intelligence, sound principles, and sufficient
education—one capable of exercising a wholesome
personal influence over those whom he has to control
and instruct.

Well, we have had enough about warders.
Let us go on.

The leading object of the system being to
reclaim the prisoner, the nature of the
educational instruction afforded to him within the
prison walls becomes, of course, of the highest
importance. Crime, as we too well know, is not
inseparable from knowledge; is not wholly alien
even to the loftiest order of intellects; but it is
over the ignorant that its dominion is the widest
spread and its grasp the most tenaciously held.
Of the mass of men who become inmates of our
penal prisons, few are found who can do more
than read and write in the rudest manner,
while a larger proportion are completely ignorant
even of the very letters of the alphabet.
Before you can hope to accomplish anything in
the way of reclaiming such men, you must
contrive to let in upon their minds some ray of the
light of knowledge. Now, how is this attempted
at present? and what is the nature of the
knowledge sought to be imparted? The chaplain of
the Pentonville prison, to whom for the last ten
years the management of the schools throughout
the convict service has been chiefly left, declares
in one of his earlier reports, that in his opinion,
"beyond intelligent reading, legible writing, and
arithmetic in its principles and practice, little
remains to be desired in education among
prisoners," because, he adds, they will thus
acquire "the means of reading for themselves
the things concerning their souls."

What objection is there to that? To me it
seems all very good and proper.

The objection is, that the principle laid down
is too narrow, and the end aimed at too
exclusively a religious one. Do not mistake me. Of
course, I do not urge a syllable against the vital
importance of making instruction in the great
truths of Christianity, part and parcel of the
education of every man; but if a man is
expected to gain an honest living in the world by
the exercise of his industry and intelligence,
it is a part of the Christian scheme that he must
be taught some other things besides those which
alone concern his soul. Contrast, with what
the Pentonville chaplain says, the sensible
observations lately made by the Dean of Carlisle,
in an address on Christian education: "The
great leaf which has been turned over on the
subject of education in the present day is just this:
we have learned that we are as much bound to
educate the body as we are the soul, and the
soul as much as the mind, and the mind as much
as the other two, and that we must neglect none
of these in any system of public or private
education; for that system will be displeasing to
God, and calculated to frustrate His wise and
benevolent purposes, which does not fully
develop all these three faculties of man." MR.
MEASOR would depose the chaplain from his
usurped office of chief instructor in the prisons,
and would impart to the convicts sound
practical knowledge upon all subjects likely to
be useful in life. Surely this is reasonable.
Convince the prisoner that honesty is the best
policy—instruct him thoroughly in the means
by which he may live honestly—and you lay
the foundation of an active and practical
religion in his heart which shall bear fruit
of the highest and holiest worth here and
hereafter. Reverse this—give him no secular
instruction—tell him that all he has to do in this
world is to profess to attend to "things concerning
his soul," and you make him a hypocrite while
he remains under your care, and leave him as
ignorant and as abandoned as ever, the moment
he is beyond your reach. I am not asserting
this loosely. It is a fact, proved by experience.
Not long since there were in Chatham prison
one hundred and seventy-one men who had
previously undergone imprisonment in convict gaols.
Upon their reconviction and readmission to the
prison, it was discovered that of this number only
forty-nine were able to read and write reasonably
well, one hundred were imperfectly able to read
and write, and twenty-two could do neither one
nor the other. And it is not only in the matter
of education that the prison chaplain is (with
the best intentions) found wanting, practically.
He often aims at being the prison disciplinarian
as well as the prison instructor, and in many
instances the prisoner's punishment is lightened
or increased according to the report the chaplain
makes of him. Now, the chaplain encouraging
professions, and merely professions, from the
prisoners—because it is impossible in a prison
to test religious profession by practice—makes
the gravest mistakes, and floods society with the
worst kind of ticket-of-leave men. He is
remarkable for his advocacy of separate confinement.
Connected with the question of criminal
punishment, there is perhaps no one point that
has given rise to so great a diversity of opinion
as that of the use and limitation of separate
confinement. For very short sentences, its
propriety can hardly be questioned; but applied
to lengthened periods—such, for instance, as
eighteen months, as until recently was not
unfrequent—it is found to operate upon the prisoner
in an unwholesome manner. The doctors tell us—
and none more forcibly than the Queen's late
physician, the lamented Dr. Baly—that the punishment,
when continued for many months, exerts
a depressing influence on the whole nervous
system of the convict, resulting in a loss of
physical vigour, an impairment of the power of
resisting external impressions (whence arises a
liability to convulsive attacks of a singular and
painful nature), and in a general prostration of
mental energy. Can a system which produces
such results be properly maintained?

It certainly seems very questionable.

The doctors almost unanimously condemn it;
on the other hand, the chaplains are almost
unanimous in defending and supporting it.

In the name of charity—why?

Because they say it "softens and subdues"
men's minds, and makes it "easy to the affectionate,
zealous, Christian minister to move the