are her children to such a mother. Knowing
of maternity only the pains, and of childhood
only the perils, she is like those whose anguish
it is to die of starvation in the midst of plenty.

Some put their fear upon their worldly
matters, and live in dread of bankruptcy. With
a fortune in the Three per Cents, they fear to
spend liberally; "one never knows what may
happen, and millionnaires have gone ragged
and shoeless to the grave before now." Wherefore
they live the life of a pauper, in dread
of becoming one. Others, working bravely
for their daily bread, of which good fortune and
industry together give them generous bakings,
fret their souls in fear of old age, and blindness,
and paralysis, and poverty; others, if
the fees do not come in daily like an
uninterrupted golden shower, set up a howl of
despair, and the husband is railed at for being
less prosperous—that is, less deserving—than
his fellows, and the wife goes down into the cold
hell of dread, seeing ruin and desolation for
herself and the children, because her husband's
work is not like a perennial fountain, the same
in all seasons and under all conditions. This
monetary fear is very common—in its full-blown
development, making misers.

Some people are beset with emotionial fear,
which is of a different kind from the more
material. If a friend, tried, trusted, and trusty,
do not write or call on the very day expected,
then is there surely something desperately
wrong; there is a coolness, and there have been
slanders. If they are very much convinced
that their fear is truth, perhaps they do not
attempt to find it out, but take the severance
for granted, and act on it; whereby they
make it a reality, and of their baseless fear create
an irrevocable fact. How many a heart has
sat at the egde of the grave for all its life thereafter,
because of this grisly phantom of dread!

Spiritual fears invade some with frightful
force; and very ghastly are those fears. But
they are too sad and awful to be touched on
here, and by me stirring only the gayer surface
of things. Howbeit, indeed, this matter of False
Fear is scarce a matter of mirth in any of its
aspects, and, rightly taken, claims from us more
pity than amusement, more tenderness than scorn.

FAT CONVICTS.

PUNISHMENT or reformation? This has been
the grand point at issue in the different convict
systems and jail arrangements—whether the
offence shall be avenged by the personal disaster
of the offender, or a recurrence (probably)
prevented by his moral improvement. The two
sects in question are in direct opposition to each
other; the extreme of the one denying the right
of crime to any greater moral attention than has
been paid to virtue, that of the other making
it a passport to exaggerated esteem and sickly
enthusiasm; so that a man has but to become a
felon to be at once an object of sympathy, and
regarded as a much finer fellow than your
dull lout who plods on in a straight line from the
beginning, without energy enough to go crooked.

We now in England have banished the first
system from public adoption altogether; and
say out boldly, "Yes, punishment should be
reformatory, not retributive, and the criminal
should go through penitence to virtue." But
how is this to be done? Granting the principle,
what about the formulas? Here again we
meet with two parties, the one organising and
drilling men into good prisoners, as bumpkins
are made into smart parade soldiers; the other
leading them by self-education into a better
knowledge for the future of active life. The
first class includes, as its working form, costly
arrangements and extended physical indulgence,
while part of the reformatory code of the second
consists in hard labour and personal privations.
The government prisons, so perfectly organised
and admirably drilled, represent the one; Captain
Maconochie and Sir Walter Crofton the other.

There is now in the field another advocate for
the latter system, and one eminently worthy a
hearing, whose experience has not been got out
of Blue Books annotated down the margin beside
a comfortable fire and at a convenient desk, but
in actual work and experimental practice; we
mean MISS CARPENTER,* long known for her
connexion with the reformatories, and now taking
up the more difficult question of adult crime,
and how our criminals are to be treated for the
safety and protection of society and their own
best good combined. If all sentences were for
life, then the question would hang only on the
convict himself, and the righteousness or
morbidness of philanthropy; but as most are time
sentences—merely an interval of seclusion and
then a return to the world—it is a matter of
self-defence as well as of philanthropy, of common
sense as well as of high morality, to do our
best to send back into active life an honest man
and not a villain, a citizen and not a criminal, a
man and not a wild beast. Putting it, then, on
that ground only, by which system do we diminish
the dangers to society: by returning a percentage
of convicts to society transformed into
decent members of it; or still no better than its
scourge and oppressors? We will answer this
question out of Miss Carpenter's book, and by
her own statements.

* Our Convicts. By Mary Carpenter.

The English system is, as we have said,
professedly a reformatory system, and looks as
well on paper as any system possible to be
devised by human ingenuity. Yet it is a costly
and a grievous failure; for it does not accomplish
its object—it does not reform the prisoners.
prisoners. This is proved by the number of
recommitments, much in excess of what should be,
or of what would be were the system more in wise
accordance with the needs and nature of man.

Another proof, by inference, is that criminals
prefer a sentence of three or four years' milder
penal servitude in convict prisons, to a short
time sentence of eighteen months or two years'
severer discipline in county jails.