on Shooter's Hill and pillage them. A Prince
of Wales had been a robber on Gad's Hill;
and, for the benefit of noble burglars and
highwaymen, a statute decreed that a peer of the
realm or lord of parliament, on his first
conviction of a robbery, was entitled to benefit
of clergy, even if he could not read; that a
lord of parliament could read being in those
days by no means a matter of course. The
spirit of such fine old English gentlemen, all
of the good old times, was not invariably
mild. Upon the coat of one such chief was
blazoned in large silver letters, "I am Captain
Warner, commander of a troop of robbers, an
enemy to God, without pity and without
mercy."

The causes of crime, as summed up by Mr.
Hill, are, bad training and ignorance, drunkenness
and other kinds of profligacy, poverty,
habits of violating the laws engendered by
the creation of artificial offences, other kinds
of unjust legislation, temptations to crime
caused by uncertainty or insufficiency of
punishment. These last act, of course, rather
in aid of other causes; chances of escape
from the due penalties of crime weaken
resistance to temptation—they are not temptations
in themselves.

The causes thus specified are all now
actively at work; that is notorious. But it is
not so well known as it should be, that
every one of them acts, in our own days,
with greatly diminished force. Few criminals
are reading people. The great decrease of
drunkenness is notorious to every
moderately sane man who does not carry his
pigs to a Whole Hog market. Of the
decrease of poverty we may be very well
convinced, when we remember that in the
fine old times of Agincourt and so on, the
four-pound wheaten loaf would have cost, at
our money valuation, half-a-crown, and the
artificers and labourers were "driven to
content themselves with horsse corn, beans,
peason, otes, tares, and lintels." The increase
of servants' wages—which in Birmingham
have risen fourfold in the last sixty years,
and everywhere have increased so much as
to yield a large deposit of surplus in the
savings' banks—is a sufficient proof of the
increased value of the poor man's services, and
the increased consideration he receives for
what he does. In this respect, though many
still are suffering, the number of the sufferers
becomes steadily fewer. As for artificial
offences, when we have got rid of the game
laws, there will remain not many; and
although courts of justice are, to this day,
uncertain in their issues, and unequal in
the judgments they pronounce, it is a long
time since the English judges were
themselves tried and fined for their venality;
since Sir Adam de Stratton, Chief Baron
of the Exchequer, paid thirty-four thousand
marks for having subjected his law to
lucre, and since Sir Thomas Wayland, Chief
Justice of the Common Pleas, was
sentenced to be hanged, for aiding and abetting
murder.

What of the remedies, the modes of treatment
now in use, or those others which are perhaps
hereafter to be preferred? Upon this important
subject Mr. Frederic Hill has a great deal
to say. His opinions are entitled to respect,
because his life has been devoted chiefly to
the consideration of the subjects about which
he speaks; he having fulfilled the duties of
an Inspector of prisons both in England and
Scotland. I will state a few of Mr. Hill's
opinions, and then hint a few of my own.

A first fact to be remembered in considering
what treatment is most proper for our
public criminals is, that the number of them
bears a very small proportion to the population
of the country. In any town of moderate
size the thieves are better known to the
police than the shoemakers or hatters. Even
in London a list very nearly complete could
be supplied for insertion in the trade department
of the Post Office Directory. At Kinghorn,
in Fife, there were nine resident professional
thieves, who produced the bulk of the
public offences for a population of fifteen
hundred people. In the whole of East Lothian
there were not more than twelve professional
thieves among six-and-thirty thousand men,
honest in the sight of law. Many offences are
committed by a small number of culprits,
some of whom come into the prison scores of
times. Mr. Hill quotes from one of his reports
a striking illustration of this fact in the case of
Inverness. "My informant, a police officer of
the town, who had been several years in the
service, had passed all his life at Inverness,
and says that he knows every house in the
town, and all its inhabitants, that he is quite
certain the great bulk of the people are
honest, and that if fifty or sixty persons
could be withdrawn, and the vagrants kept
away, there would be really very few offences.
He says that he has the very same set of
offenders over and over again through his
hands, and he particularly mentioned one
woman who had been eighteen years on the
street, and who he feels sure has been a
prisoner in the police cells at least a thousand
times, chiefly for acts of violence, such as
breaking windows, &c., committed when
drunk. It was on the 28th of September
that I was questioning him on these matters,
and this woman had already been committed
seventeen times in that month."

This case makes very evident the uselessness
of short committals, and may lead at
once to a statement of the principle which
Mr. Hill advocates. The object of state
punishment, he argues, is not to avenge
offences, but to prevent them. Prevention
requires that the prison should be made a
place decidedly unpleasant to the criminal,
but while imprisonment should be a penalty
to the transgressor, it should be used at the
same time as a means of reformation. Therefore
Mr. Hill looks forward to the time when