deal had yet to be done in county and borough prisons, that there was a want of system in the management of them, and that in other respects they required reorganisation. The Act of 1865 did all that an Act of Parliament could do in that direction, that was to say, as Sir Walter Crofton had observed, it sketched out a system, gave certain powers into the hands of the justices, and also afterwards threw out very broad hints as to what was intended by the sketch. The result, however, was that, in regard to the majority of prisons, the system thus indicated had not been carried out at all. The great fault of the Act appeared to be-though probably it could not be helped at the time—that it did not give sufficient power into the hands of any central authority. He did not say to what degree the power should be given, but certainly some central authority, some representative of the feeling of the country, or those who were best informed, ought to have a power more than the Home Secretary had now upon the subject. He could not but think that that was the way to remedy the evils pointed out. At present each local jurisdiction made its own rules, and the Home Secretary approved of them. But that was like a critic approving of a landscape. Unless you originated the thing yourself, you had a very imperfect means of controlling the laying down of any system that you wanted. The Home Secretary was almost like a man driving 116 horses, without any connection with the rein-horse, but with separate reins in his hands. More than that, it was as if each of those horses was able to argue with the driver. It was worse even than that, because, in a great many cases, the coachman owed his position to this, that, and the other horse, and in view of support at the next election, and fearing that he might be turned off his box, he felt obliged to look after them. Who would care to drive a team like that? The conclusion, therefore, was that more power must be given to the Home Secretary, in order to provide anything like uniformity. The first most important and most essential step was to reduce the number of prisons. Uniformity was a great difficulty. There were now about 115 prisons, and some reference had been made to the difficulty of closing several of them on account of the undesirableness of adding fresh prison accommodation, and so on. According to an estimate he had made in his paper, there could not be any difficulty in closing nearly half of the present number of gaols. As to the undesirableness of incurring great travelling expenses in the case of prisoners under short sentences, if the question were gone into as regarded space, or the area which a reasonable number of prisons would accommodate, it would be found that, with something like sixty prisons, one prison would be provided to every sixteen or twenty square miles. In that case there would be no great amount of travelling expenses incurred. Some counties had already adopted the system of having one prison for a large area. Staffordshire, a large county of nearly a million inhabitants, had only one prison, both for boroughs and county. Cornwall also, he believed, had only one prison. That showed no practical difficulty existed on that point. With reference to labour and all that part of the question, everybody now seemed agreed that penal labour was necessary in its proper place, but that it was a thing you ought to have as little of as possible; that industrial labour was the best in a great many points of view, but that for short sentences, and in certain places, confinement in cells with industrial labour was not a punishment. Moreover, it was difficult to provide industrial labour in some instances. Penal labour, as Sir Walter Crofton had pointed out, could be made so disagreeable that prisoners might try to escape from it; and, therefore, they looked to industrial labour as a reward, that being the system adopted in all well-managed prisons. Therefore the feeling appeared to be pretty nearly unanimous with regard to the main remedies to be introduced and the way to apply them. MISCELLANEOUS. DR. W. A. GUY, F.R.S., Professor of Hygiène, King's College, London, read a paper on The Executions for Murder that have taken place in England and Wales during the last seventy years. Dr. Guy's paper consisted of two parts-an appendix of eight tables, and a text consisting of explanations, comments, and statements of results. It may be said to have been the sequel to a paper submitted to the Statistical Society in April, 1869, and printed at p. 159 of that Society's Journal for that year, in which Dr. Guy examined the relation of insanity to crime, and discussed the plea of insanity in criminal cases, chiefly by means of the facts recorded in the successive reports of the Home Office on Judicial Statistics.' Feeling that in bringing these facts together he had by no means exhausted all the information the reports contain on the topics of crime and insanity, and that by studying some simple order of facts, such as executions for murder, additional light might be thrown on those questions, the author again took the subject in hand, being the more inclined to do so, inasmuch as in the case of executions for murder we possess a long series of well-defined and strictly comparable facts. Mr. G. R. Porter, in his chapter on crime, in The Progress of the Nation,' gave the number of persons executed for murder during the thirtyseven years from 1805 to 1841 inclusive, on the authority of Mr. Redgrave, and if we add to these the facts contained in successive numbers of the Judicial Statistics,' we can compile an unbroken series of facts relating to executions for murder in England and Wales, reaching back no less than seventy years; of which facts a careful analysis can scarcely fail to yield us some useful information. It may be well to premise that, in the tables of the appendix, the leading facts thus collected are presented not * See Transactions, 1865, p. 171; 1869, pp. 256, 271. only as naked facts, but, that one year may be compared with another, as the figures which would have been recorded if the population of England and Wales remained stationary at 20,000,000 of persons for each of the seventy years comprised in the table. It may be well to state that the Judicial Statistics' for the thirty-nine years ending 1874, present us with additional particulars of a very instructive and suggestive character. It may also be well to state that the figures in the tables comprise all the executions for murder which have taken place in England and Wales; whether the crime was committed on the high seas or on land, by foreigners or natives, or by foreigners on foreigners; whether by persons born in England and of the English mixed race, or by Scotch, Irish, or Welsh settled in, or recently immigrating into England. The few cases in which men or women have forestalled the executioner by committing suicide are also included. The naked facts show an average of about 12 executions for murder per annum, a minimum of 4, and a maximum of 25; also such abrupt transitions as 4 executions one year and 15 the next, 5 one year and 16 the next. The average number executed in the seventy years barely exceeded 16 in the 20,000,000, or much less than 1 per million of inhabitants, and these were but one in six of the persons charged with the crime of murder. The great differences that exist between different years are shown by such figures as 43, 44, 47, to the 20,000,000 of inhabitants, contrasted with such numbers as 4, 5, and 6. The third fact deserving of notice is the largeness of the fluctuations from year to year. It is well illustrated by contrasts at both ends of the table. Thus, the executions per 20,000,000, which were 10 in 1806, were 33, or more than three times as many, in 1807; while the low figure of 4 in 1871 became 13 in the year following. These startling contrasts, with which we are all familiar when we are dealing with small numbers, even though they represent events occurring among large populations, slowly diminish, (though they are far from disappearing) if we gather our facts into groups of 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32 years, or of 5 and 10 years. Even when we throw the facts for the whole seventy years into two periods of thirty-five years each, while the first thirtyfive years (from 1805 to 1839) are found to yield 778 executions, the second period (from 1840 to 1874 inclusive) yields 400 executions. The executions of which this paper treats are, it should be borne in mind, executions for murder only; so that it was not necessary to complicate the inquiry by reference to those amendments of the law by which, in 1832, 1833, 1834, 1835, 1837, 1841, and 1861, the punishment of death was abolished for a long catalogue of offences. The executions for murder, then, if taken by the year, and in round numbers, amount to 22 per annum for 20,000,000 souls during the first thirty-five years, and to less than 12 executions during the second thirtyfive. There is good reason to believe that the executions for murder a century ago were much more numerous in proportion to population than they are now; for John Howard, in his work on The State of Prisons' gives a table of the executions for murder at the Old Bailey for the twenty-three years ending 1871, from which it appears that, when reduced to the same standard of population, they were more than sevenfold more numerous than they have been for the twenty-three years ending 1871. But it must be understood that these figures record the executions for murder that have taken place in England and Wales for seventy years past, not the acts of extreme cruelty and violence which have been brought to trial. They do not enable us to measure the force of murderous passions, but only the fate they have entailed on a fraction of the men and women who have indulged them; for an execution for murder may be said to be the final result of a series of eliminations to which the cases for trial have been successively subjected. The total of cases first suffers some diminution by the removal of those in which there was no prosecution, then a much larger abatement through the cases in which the grand jury found no bill. Next, we have to subtract that much larger category of cases in which the accused were found not guilty on trial. But the work of elimination does not end here. A certain number of the accused are acquitted as insane, and a smaller number are found or declared to be insane afterwards. The final elimination consists in the revising work of the Home Office, the last and not the least important of the whole. The figures of the Judicial Statistics' for the thirty-nine years (from 1836 to 1874) enable us to measure the force of these several processes, or steps, of elimination. In those thirty-nine years 67 persons (male and female) were left for trial, one year with another. These were reduced to 66 by failure to prosecute, and further reduced to 60 by cases in which no bill was found by the grand jury. Of the 60 cases that were brought to trial, 31, or more than a half, were acquitted. Of the remaining 29, 6 were acquitted as insane, and three more were subsequently found to be in that state, making 9 in all; leaving 20 to be sentenced to death, of which 11 were executed. On these successive stages of elimination, Dr. Guy made the following 1. No Prosecution.—In this item great changes have taken place. The failures, which were numerous in the early years of the 39, have become rare in the later years. From 1836 to 1844 (a period of nine years) the figures ranged from 1 to 7, and reached a total of 26. In the remaining thirty years, the aggregate was only 14, and in no year, with the exception of 1867 (when the figure 6 occurs) was there more than one case of no prosecution.' 2. No Bill Found.-The operations of the Grand Jury, though fluctuating from year to year, have for groups of years shown great steadiness, with a marked tendency to express themselves by smaller figures of late years. Thus, if we divide the whole period of thirty-nine years into three of thirteen each, we find the first group, ending 1848, yielding the sum of 87 cases; the second, ending 1861, also 87 cases; and the third ending 1874, 67 cases. When the actual figures are reduced to ratios of 20,000,000, the figures for the three equal periods of thirteen years become 107, 94, and 66. The fluctuations from year to year are, of course, in part determined by the number of cases for trial; but it is well worthy of remark that equal numbers in different years, when submitted to the operation of the grand juries, issue in very different figures. Thus (to take only one example) 70 cases for trial yielded in four different years, 2, 4, 8, and 12 cases of No Bill.' 3. Acquitted on Trial. Under this head the figures show a decided decrease for the third period of thirteen years, when we deal with the actual returns, and a progressive decrease if we substitute for the naked facts the ratios per 20,000,000. The figures will be best understood if presented in a tabular form. As a general rule, subject to very few exceptions, it may be observed that the acquittals were greatly in excess in the first |