broke out among us, the individual in whom it was
exhibited used to be promptly seized and carried
off to a certain Lazar House thousands of miles
away, and well across the seas, where his noxious
symptoms would not annoy the community, and
where others would not be infected by him.
Before this excellent and convenient plan had
been hit upon, we had even a simpler way
of dealing with these moral invalids. We used
to kill them. It had been decided that a felon
was a public nuisance, in the strongest sense of
the word; that his reforming was too improbable
a contingency to be worth a thought; that it
was necessary to do something to him which
should deter other people from following his
example, and which would at the same time render
it impossible for him to do any more mischief to
his fellow-creatures. All this was effected (or
supposed to be) in the most easy and complete
manner possible by hanging him; and accordingly
he was hanged. Besides: this remedy
was so cheap. The hangman's fee was a mere
nothing, especially when he knocked off a dozen
or so of patients at one interview, and that fee
once paid, and the shell provided by the prison
carpenter, all was over, and a wretched failure
of a creature, a disgrace to humanity, a plague
to himself and to every one else, was got rid of.

There was only one unfortunate thing
connected with this good old way of dealing with
the criminal population; and that was, that it
seemed an intolerable blot on our civilisation,
and wholly inconsistent with humanity. It
would not do. It was intolerable to think, as
you got up any fine Monday morning to attend
to your business or to enjoy yourself, that your
fellow-men and women were being hanged up by
the neck before a brutal rabble, for robbing a
hen-roost, or stealing a sheep. So gradually,
and little by little, the gallows got to be out of
fashion, and first one crime and then another
was struck off the black list of capital offences.
Still it was thought necessary to get rid of the
criminal. So he and she were just despatched
beyond seas to the other end of the world,
and there kept according to the nature of their
misdeeds, for seven years, for fourteen years, for
a lifetime.

This system, in its turn, had great advantages.
The horror of the gallows and its terrible weekly
load was done away with, and still the criminals
were got out of the way. They were sent to a
place where none of us ever saw them, and where
they could be forgotten. Reports in connexion
with them would come out from time to time, but
there is a great difference between reading about
a convict, or any other terrible being, and coming
face to face with the monster. Pity that this
admirable way out of the convict difficulty
would not do! Pity that the colonies should
become too hot to hold them! Pity that the
fastidious tastes of the colonial populations
should lead them to object to our worst criminals
as fellow-colonists! This is the way in
which some of our most admirable schemes and
our completest theories fall through. Some
detestable defect in the instruments with which
we work, that destroys our calculations. How
comfortable our transportation system, when the
objections of those horrid colonists threw it all
out, and sent our convicts back to our shores,
much as the tide sends our London pollution
back by river every six hours.

And so, as transportation has become gradually
less and less possible, our black sheep have
accumulated more and more. Various have been
the suggestions concerning what should be done
with such sheep. New localities have been
spoken of as places to which our convicts might
be sent, and all sorts of occupations have been
set forth as fit for them to engage in. Meanwhile
(as is too often the case when men find that
there is much to be said on both sides of a
question), we have adopted something of a
doubtful policy, and short imprisonments and
sanguine views of their reformatory influence
have been the order of the day.

Perhaps, with the progress of time, there is
an increased tendency among us towards
leniency. Perhaps—nay, certainly—we are apt to
forget an offence, especially one not committed
against ourselves, while the actual life of the
man who committed the offence is a great fact
which we cannot forget. Then we are lenient
from a consciousness of our own weak points.
We think of our own past faults, and we say to
ourselves, " Suppose I had been in that man's
position? Suppose my temptation had been of
the same class as his, where might I be now?"
And then, we have a great knack at hoping, and
more especially when it would be very convenient
for the thing hoped for to take place. So
we hope that criminals will reform, and good-
naturedly say, " Let the poor wretches have a
chance at any rate." Then steps in the philanthropist
and says, we suppose the honest man to
run no danger from the liberty of this felon
after we have dealt with him. That name of
criminal no longer attaches to him. He is
reformed.

Is he reformed? Has he cast his skin? Is that
creature belonging to the lowest type that can
be called human, capable of one of the highest
of human achievements and the rarest? Are
the qualities generated by twenty years of going
wrong, got out of the man's system? Those years
of boyhood, when it is so easy to learn and to
learn thoroughly, is the evil knowledge, are the
evil habits, acquired in those years, and well fixed
in the mind, to be got out again with a year or
two of prison-discipline? The habit of idleness,
which is after all at the bottom of most
criminality, the aversion to fixed employment, is that
got rid of? Is it easy, when the best years of
life have been given to vice and indolence, to
turn to and begin again in earnest, with relaxed
energies and a disorganised mind? Is it easy,
after one has idled away a morning, to turn to
and do a day's work in the afternoon? It is
possible. But it is one of the hardest of human
achievements.

That reformation is possible, is as certain as
that it is most uncommon; yet the authorities
who have of late years regulated our prison