explanation of this astonishing fact. We are ready
to allow all due weight to such considerations,
but we put it to our readers whether the
whole system is right or wrong; whether
the money ought or ought not rather to be
spent in instructing the unskilled and
neglected outside the prison walls. It will be
urged that it is expended in preparing the
convict for the exile to which he is doomed.
We submit to our readers, who are the jury
in this case, that all this should be done
outside the prison, first; that the first persons to
be prepared for emigration are the miserable
children who are consigned to the tender
mercies of a DROUET, or who disgrace our
streets; and that in this beginning at the
wrong end, a spectacle of monstrous
inconsistency is presented, shocking to the mind.
Where is our Model House of Youthful
Industry, where is our Model Ragged School,
costing for building and repairs, from ninety
to a hundred thousand pounds, and for its
annual maintenance upwards of twenty thousand
pounds a year? Would it be a Christian
act to build that, first? To breed our skilful
labour there? To take the hewers of wood
and drawers of water in a strange country
from the convict ranks, until those men by
earnest working, zeal, and perseverance,
proved themselves, and raised themselves?
Here are two sets of people in a densely
populated land, always in the balance before
the general eye. Is Crime for ever to carry
it against Poverty, and to have a manifest
advantage? There are the scales before all
men. Whirlwinds of dust scattered in mens'
eyes—and there is plenty flying about—cannot
blind them to the real state of the balance.

We now come to enquire into the condition
of mind produced by the seclusion (limited in
duration as Lord Grey limits it) which is
purchased at this great cost in money, and this
greater cost in stupendous injustice. That
it is a consummation much to be desired, that
a respectable man, lapsing into crime, should
expiate his offence without incurring the
liability of being afterwards recognised by
hardened offenders who were his fellow-
prisoners, we most readily admit. But, that this
object, howsoever desirable and benevolent, is
in itself sufficient to outweigh such objections
as we have set forth, we cannot for a moment
concede. Nor have we any sufficient
guarantee that even this solitary point is gained.
Under how many apparently inseparable
difficulties, men immured in solitary cells,
will by some means obtain a knowledge of
other men immured in other solitary cells,
most of us know from all the accounts and
anecdotes we have read of secret prisons and
secret prisoners from our school-time
upwards. That there is a fascination in the
desire to know something of the hidden
presence beyond the blank wall of the cell;
that the listening ear is often laid against
that wall; that there is an overpowering
temptation to respond to the muffled knock,
or any other signal which sharpened ingenuity
pondering day after day on one idea can
devise: is in that constitution of human
nature which impels mankind to communication
with one another, and makes solitude
a false condition against which nature strives.
That such communication within the Model
Prison, is not only probable, but indisputably
proved to be possible by its actual discovery,
we have no hesitation in stating as a fact.
Some pains have been taken to hush the
matter, but the truth is, that when the Prisoners
at Pentonville ceased to be selected Prisoners,
especially picked out and chosen for the
purposes of that experiment, an extensive
conspiracy was found out among them,
involving, it is needless to say, extensive
communication. Small pieces of paper with
writing upon them, had been crushed into
balls, and shot into the apertures of cell
doors, by prisoners passing along the
passages; false responses had been made during
Divine Service in the chapel, in which
responses they addressed one another; and
armed men were secretly dispersed by the
Governor in various parts of the building, to
prevent the general rising, which was
anticipated as the consequence of this plot.
Undiscovered communication, under this
system, we assume to be frequent.

The state of mind into which a man is
brought who is the lonely inhabitant of his
own small world, and who is only visited by
certain regular visitors, all addressing
themselves to him individually and personally, as
the object of their particular solicitude—we
believe in most cases to have very little
promise in it, and very little of solid foundation.
A strange absorbing selfishness—a
spiritual egotism and vanity, real or assumed
—is the first result. It is most remarkable
to observe, in the cases of murderers who
become this kind of object of interest, when
they are at last consigned to the condemned
cell, how the rule is (of course there are
exceptions,) that the murdered person
disappears from the stage of their thoughts,
except as a part of their own important
story; and how they occupy the whole scene.
I did this, I feel that, I confide in the mercy
of Heaven being extended to me; this is the
autograph of me, the unfortunate and
unhappy; in my childhood I was so and so;
in my youth I did such a thing, to which I
attribute my downfall—not this thing of
basely and barbarously defacing the image of
my Creator, and sending an immortal soul into
eternity without a moment's warning, but
something else of a venial kind that many
unpunished people do. I don't want the
forgiveness of this foully murdered person's
bereaved wife, husband, brother, sister, child,
friend; I don't ask for it, I don't care for it.
I make no enquiry of the clergyman concerning
the salvation of that murdered person's
soul; mine is the matter; and I am almost
happy that I came here, as to the gate of