The question of the expediency or otherwise of the death punishment is not in the author's judgment materially affected! by any of the facts brought forward in his paper, unless indeed it be that the fact of the small number of males, and still smaller number of females, now executed for murder, may be taken to prove the slight importance of the question compared with many other social problems now inviting solution; among which he wished again to specify those that attach to the treatment of our imbecile population, a subject to be presently treated under a distinct heading; meanwhile Dr. Guy desired again to call attention to the facts stated in his paper so often referred to. Those facts certainly gave some countenance to the belief that the number of insane homicides in a year was in part determined by the presence or absence of events exciting and agitating the public mind. He instanced the two cholera years, 1849 and 1854; 1857, the year of the Indian mutiny; 1862, the year of the cotton famine and second Great Exhibition; and five out of the seven years in which Parliamentary elections were held, as years in which also the number of insane homicides had increased when compared with the year preceding.

He could now add one case more to this last list. In 1868, an election year, there were twelve insane, and in the years preceding and following seven and eight respectively.

The figures thus brought forward afford a probability that the number of insane homicides is greater in years of public anxiety and excitement.

Criminal Imbeciles.

In the statistical paper to which reference has more than once been made, facts were adduced to show that the imbecile section of our population is unusually addicted to violent and destructive crimes, to sexual offences, to arson, to homicidal and violent acts, and to cattle stealing; and that imbeciles are more frequently engaged in acts of burglary than their want of ability might lead us to expect. These facts were the result of a census of the convict population, and of a strict comparison of the elements of which it consists, with the records of the crimes for which the prisoners were undergoing punishment. There was, no doubt, on the day when the census was taken, that the convicts returned as weak-minded were really so, or that the crimes for which they were being punished were correctly abstracted from their caption-papers. Some idea of the number and importance of the imbeciles and of the criminals most nearly allied to them may be formed by means of

the figures relating to the convict prison at Millbank. In the midsummer of 1869 there were in the prison 140 weak-minded and 65 epileptics, and also 25 convicts of an allied type not easily defined or described: they probably belonged to the dangerous class known among the mendicant-thieves as Half sharps.'

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Now these facts, which so strikingly illustrate the source of some of the crimes best calculated to alarm and disgust us, certainly derive support and confirmation from the figures just submitted. Insanity plays a conspicuous part in the terrible drama of homicide, and among the insane imbeciles abound.

It is obvious then that if we would look for any further diminution in the number of capital punishments, and, what is far more important, in the number of those who commit the crimes that entail them, we must set ourselves seriously to the work of securing the persons of our imbeciles, and placing them for life in asylums fit for their reception.

For practical purposes it may be asserted that two classes of imbeciles find their way into our convict prisons and county and borough gaols, and sometimes to the scaffold. The members of the one class are stamped with imbecility in face and person, and in every word and act; those of the other class wear an expression of countenance which it requires some experience to recognise, are capable of sustained and intelligible conversation, and show their weakness of mind chiefly in the foolish and strange, and often violent, actions of an unsettled. and wandering life. Dr. Guy had a very distinct recollection of at least three specimens of this class, concerning whom it was much more easy to say that they were of weak and ununsound mind than to justify the opinion in any set form of

words.

As to the proper mode of dealing with the first and largest class of imbeciles, there can be no manner of doubt. Their proper place is not the prison, the workhouse, or the highway, but the imbecile asylum; and there can be as little doubt that it is both the interest and the duty of the state, and of all who recognise the misery, pecuniary loss and public disgrace attendant upon the worst crimes, to provide the needful asylums without delay, and take the most prompt and practical measures for getting our imbeciles transferred to them.

Happily there is no sort of difficulty in recognising these imbeciles, nor any reason why well-educated and experienced medical men should not be implicitly trusted to certify them as insane The duty might be safely entrusted to our medical

officers of health throughout the country, without entailing any serious increase of expense. The smaller and more dangerous class cannot be recognised so easily, and would be most effectually dealt with by some legislative measure which should consign all habitual criminals, after the commission of a certain defined number of crimes, to detention for life. The author stated that he had already taken one or two opportunities of pointing out the proper method of dealing with this large, costly and dangerous community of imbeciles; and that he would again endeavour to explain and enforce his views.

The time has come for us to take a large and comprehensive view of the criminal and dangerous classes. We know that they are at present to be found by tens of thousands infesting all our streets and highways, and haunting the worst houses and districts in all our towns: and by other tens of thousands in our prisons and workhouses; committed to prison after most expensive legal procedures, and detained there at great cost; and frequenting our workhouses at such times and seasons as suit their convenience. To our workhouses, too, as a matter of course, must needs gravitate all the worn-out crime of England.

In our county and borough gaols and workhouses we have ready to our hand the buildings which, with little outlay of money, might be adapted to all the reasonable uses that either crime or poverty suggest or entail. We want more lunatic asylums; we want asylums for idiots into which those unhappy and helpless beings may be drafted from the union workhouses; we want asylums for imbeciles quite as much in country parts as in the neighbourhood of London; and we want establishments in which the poor, rightly so called, may be separated from the depraved destitute with whom they are now forced to associate. We want schools for the young, and asylums for the old, in which the few poor may be separated from the many destitute by whom their morals are now being contaminated and their lives made miserable. Mr. Hastings has proved to us that many of our prisons are much too small to be efficiently and economically managed; and this fact has been further enforced, and illustrated by highly important details, in the able address of Colonel DuCane, the Chairman of the Section.1 The same may be said with truth of some of

· The following are some of the figures adduced in that address :—Number of local prisons in England and Wales, 114; in 54 of which there were in 1873 only 2,578 prisoners.(an average of about 48 prisoners); but in the remaining 62, 15,102 (an average of about 244 prisoners). Of the 54 small prisons, 8 had, in 1874, an average of 10 prisoners, and 33 of 50. The earnings of prisoners ranged from less than 4s. to more than Sl.: the average, 2l. 17s. 6d. The cost per head

our union workhouses. If a survey of all our prisons and workhouses by competent persons could be brought about, it would be easy to find some in every county and district which might at moderate cost be converted into lunatic, imbecile, and idiot asylums; into almshouses for the poor, and semi-penal establishments for the aged wrecks of the criminal population; into schools for poor children, and reformatories for those who have been all but hopelessly corrupted by early association with the criminal classes.

These suggestions, which might have sounded Utopian a hundred years ago, when railroads were not even imagined, and when a Local Government Board had no existence, have, Dr. Guy submits, become perfectly feasible in these more fortunate times, when the conveyance of people from place to place has become easy and cheap, and the Local Government Board is able to take a larger and wider view than was possible only a few years ago of the dangerous classes, and of the unseemly and demoralising way in which they have become blended and confounded with the decent and honest poor.

As to the cost of such a procedure as that here advocated, the author expressed his opinion that the expense of adapting our smaller prisons and our union workhouses to their new and better uses would be amply defrayed by the sale of so many of these buildings as might be pronounced to be no longer

necessary.

There was still a word to say on one obvious means of quickly gathering our imbeciles into asylums fitted for their reception: and here the author advocated the simple expedient of submitting every prisoner on his discharge from prison to the examination of an expert, who should report to a magistrate on oath (as is done in the case of pauper lunatics) the fact of a prisoner so discharged being imbecile or of weak mind, and a fit subject for an asylum; or, if of doubtful sanity, for an establishment in which he should pass a period of probation, thence to be sent to an asylum or discharged, as the case might require.

Dr. Guy concluded with a few words of explanation, to the effect that the first part of his paper, which deals with executions for murder, was new; the remainder not. What he had had

varied from 177. to 1227. If half the prisons were disestablished 200,000l. a-year might be saved; and still no one of the prisons retained need be more distant from any place than fifteen miles or so. The present distribution of our county and borough prisons is very curious; Staffordshire has only one prison on its borders, but Lincolnshire has ten within its limits, of which three are in the capital city. One part of England has a prison at the service of 20,000 people, and another part of England supplies one prison to 858,000 people.

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occasion to say on the plea of insanity in criminal cases, and on the dangerous propensities of the imbecile section of our population, is simply in confirmation of what he had said and written elsewhere. Nor were his suggestions respecting a survey of our workhouses with a view to the disintegration of their ill-assorted populations, and their allotment to better uses, now made for the first time.1 What was new in the suggestions now offered was the association of the county and borough gaol with the workhouse with a view to a joint survey of the two. Believing that it is fitting and convenient that those normal schools of vice, our union workhouses, should be submitted to the same examination with the prisons in which crime is punished, and that the buildings of either class should be speedily devoted to the purposes for which they are best fitted, he commended this his suggestion seriously and earnestly to all statists and statesmen.2

A Paper On the Punishment of Death,' was read by Mr. HOWARD LIVESEY. The writer endeavoured to prove, not by statistics, but by arguments and illustrations, based upon results, that the punishment of death, whilst revolting to our humanity, inconsistent with the teaching of the New Testament, and repugnant to the spirit of the age, has not, in any degree, diminished the crime for which it is inflicted, but rather tends, by familiarising the people with death, voluntarily and systematically inflicted, to demoralise or destroy the God-given instinct of the sacredness of human life, and thus, in some degree, to capacitate men for murderous deeds. The writer contended, without positively denying our right, in the abstract, to kill men who have killed others, that human tribunals, being fallible, are incapable of getting at all the motives and hidden forces which have had to do with the crime, and which ought to influence the destiny of every man. Also that human law should bear some analogy to Divine law as interpreted in the New Testament. The strong point of the paper was the impotence of capital punishment to deter from the crime of murder, which, if once admitted, and the writer contended that is unquestionably demonstrable, both from statistics and experience would move the nation to demand the abolition of a punishment in regard to the extensive and somewhat indis

1 See Dr. Guy's Inaugural Address as President of the Statistical Society in the Society's Journal, December, 1874; and his edition of 'Walker's Original,' p. 223. 2 Dr. Guy's Paper in full, with more than 8 pages of tabular matter illustrating many interesting questions connected with executions for murder, will be found in the first issue of the 'Statistical Journal' for the year 1876.