for ever working-in man's service. Gigantic harbour works might be constructed where there is no possibility of their being constructed now, and those lands reclaimed from the sea-shore which no private enterprise will attempt to reclaim, and for which no funds, private or public, are likely to be used. The convict world should be a busy world, but its long-sentenced denizens should not be taught tailoring or carpentry or mosaic work -the last "fad" of the superior persons in office at our female Government prisons—and always the worst and hardest work for the worst and hardest characters. A man under a light sentence should certainly be taught a trade, so that he should be able to go forth into the world again and earn an honest living. He would belong to the men with a chance held out to them yet; and if work could be found for him when he stepped from his cell to the free world, all the better. It is the first look round at the crowd of unsympathetic and suspicious faces which is so disheartening to the ticket-of-leave man. Mary Carpenter relates an anecdote of an old offender who said. once to the chaplain of Bath Gaol, "I have been told a thousand times to go and get work, but it was never said to me during twenty years, while in or out of prison, 'I will give you work.'"

Concerning female prisons and female prison labour, I need not speak at any great length. That is another problem, new and intricate and full of the mystery of life's temptations, and it is only to be remarked here that what I have said is not in the aggregate intended for those poor, weak, sinful mortals. For the female prisoners are certainly not as other prisoners are; they are very seldom wholly bad, and at most periods of their career, and with few exceptions, are emotional, impressionable, eccentric, and irreconcilable creaturesas I believe it may be said of the sex at times, even out of prison and in the most respectable society-but from whose variable moods some good may be evolved, and is very often evolved, and in whom-strange contrast to the male prisoners-some natural affections are to be developed, even from the shadows of the cell.

The silent system which I have advocated for the male prisonand the separation system-would not act well in a female convict establishment; and here is a greater study than the male prisoner, for those whose sad mission on earth it is to study it. Under the silent and the separation system a man is quiet and harmless, and may be led occasionally to penitence; under the same system, in a female convict establishment, the woman will scream and rave, smash the glass with her tin "pint," fly at the matron's throat or

the minister's white tie, and eventually be carried kicking and screaming to the penal wards for the mere love of a change, or reaction from the desperate dull quietude which is driving her mad. Association in one form or another she must and will have, or die; and if it were possible for the State to train a large body of Christian workers to keep these women company, in lieu of pairing them off, without the slightest discrimination as to character, with their sisterconvicts, much good-much reformation even-would surely be effected. So that a female prisoner is quiet, it is sufficient at present for the "system." Even a powerful preacher-a man of God with the gift to touch these wayward or stubborn hearts-is allowed no place in the female prison world; it is considered that his homilies would excite these female convicts too much, and render them beyond all control in their wild fits of remorse or defiance. Here again I think may be a mistake; for if these natures are thus impressionable, thus easily worked upon to tears and desperate regrets, some plan might be formed which would have better results than are to be found now under a régime of sleepy parsons and nervous Directors, who are fearful of anything that is new and strange, and not within the sphere of "regulations." My little theory of classifying convicts, of dividing and subdividing them in various small establishments, would, in a female prison, assuredly work well; give each matron-if there were enough matrons, which has not hitherto been the case-more opportunity of studying the individual characters beneath her rule, and acting for the best for them according to her judgment, and those powers of observation born. of living in their midst.

One last suggestion which I will venture to make is, that a band of earnest, thoughtful PRISON INSPECTORS would supply a great need in the service; a band of well-paid men and women from all ranks, with absolute power to enter all prisons at all times, and see for themselves what is going on in prison service, and how that service works-whether the wheels grind slowly or quickly of the complex machinery which we call prison government-and with the power to suggest and carry out improvements in the rules, when by committee, or what not, it is effectually proved that such rules, as they are, tend not to any good or useful end. Attempts in this direction have not been made fairly and persistently—and prison government is still, and likely to be, a Board of Direction dozing and prosing in Parliament Street, S.W.-with each worthy Director "laocooned" by red tape and struggling in its midst to make things "neat and tidy" at the least possible expense to a paternal Govern