Messrs. Murphy and Callaghan being really and
genuinely free, it will be found that their score
of punishment stand thus:

But this Irish convict system bears fruit far
away beyond its own immediate sphere. In
England, the common plea for convicts relapsing is
that none will employ them. But in Ireland, the
directors have so fairly earned the public faith,
and have won such implicit credit in their
system, that convict labour is in eager request,
and the supply does not equal the demand. They
make the best of trained servants and labourers.
Only a short time since, a lady writes from the
country to a friend in town for a nursery-
governess, and after diligent inquiry, it is
discovered that not only a good nursery-governess,
but far away the best that could be found, is to
be selected from among the female convicts.
The lady accepted the choice made for her.

Such is the Irish convict system and its fruit.
That fruit has been so startling and unexpected,
that in England it has been received with grave
doubts and some mistrust. On the Continent,
through that clearness of vision which foreigners
have for all real discoveries, it has been heartily
welcomed. The late Count Cavour personally
examined into it and approved. In
England it has been objected that the Irish system
has to deal with a comparatively innocent
class of criminals, if such a phrase may be
used. In answer, the directors appeal to the
names of evil-doers in their books, against
whom fifteen and twenty previous convictions
have been established—who have been proved by
the fire of this process—and are now reformed.
Again, to explain that large amount of reformation
(ninety-five per cent) so strikingly contrasted
with the ninety-five per cent who do relapse in
England, it is said that the Irish convict flies to
England to avoid the pressure of the espionage
brought to bear on him; and of course cannot
figure in the list of relapses in his own country.
To which the directors of the Irish system
reply, that they can account (with very slight
exceptions) for nearly every man under their
care, or could in a very short time: which seems
a satisfactory answer enough. Finally, these
grounds being cut away, it is urged that this
Irish system is no new system; and that what
is all but an " intermediate" system may be seen
at Chatham and Portland. There the convicts
work outside their prison, and quarry stone a
mile from the jail. But " stone walls do not a
prison make, nor iron bars a cage;" and though
not in jail at the moment, they know they must
return there that evening. If Chatham be
intermediate, so are the huge bagnes at Toulon and
Brest.

The director of the costly English system
—that system which lays out its happy hunting-
grounds where convicts may be soothed and
pampered into decent prison behaviour by the
agency of "puddings," "allowance of tea, beer,"
and gratuities reaching to " thirty pounds"—
has bluntly denied the efficacy of this Irish
prison cure, and has claimed the palm of success
and of excellence for his own.

Now, there is a huge fortress of restraint at
Wakefield, the West Riding prison, conducted
on admirable principles, and, as will be seen,
directed by an enlightened spirit of progress.
Having room to spare, it takes in the overflow from
Pentonville of government convicts. Four Visiting
Justices of this institution—a little alarmed
by the fact that some four-fifths of these latter
prisoners, or about eighty-one per cent of their
criminals, were coming back to them after their
release—with an admirable spirit determined to
set sail for the new Dorado of prison discipline,
and personally investigate the truth of these glowing
legends of reformation. Their first experience
was almost startling, for, on entering one of the
Dublin prisons, they found a company of
convicts " knocking off work," and shouldering their
spades preparatory to a mile's walk through the
crowded streets of a crowded capital. There
was here no prison dress, no guard beyond
another workman, also shouldering a spade; and
they were hurrying off to dinner like other
ordinary and, it may be said, honest mechanics.
The Four Visiting Justices were not a little
confounded by this curious sight, and almost
half converted.

One argument which had been pressed on the
Four Justices, as fatal to this Irish treatment,
was that the Celtic temperament was more
malleable and ductile, and more pastoral, in
short; and that in a huge manufacturing
empire whose population was densely crowded,
and whose operations were more complex, and
where the struggle for life and sustenance was
more intense, there would be a greater field for
crime. However, a photograph book copiously
stored with the cartes de visite of malefactors,
done by the Silvy of the jail, was presented
for the inspection of the Four Justices, and
those gentlemen, fortified as they were by a
familiarity with the type of countenance which
their own thirteen hundred Wakefield prisoners
could furnish them, were confounded by the
tremendous galaxy of ruffianism which blazed
upon them through the medium of albumenised
paper. A nearer familiarity with the originals
of these interesting likenesses only strengthened
the convictions of the Four Justices,
that the facial type of Irish criminality fully
rivalled, if it did not exceed, the hideousness of
English villany. And it becomes a gratifying
source of pride for the upholders of the Irish
system, that these gentlemen have reported that
the human soil there, was as rude and repulsive
for reformatory tillage as the criminal ground at
home. The warders in the jails have to carry
heavy truncheons for their own security, and
the ordinary metropolitan police, while patrolling
the suburbs of Dublin at night, are accustomed
to carry cutlasses.

This truth, however unflattering to the
national character, is further triumphantly