Surely the above figures require neither comment nor amplification. Flourishing in our midst is an institution which, by year after year housing and succouring the broken-down, jaded sinners, honestly fulfils the design of the worthy men whose good deeds. live so long after they have passed away. Its size, its capabilities, and its usefulness place the Magdalen immeasurably above every other establishment of the kind. The impression which prevails in certain quarters, that it is to some extent a close borough, managed by a small clique, is manifestly incorrect; but it would notwithstanding be very gratifying to have more light thrown upon its internal arrangements. At present there is some unnecessary reticence, not on the part of the administrative officers, but in the rules laid down for their guidance; and it would be satisfactory if, by an amplified annual statement, by offering greater facilities of inspection to the benevolent, and by giving convincing proof of the catholicity of their mode of admission, the managing committee would extend the knowledge of the good they effect. This is now but imperfectly understood, and even the Charity Commissioners, by not publishing their report on the Magdalen, and by making a ridiculous stipulation that it should be considered a private document, have favoured the obscurity under which the operation of the charity labours. It is not impossible that improvements could be made in its rules; it is not impossible that the tacit regulation excluding women who have been long in their sin might be rescinded or modified; and that the already comprehensive benefits it confers might be still further enlarged. That the sad evil which the Magdalen is designed to allay is an embarrassing one, is no reason that the earnest and religious-minded should put off its consideration until that convenient season which is so hazardous a waiting-time.

I commenced by appealing specially to the sorrow-stricken, because I know that none have so much faith in the providence of God as those who have felt His chastening hand; but surely I have said enough to interest all in the establishment I have described. It forms but one link in a long chain of noble missionary effort; it benefits only the social pariahs of a certain grade; and its position and aims are exceptional and peculiar: but inasmuch as it has rescued brand after brand from the burning; and as it has bravely stood the test of time, of ridicule, and change, so, as it seems to me, does it call for extended sympathy and enlarged support in the name of Him who came to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

THE INFLUENCE OF GAOL CHAPLAINS.

BY THE REV. C. B. GIBSON, M.R.I.A.

(Late Chaplain in the Convict Service).

A RESPECTABLE gentleman in the City had a son who gave him and every member of his family a great deal of trouble by his extravagant and felonious propensities. Complaining to his wife, one morning, of the sums abstracted from his cash-box, that lady replied,

His

"Perhaps it would be as well to send him to our country cousins in Yorkshire. Let him work on their farm for his food. labour may be an object to them."

"I think you have hit on it, my dear; we will try it for a few years, at all events, provided our cousins will take him. I shall tell them to work him hard, and to keep his nose to the grinding

stone."

The country cousins were consulted, and said they would be "delighted" to receive the lad and give him food and clothing for his labour. He was accordingly sent off. For a few years the reports of his conduct were most favourable; but after this there was a change, and the Yorkshire farmer wrote to say that he could "keep him no longer," that "he refused to do an honest day's work, and, worse still, was setting a bad example to every member of the family. Send for him at once, or I shall pack him off. I would not keep such a fellow in my house."

"What shall I do with him?" said the father of the lad, with a sigh, to his wife.

"Send for him, he is our own son,-and let us do our best to reform him ourselves. After all, it is hardly fair to expect our Yorkshire cousin to keep him."

The question, "What shall we do with our convicts ?" was easily answered some years ago: "Send them to Botany Bay, Van Diemen's Land, or any of our colonies," was the reply. So they were sent, and there was an end of them and the difficulty. They were provided for for life. But this state of things no longer exists: one colony after another has refused to receive our convicts; the colonists of the Cape of Good Hope had nearly risen in arms against us for attempting to send a ship-load there, and resolutely resisted their landing; and we were obliged to give in, and send our merchandise elsewhere. There is but one colony-Western Australia—

which is still willing to receive a portion of them, but a pressure has just been put upon it and the mother country by the Colonial Government at Melbourne, which, there is little doubt, will effectually close this port against our convict ships. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the English Government has succumbed to the pressure put upon it by the people of Melbourne. They think we ought to deal with our own moral sewage, and not direct its course towards them, or deluge our colonies with it. "We have enough of our own to deal with, without yours," is their language; and we must confess there is reason in language like this.

This being the state of things, the question is no longer "What shall we do with our convicts?" but "How shall we reform them, or any portion of them ?" To this most important question we

would now address ourselves.

The machinery for the reformation of a convict is of a twofold nature,-moral and material, physical and spiritual; between which there should exist as much harmony as possible; and where there appears no real harmony, there should be no clashing. There should be a perfect understanding between the governor of the prison and the chaplain. The governor's duty is to see that the sentence is fairly carried out and the discipline of the prison maintained. It is the chaplain's duty to watch over the mind and heart of the prisoner, and to mark well the effect of the prison discipline upon the moral nature of the convict.

We say this emphatically and advisedly, inasmuch as there is an impression abroad that chaplains have nothing whatever to do with discipline. We happen to know a chaplain who was summarily dismissed for publishing a book, in which he attempted to show that a new feature in convict discipline was producing a large increase in prison relapses. As a rule, the less a chaplain interferes, the better he will be liked. Let him take his salary, eat his bread and butter, and hold his tongue.

But suppose he should see his own work marred and brought down by the discipline; that he be placed in the position of a clergyman who feels his church shaking and crumbling about his ears from the working of a large and powerful steam-engine; what is he to do?-Politely tell his neighbour to stop it, and be laughed at for his folly? No; the man who does the injury must be publicly prosecuted.

Let us notice the various kinds of discipline to which each convict is subjected, before he becomes a perfectly free man, such as he was before his imprisonment; and the effect, or probable effect, of the discipline in the way of moral reformation.

The convict commences his novitiate in one of our cellular prisons. If an Englishman, he is sent to Millbank Prison, on the

Thames, near Vauxhall Bridge. The majority of male convicts are drafted in here from the county and borough prisons, where they are confined previous to conviction. A prisoner regularly confined in a county, city, or borough prison, after conviction, is not a "convict," as this term is now understood. In these prisons the longest period of detention is two years. It requires a sentence of five years, and an incarceration in a Government prison, to have the convict brand properly and legally burned in.

Millbank, though a separate and cellular prison for females, is little more than a receiving-house for males, where they remain but a few weeks, and are then sent to the beautiful model prison of Pentonville, in Islington. We call it beautiful, and so it is,a beautiful piece of machinery-a beautiful man-trap, or mouse-trap, but one almost too complicated for unskilful hands to meddle with: for a few more turns of the screw than are laid down in the scale by the late Sir Joshua Jebb-by whom the machine was constructed, —and you injure both the body and mind of the prisoner.

Here, at Pentonville, the prisoner may be truly said to commence his novitiate; but as the Roman Catholic chaplain of the separate prison of Mountjoy, Dublin, said, with surpassing naïveté, "These poor people are not called by God to a contemplative life; and hence their minds soon require to be relieved by occupation. If this be denied, the almost inevitable consequence is idleness and ennui, from which they take refuge in reminiscences nowise favourable to improvement."

There was an attempt made some time ago in Ireland to introduce what is called the "idle discipline;" and as this discipline was supposed to be new-although it had been imported from America,it "took" for a time, and was countenanced by people who should have known better. "Idleness and dislike of steady work," write the Four Visiting Justices of the West Riding prison of Wakefield, "are probably the most universal characteristics of the criminal class. We in England have sought to correct that by making labour as penal as possible, by the treadmill and the crank. The directors of Irish convict prisons have adopted the opposite plan, they have made idleness penal, work a privilege."

This seems to sound well, but let us read a little farther :

"The prisoner, kept in the strict seclusion of his cell, and forced to be idle, soon feels that to have something to do would be a great relief to the intense monotony of his existence. The want of work becomes the severest punishment; so severe indeed, that were it continued too long, the mind would give way under it."

To say nothing of the mental and moral evils arising from the idle cellular discipline-among which we find madness and suicide, examples of which have come under our own observation, some of

which we relate in "Life among Convicts,"-to say nothing of these, the attempt to force a man to be idle seems directly opposed to all our preconceived notions, and as much opposed to the laws of nature as to the command of God, who has said, "Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work."

But we cannot violate any one of God's natural laws-for the laws of nature are the laws of God-with impunity to ourselves or others. This idle discipline would not succeed even with the lower animals. Let us, for example, introduce honey into each particular cell of a beehive, and deprive the bee of the power of gathering and manufacturing for itself, for the space of three months, or even three weeks, and we shall have every bee in the hive in the condition of the gentleman that Doctor Abernethy advised to live on a shilling a day and earn it. The late Doctor Bayly, physician to the Queen, and for many years superintendent of Millbank Prison, says, in one of his reports on cellular or solitary confinement, "When the punishment is continued for many months, and especially when it is carried out in all its integrity, it exerts, as might be expected, a depressing influence on the whole nervous system of the convicts. The result is shown partly in the loss of physical vigour, and of the power of resisting external impressions, and partly in an impairment of mental energy."

We regret to say that some prison chaplains have given their sanction to the idle cellular discipline, on account of the advantages which they imagine it gives them over the weakened mind of the prisoner. One of these gentlemen, speaking of this system, says, “If protracted long enough to be adequately penal, and to give the chaplain a fair chance, it renders the wits and will limp and flabby." "Minds," says another chaplain, "suddenly separated from all external associations," and, as we learn from the context, without industrial employment, "generally present at first a perfect chaos of feeling. Here solitude, compelling reflection, soon does its work." Yes, but it is a work of darkness, and not of light :

Εκ Χαεος δ' Ερεβος τε μελαινα τε Νυξ εγενοντο.

Men of good understanding-and there are men of this stamp among prison chaplains-were not long in discovering the fearful evils likely to result from the idle discipline. "Industrial occupations under qualified masters should be provided, to such an extent as would serve to alleviate the feeling of loneliness in the cell, and to convey a knowledge of such handicrafts as would prove useful to the prisoner in after life," writes the Episcopalian chaplain of an Irish convict prison, in 1852. "My decided conviction is," writes the Presbyterian chaplain of the same prison-Mountjoy, "that the separate system adopted at Mountjoy, in cases where the health of the prisoner