the empire, and especially in England, there is nothing of education but the name. Teachers and scholars are much in the same condition. One master being asked by the Commissioners if he taught morals, observed, "That question does not belong to my school; it belongs more to girls' schools." Another, an Irishman, being asked if he taught grammar, very candidly answered, "Faith, and it is I that don't; if I did, I must tache that thing I don't know myself." Another had conscientious scruples about counting her scholars-" It would be a flat flying in the face of Providence; no, no, you sha'nt catch me counting. See what a pretty mess David made of it when he counted the children of Israel !"

A duty incumbent on the State has been left to the irregular and convulsive efforts of private benevolence. These, as might be expected, have failed to meet the requirements of so gigantic an enterprise; and until some national scheme has been devised, which shall reconcile all our scruples, or crush them down upon the plea of an inevitable necessity, it will be worse than idle to flagellate the victims of our neglect. If there were no other motive than that which appeals to our pocket,-the lowest but not the least powerful that can influence mankind,—it is all sufficing to encourage an effort in this direction. What we now pay as Prison and as Poor-rates, exceeds the entire revenue of the nation at no distant date. Let these be increased for a little, with a view of their being ultimately reduced to a point that we can contemplate them without alarm. Our benevolence alone would not be gratified by an educational crusade. Our safety and our interests depend upon it. "Of all the men we meet," said Locke, "nine parts in ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education." Keep this in remembrance, along with the undoubted truth, that men are never in a state of independence of each other. This mutual interest—this dependence of man upon man-of all parts of society upon each other-is the chain which cements it into that compact and living mass, to whose combined action alone we are indebted for the blessings of civilisation.

The knowledge, however, which must be imparted, is a knowledge that must teach not only the relations to man, but the relations to God. Though it is power, it is nowhere identified with virtue. The supremacy of conscience must be asserted at the same time that we teach geography and arithmetic. Religious training and moral culture must go hand in hand with the most scientific training in secular knowledge. The Ragged Schools can serve little purpose if the children return to homes where all the lessons they receive will be effaced by parental ribaldry. Conscious of this, the minister is established in

Houses of Refuge after Punishment.

35

many cities to bring the parents within the range of the same instruction with their children-a scheme which occupied many of the thoughts of Dr. Chalmers in his later years, and which he so well developed in the West-Port of Edinburgh.

4. It has been urged with great energy by a number of philanthropic men, that all imprisonment will be unavailing, if, when it is ended, the delinquent be sent back among the guilty companions of his early years. He must starve or rob; he cannot emerge from a long confinement without wasted strength and a ruined character. Necessity urges him, therefore, to take refuge amongst the hordes of thieves who receive his return with open arms,-give him a joyful welcome,-laugh away his scruples, and hurry him again into the same vortex of infamy.

There is no doubt a literal and gloomy truth in these statements, which do not exaggerate the unhappy condition of the liberated convict. But the remedy adopted is worse than the disease. In various cities houses of refuge have been established for their reception, which confer greater comforts, and bestow more advantages even than our prisons. They will consequently be objects of interest to the poor man; and here again he will be tempted to teach his son the violation of the moral law, as the best means of commending him to the charity of mankind. It was this that startled Lord Denman, and extorted from him the emphatic condemnation of the system we have cited. It was this that induced the Middlesex magistrates, at a meeting, reported in the Times of 12th September last, to refuse their concurrence to the erection of such an establishment. That their fears were not visionary, is amply established by a Police Report in the same paper in the following week, from which it appeared that a society existed for promoting the emigration of parties to New York, whose qualification for the free passage was their having been convicted felons. The complainants in the case were the wives of two men, who had been left destitute through their husbands having been shipped away by the Association. It was stated by Mr. Jackson of the City Mission, that he had for months been engaged in throwing all these noxious weeds upon the soil of our transatlantic neighbours; that he felt satisfied he had accomplished a great deal of good; and that the two men in question came peculiarly within the view of desirable emigrants for the Society, inasmuch as they assured him they had been thieves of seven, eight, or ten years' standing, and had been repeatedly convicted, and were not only known to be the companions of thieves and felons, but were also plainly conversant with their haunts and slang. It turned out that Mr. Jackson had been imposed upon, and that, so far from the satisfactory statements made to him having been correct, one of his

protégés had never committed any other offence than that of being out of work, while the whole extent of the other's crimes consisted in an infringement (he being a cab-driver) of the Hackney Carriage Act. It was mentioned to the magistrate, that the positive belief that the parties shipped had led the life of often-convicted criminals, was essential to their applications being entertained. In this case the parties told a lie to get the benefit. In other cases, this might not prove effectual, and candidates would require to qualify by the actual commission of a crime. These facts show the danger of such institutions, and lead us to another, about whose expediency experience and theory are not at issue.

5. This is emigration. The children of the Ragged and Industrial Schools cannot remain there for ever; criminals emancipated from prison must have some employment; and thus people have been driven to look beyond the crowded occupations of our little islands, to the uncultivated wastes in the colonial dependencies of the British Crown. An evil may be improved into a good. The swarms that are an evil here might supply in another hemisphere the labour necessary to evoke the latent energies of its virgin soil. Lord Ashley, the untiring advocate of every scheme of human amelioration, moved in vain in the House of Commons in June last, "That it is expedient that means be annually provided for the voluntary emigration to some of Her Majesty's colonies of a certain number of young persons, of both sexes, who have been educated in the schools ordinarily called Ragged Schools, in and about the metropolis." He proposed to carry 1000 each year, (above fourteen years of age,) 500 boys, and the same number of girls, to the colonies in South Australia, in which, at the present moment, the greatest demand for labour existed. Their removal was to be the reward only of good conduct, and after a certain amount of education had been received.

This is a scheme, without which all institutions like Ragged and Industrial Schools must fail, because their effect is only temporary, and they do not remove the object of their solici tude from the vice by which he is surrounded. Service is sometimes obtained for girls, and boys who have displayed activity in the Industrial Schools are taken as apprentices to trades. But the number thus provided for is small, and the greater part must return to their own shifts when they have grown too old for the school which has given them a temporary shelter. For their case emigration is the cure. That it would be advantageous to the colonies, we have evidence the most decisive.

"Mr. Cuninghame of Port Philip says, in his evidence before the Lords' Committee on Emigration, that the want of labour is by far

the greatest impediment to the colony, either social or pecuniary. It is almost impossible to be got at all. The wool is worse got up; and everything but wool-growing is at a perfect stand-still from want of labour. The colony will absorb many more than we could count upon for future years. We can employ any species of labour, because sheep is not an exhausting or fatiguing operation.' This would just be the labour for emancipated juvenile criminals, or those who emerge from the Ragged Schools. In the Times of 20th May 1848, a letter appeared with the following passage: 'You must strain every nerve to send us relief, for fully three-fourths of the 5000 emigrants now coming out will be instantly absorbed on landing, for domestic servants in Sydney, Melbourne,' &c. 'For every 1000 sheep three persons at least are required, with wages of £20 a-year, and weekly rations of 10lb. beef, 121b. of flour, 21b. sugar, quarter of a pound of tea, and a house. Thus, at a station of 5000 sheep, fifteen men and boys would be required. Taking the number of farms and stations at 4000, and the number of servants in the bush at 12,000, this would make at each station but three, not one-half of what is necessary. Three, then, to each station would take at once 12,000; if then 1000 were sent annually, it would be to each station only one every four years."

With reference to the females, there would be no difficulty at all. The demand for domestic servants is so great that often five or six gentlemen will be squabbling at the shore to secure

that land. The males in Port Philip are to the females in a frightfully large proportion; and it would certainly be a heaven upon earth to many of the distressed girls who are wearing their lives away in selling oranges, matches, and flowers at the corners of the streets, to end finally in making shirts at sixpence a-piece, or in something worse, were they transplanted to a settlement where they would receive at once all the comforts, and many of the rude luxuries of colonial life.

The Emigration Commissioners see no difficulty in the plan; and assuredly there would be little difficulty in it, if we had only some stern convulsion to sweep away the inanity of official indolence. It ought to be kept steadily, however, before the public mind, as the most practical remedy for our evils. We could send out, for example, at a cost of £30, a young couple about to become paupers, who could not have been supported as paupers or criminals in this country at a less expense than £40 a-year. A like sum for many succeeding years might, moreover, be demanded, besides the ultimate support of some six or ten children. And thus, before they die, they may cost many hundred pounds. Some of the thieves who are now prowling about our streets have had expended upon them a sum, from first to last, that might have set them up as sheep-farmers with a stock in Australia. Let it be remembered, too, that the £30 paid for

the passage of a boy and girl, is the only outlay necessary to convert two starving wretches into a thriving pair, who would return to this country in a short time, in the purchase of manufactures, some £15 or £20 per annum; and it may be fairly reckoned that they would send £5 additional for the support of aged relations. To carry out the scheme, it would be necessary to have an efficient equipment of officers. An Emigration Board, with an agent in each colony, would soon, however, lessen the evils under which we groan, at the same time that they would reanimate the struggling colonies by their labours.

We leave these suggestions with but a slight hope that they can be forced upon Government. The dread of exciting public indignation at new taxes, and the consequence thereof in loss of place, seem ever to haunt the minds of all official men. Things cannot be worse, it is argued, than they have hitherto been, and so long as we can jog on, there is no necessity to tempt untried experiments. The public, however, has been startled from its long indifference by the truth, that it is cheaper in the end to prevent, than to catch and cure. A few years ago, the thieves' literature that then existed directed public attention to the practices of thieves. It has now also been aroused, not from the same morbid appetite for the horrible, but in order to ascertain the criminal organizations that paralyze all our efforts. Crime has been studied in the most philosophical spirit. Even the tendency to commit it-the most difficult question in moral statistics-has been reduced to ascertainable ratios. Given as postulates the numbers of the population, their education and their comforts,and the whole is settled by a simple arithmetical operation. Philanthropy stands aghast in the presence of these immutable laws. It perceives that the causes which make the law must be destroyed. It is seen to be inhuman to do nothing more than hurry unhappy wretches to the prison and the scaffold, year after year, in the same proportions as to their number, and to the description of their crimes. From age to age, onward till the end of all things, there will be the annual recurrence of these gloomy memorials of our fallen nature, unless we eradicate the source from which crime must necessarily flow. It is sometimes, no doubt, the product of a sudden mastery of a fierce passion over a mind which had prided itself in its strength or its philosophy. But the great mass of crime is traceable to surrounding circumstances, within the range of remedial agency. Selfishness and humanity combined, call upon us to rouse that agency into life on behalf of the millions not born to the purple ; and remembering the fallibility of our nature, the best must stand in awe when they think what they might themselves have been under the pressure of similar temptations.