non-educated, and so removed to some extent one of the temptations to crime. Further, education and moral training have up till the present time gone together. The proportion of those who can read and write to those who cannot may be a a gauge of the state of education in any district, but it must not be supposed that a criminal is less a criminal after he has learned to read and write. In various indirect ways education, or the cultivation of the mind, will have an effect on the criminal propensities; for instance, by providing means of occupation and recreation which may keep people from the vice of drinking and all its degrading consequences, in making them more capable of foreseeing and appreciating the consequences of their evil acts, and rendering the disposition less brutal, and so on; but it is not clear to me that mental education, in the ordinary sense, can be expected beyond this to do more than alter the form or manner in which crime is committed.

Crimes of a direct nature, involving more or less violence, are the crimes of uneducated persons. Swindling is the crime of the educated, and I will not say that the latter class of crime has not in one form or another increased with education. Carlyle says, 'I know of but three ways of living in the world: first, by wages for work; second, by begging; thirdly, by stealing, so called or not so called;' and I fear there are a vast number of modes of stealing which are not so called,' so that our calculations on the subject of real crime are rather baffled. Criminals appreciate this distinction. A convict at Gibraltar Prison recently observed to the chaplain, who was endeavouring to show him the iniquity of his career of stealing, ‘Stealing you call it, we don't; we call it taking.'

But, however difficult it may be to assign its true value in repressing crime to mental education, there can be no doubt of the effect of moral training, for that is aimed directly at promoting principles of action with which crimes cannot exist.

The Rev. Mr. Sherwin, the chaplain of Pentonville Prison, has furnished me with an apposite illustration of what mental education can effect, and what it cannot, and what kind of education tends to increase or diminish crime: Andrew Clarke, one of the men in the last assignment of convicts to Western Australia, may serve as a specimen of the utter ruin which may ensue from early evil culture. He described his mother as being perpetually drunk, and as soon as he was sharp enough to go about the streets alone, she sent him out to practise the arts of theft to which she had trained him. From boyhood she had taught him to drink whisky, whereby his growth was impeded; nevertheless, his mental powers were considerable, and

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after innumerable summary convictions, succeeded by three sentences of penal servitude, he acquired in prisons a large amount of knowledge, but was never morally improved. He was the most incorrigible, unmanageable subject, perhaps, that

ever entered Pentonville Prison. He always traced back his stream of villanies to his wretched mother's discipline.'

It is clear that this man received little or no benefit from mental education, and that the training or education imbibed in his early surroundings was what formed his character. It is, in fact, the teaching acquired by the example and instruction of those with whom a young person associates, more than the direct lessons either of the clergyman or the schoolmaster, that influences the conduct for good or evil, and forms a foundation of morality or immorality which nothing can replace. Industrial Schools are intended to effect this object of removing children from evil associations and surrounding them with good, but there are, no doubt, still vast numbers of children who are likely to turn out badly from not being under good influences, but whose condition is, for one reason or another, not such as to cause the Industrial Schools Act to be put in operation against them. These will, at all events, benefit by being removed for a certain part of each day, and for a certain number of years, to the ordinary schools of the locality, and in these instances, at least, it is to be hoped that education may soon become compulsory.

These considerations, however, should not lead us to relax our efforts to reclaim those who have fallen into crime by such moral influences as can be brought to bear on them while in prison; only let us be careful that these efforts are directed by a single-minded desire to effect the improvement of the prisoners, and not to gratify any inferior sectarian motives; for a prison is the last place in which the rivalries of religious ministers should find a field; and let it be always remembered that religious instruction obviously achieves its object most effectually by keeping people out of prison, and to this object the labours of ministers of religion will best be directed.

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THE PREVENTION OF CRIME ACT.

Has the Prevention of Crime Act, 1871, proved satisfactory in its operation? By the Right Hon. Sir WALTER CROFTON, C.B.

HAVE been requested by the Committee to write a paper on the operation of the Prevention of Crime Act, 1871, a statute which the Association has done much to promote, and for which the noble Lord who presides over our meeting. this year deserves the most sincere thanks of the community.

For several years prior to 1864 various opinions were held with regard to our convicts. There were:

I. Those, and they were numerous, who advocated their retention in prison until the termination of their sentences.

II. Those who supported a conditional remission of their sentences unaccompanied by supervision after liberation.

III. Those who desired a conditional remission of sentences, provided such remission was accompanied by the safeguard of police and other supervision.

The time has long since passed when it was necessary to discuss these several opinions. The Penal Servitude Act, 1864, confirmed the third opinion, and extended to Great Britain the conditional liberation accompanied by the systematic supervision which had been so long in force in Ireland. In 1866, Sir Richard Mayne, then the Chief Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, in reply to a Parliamentary return moved for in order to test the progress of police supervision, reported that the operation of the system had been very favourable, and 'that it was not known or believed that the reporting themselves to the police had in any case prevented a licence-holder obtaining employment, or caused the loss of employment obtained.'

Lord Aberdare, in 1869, Secretary of State for the Home Department, expressing his approval of the results of supervision, succeeded in passing the Habitual Criminals Act, 1869, which, in addition to other salutary measures well calculated to break up the criminal class, extended the principle of police supervision to other criminals defined in the statute.

Great credit is due to the minister who so courageously grappled with an evil which was everywhere acknowledged, but which had not heretofore been attempted to be re

medied. It was assuredly a great blot in our social state, that we should so long have suffered the existence of a criminal class' dominant in our midst. The foreign representatives attending the International Prison Congress in London, in 1872, stated that no such class-as a class-was to be found in their various countries. Our carelessness with regard to our criminal population, when we could get rid of such a large number by means of transportation; and our hesitation in interfering with the liberty of the subject although that subject was carrying on constant warfare against the honest members of the community-had generated the growth of an habitual criminality which at last became perfectly intolerable. But still we hesitated; and until the question was comprehensively dealt with by the Act of 1869 we had not advanced very far in the repression of crime.

The Habitual Criminals Act, 1869, enacted several provisions well calculated to break up the criminal class :—

I. We had, by the 5th clause, the establishment of a Register for Criminals,' a measure which had been very urgently pressed upon the attention of the Government by this Association.

II. The extension, by the 8th clause, of police supervision to criminals, defined by the statute as Habitual Criminals.

III. By the 9th clause, we had an amendment of the Vagrant Act (5 George IV., c. 83), by which it became more easy to deal with reputed thieves loitering in places with evil intent.

IV. By the 10th and 11th clauses we became enabled to enforce penalties for harbouring thieves,' and to deal more stringently with the receivers of stolen goods and dealers in old metals.

V. By the 16th clause, the provisions of the Industrial Schools Act, 1861, were made to apply to all the children under fourteen years of age of any woman who shall be convicted for the second time of an offence defined in the first Schedule, when such children shall at the time of the conviction be under her care and control, and have no visible means of subsistence.

It is, I think, undeniable that these provisions were of a nature to attack crime in its stronghold, and we cannot be too thankful that these principles were at last placed upon our Statute Book. The Prevention of Crime Act, 1871, which was also the good work of Lord Aberdare, gave the greater completeness to these measures which experience had proved to be necessary, and also made some changes in the procedure enacted in 1869. These changes were principally the more

systematic supervision of licence-holders, and an alteration of the supervision clause with regard to those defined as Habitual Criminals. Under the 8th clause of the Act of 1869, persons twice convicted of crimes defined by the statute were (unless otherwise declared by the Court) subjected to police. supervision for periods not more than seven years. The alteration made by the 8th clause of the Prevention of Crime Act, 1871, is, that the Court may direct police supervision in the same cases and for the same periods of time. By the 14th clause there is an increased stringency of procedure with regard to placing the children of habitually criminal women in Industrial Schools.

It cannot well be doubted that these amendments have been very considerable improvements. All-important is this statute to the public, but in proportion to its importance so becomes the necessity for watching its development, and taking such steps as will prevent its becoming a dead letter. I regret to state that there are unmistakable signs abroad which should warn us to be wise in time, and to secure, while it is yet possible, an administration of the statute on some most important points more in accordance with the views of the introducer of the measure, and more conformable with the intentions of Parliament. Some of these signs to which I allude are made from official quarters, and there can therefore be no doubt of their importance; others from the observations of criminals themselves, who do not now appear to have the wholesome dread of the disabilities of the Prevention of Crime Act' which they felt a short time since, when they believed its development would be in accordance with the language of the statute. The official signs are these:The Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, in whose office the 'Register for Habitual Criminals' has been kept since 1869, informed us in his last year's report that the registration of habitual criminals has been continued as heretofore, but the numbers on the registry have increased so rapidly that there are now 117,568 names on the register, and they increase at an average of 30,000 per annum; very few inquiries have been received from any but the Metropolitan Police, and the identifications have been very few. Only 950 inquiries have been received from outside the Metropolitan Police District since the establishment of the register in 1869, and 3,006 from the Metropolitan Police. The number of identifications has only been 890 out of 3,957 inquiries, and as regards those made by the Metropolitan Police a large proportion could be identified without any reference to the registry at all.'