We could extend our examination of witnesses, by going through nearly all those who appeared before the late Parliamentary Committee on Juvenile Delinquency; for nearly every witness gave evidence in favour of the above views. It appears needless now to do so, for it has become pretty clear to those who have practical experience of such matters, that some new measure is needed.

We are now happy to observe, that the measure introduced by the noble Lord, Earl Shaftesbury, into Parliament, is likely to become law; and in a future number we shall give for the information of our readers, some of the leading provisions of that Bill, and also of that introduced into the House of Commons by Mr. Adderley, on the same subject.

VAGRANT CHILDREN.

IN a Parliamentary paper just published, a return is given of the number of children below the apparent age of 14 found by the police "at large" as mendicants or thieves. Of such children, 94 were found in the various metropolitan districts, in whose cases it was impossible to find or trace their connexion with their parents. The parents of 231 "children at large" were found, and appeared to be in a condition of life to maintain and educate them; while it was found that the parents of 580 of such children were capable of at least contributing to their maintenance and education. Of 411 children it was notorious that their parents sent them to beg and live in idleness and profligacy on their earnings. The total number of children "at large" in London amounts to 1,316. Joined to this return is a similar statistical acount of the children under 14 found by the police in lodging-houses as mendicants or thieves. Of such children 40 were found without parents; the parents of 105 were able to maintain them, and the parents of 1,190 were able to contribute towards their support; and 433 were purposely sent from their homes to beg. The total number of children in lodging-houses was 1,782, which number, added to the number of children "at large," gives a grand total of 3,098 juvenile mendicants and thieves. These figures, however, give but a very inadequate idea of the real number of the criminals who are daily growing up to manhood and womanhood. It is stated in a note to the same return that the number of children at large and living in idleness, without education, and apparently neglected by their parents, of the lower classes, who are generally in the receipt of wages, amount, as nearly as can be ascertained, to 20,641 under 15 years of age; and there are 911 among this number who have been charged with other offences than those of begging and theft.

"The effectual antagonist to the increase of crime, must be found in such an education as shall reach the young of those classes, out of which criminals are bred, and shall replace the education they now receive from their larcenous and felonious parents, by such juris-prudential arrangements, as shall rescue both the juvenile delinquents, and offenders whose term of punishment has expired, from the necessity which they now lie under, of falling back among their old associates, and recurring to their evil courses."-Edinburgh Review for April, 1853, page 300,

Notices of Meetings, etc.

Papers, Original and Selected.

JUVENILE MENDICANCY-LORD SHAFTESBURY'S BILL. In spite of the noble efforts which have been made during a series of years for the rescue of our juvenile pauper population from wretchedness and ruin, it is a fact patent alike to the political economist and the Christian philanthropist, that the fountains from which flow the polluted streams of youthful criminality, have not been dried up. We know what Ragged Schools and Night Refuges have achieved. We are not unmindful of the benefits now being reaped from the breaking up of those dens of thieves, the low lodging-houses of London, now under the surveillance of the police, and fast becoming both physically and morally pure. It is, indeed, gratifying to be able to state on the best authority, that in the Metropolis alone, 80,000 lodging-houses have been already registered according to the provisions of the new Act, and that there is good reason to believe that the number of such houses will soon amount to 100,000. But still another bold and vigorous experiment is required to be made. Juvenile mendicancy abounds in our streets. The famine which consigned so many of the Irish people to the grave, or drove them across the Atlantic, was also the occasion of a vast immigration of the Celtic race into all our great towns in Great Britain, and especially into London itself. These people have brought with them their rags, their filth, their squalid indolence, and with these also a low cunning, long and diligently practised on a more barren soil than our own, in extracting from the benevolent more or less abundant alms. Within a few years, every Londoner must have observed new groups in our public thoroughfares, a "cooped and wandered wretchedness," to which hitherto he had been a stranger. The tattered husband and wife, each with a child in arms, and a troop of little urchins bringing up the rear, have looked forth their wants on the passers-by, or when the policeman was not near, and a quiet street or square furnished the opportunity, have moaned out with a vociferous importunity their uncouth and eager solicitations. As the Times remarks, "This Metropolis certainly is the strangest place in the world. It is a place where extremes meet, and where splendour is next door to misery. One thing we have here in fuller development than may be found in any other city of Europe. We have a whole population of mendicants, or rather of people professing mendicancy." And, adds the leading journal, with good-natured and just raillery," Here we are all sound economists; we all despise the abbeys which sucked up the wealth of the land, and for a pretence, kept a crowd of beggars at their gates; we all think a beggar worse than a sinner, inasmuch as he sins at another's expense; we are all thrifty and have an eye to the main chance; we are all fastidiously neat and clean; we are all jealous for an appearance in the eyes of foreigners-yet we all give to beggars. It is the father of the family who is the chief delinquent. Whatever his wife saves in tea, butter, or beer, he throws away upon beggars. He saves sixpence by screwing a cabman, and gives it to a fellow whom no cabman would trust near his

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stand. The husband, always the biggest talker, is the weak point of the domestic fortress. He gives, gives, gives, and has only courage to confess the half of his infatuated benevolence. To this respectable paterfamilias, the model householder of London society, and the most self-sufficient being that walks the earth, we mainly owe the existence of such a mass of mendicancy as is to be found nowhere else on the globe. It is true that the English make beggars wherever they go, and are, therefore, sure enough to find them. Wherever the tourist roams over the Continent he finds the invariable little bareheaded, barefooted boy, mumbling, Un petit sou!' or some equivalent appeal. But it is the Englishman who makes the little wretch; the natives have too high an appreciation of their coppers. Everywhere we are scolded for demoralizing the poor. In London we have it all our own way, and we have reduced the poor to the lowest scale of morals. It has come to this, that you will encounter more beggars, of one sort or another, in walk from Westminster Abbey to Oxford Street, than you will in a tour from London to Switzerland, whether you go by Paris or by the Rhine, You may be a week at Brussels without being molested, except by a woman offering you a bouquet as you step into your carriage, or by an old cripple who offers you holy water at the cathedral. Yet Belgium, we are assured by our handbooks, is a priest-ridden, pauper-eaten country. Then what is London ?"

Many a reader will acknowledge, whether a paterfamilias or not, that he has been guilty in this matter. The eye has affected the heart; misery, cold, and hunger, were before him; the pleader was ofttimes the solitary child, naked and shivering, who told you that he or she sometimes went in the evening to a Ragged School, and you said, "Ought he be allowed to starve ?" But you and others forget that nearly all such are the children of idle and drunken parents, able to work and frequently employed, but who prefer luxurious sloth and copious gindrinking at the cost of the public, and by the utter demoralization of their unhappy offspring. And you also forget, that "as surely as the tadpole will change into a frog, the little fellow who pursues you length of a street, with the stump of a broom in his hand, will one day pick your pockets, and be a frequent charge on the county rates and the national exchequer. Our juvenile offenders in the Pentonville and other reformatory prisons, cost us each more than £50 a-year; he will probably be a pensioner on the State for the rest of his life, and whenever he is not in prison will be plundering the public.

the

"WHAT IS TO BE DONE?" asks the Times. It wittily suggests, but as speedily withdraws the proposed remedy, of taking away from the gentlemen "their breeches' pockets," and the bringing of "some corre sponding process" to bear upon the ladies. That a great evil exists, ever increasing, awfully cumulative and threatening to our social wellbeing, is more and more evident every day→→

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Scarcely anybody," says the Daily News, "knows what to do. A Committee of the Lords sat some years ago, to inquire especially into the case of juvenile offenders and transportation; and their report was founded on the testimony of magistrates, judges, chaplains, governors of jails, and others who were supposed to have a practical knowledge of the unhappy class which occasions so much grief and perplexity. Nothing could be stronger than the expression of opinion on the part of the judges that education of a

high order, early administered, was the only resource. Yet nothing effectual has been done. The magistrates know not what to do with the young creatures who are brought before them, many times in a year, and in increasing numbers; and the police are but Job's comforters in the case; for they tell of multiplying swarms in every town throughout the country. To tell how prison is no remedy, but quite the contrary, is so trite, that nobody wants to hear it. We all know that children sink lower, either there, or when they come out, so branded that they cannot get work, or any kind of countenance from society. Prisons have failed. Parkhurst has failed, because it is a prison where the boys are most unhappy of all. The young creatures are far below the reach of the educational aids of the Government, as at present afforded. They are below even the Ragged Schools. A Ragged School may, at its first institution, include a good many of the perishing and dangerous class; but in a little while the character of the attendance rises, and the most wretched class drops out at the bottom. The young creatures are off in their wildness to prey upon their kind-the girls to haunt fairs and markets all over half-a-dozen counties, and the boys forming gangs, and drawing in and training little children of half their own age. All this is going on; and we go on administering prison-prison-still prison, after we have all lost faith in prison; and just because scarcely anybody has anything else to propose."

But is it not pleasant to find that "scarcely anybody" is not the same phrase in its application as "nobody?" For Providence raises up from time to time men who, if they cannot untie, yet do cut many a Gordian knot like this by a sword wielded by a strong arm, and made keen in its edge by love. The difficulty which has long perplexed us, which no statesman has ever been able to solve, although attempts have been made to do so not a few; this difficulty is now, we confidently believe, in the fair way of being met and conquered by the proposed measures of Lord Shaftesbury and Mr. Adderley. To an explanation of the provisions and objects of the first of these Bills, we now call the attention of our friends. The second measure, in strict harmony in its benevolent spirit with that of Lord Shaftesbury, although differing in the special class for whose benefit it is intended, will form the subject of a future notice.

We have already referred to the fact that vast numbers of young children are daily sent out, not only in the Metropolis, but in all our great towns, in order to obtain by begging the means of supporting their idle or dissolute parents. It is also well known that there are many orphan boys and girls who are compelled to seek in this objectionable mode the means whereby they obtain a miserable nightly shelter, and a pittance of support from those lodging-house keepers who may think it on the whole a benefit to themselves to receive them. Whether it be, however, the parents, or the quasi protector as just described, it will be evident to all, that these children are exposed to temptations to evil of the most urgent kind. First of all, they are trained in this way to the practice of deception, inasmuch as under the pretence of selling matches or other articles, their real mission is that of mendicancy, as most persons in London well know from experience. Again, the young beginner is speedily made familiar by this vagrant mode of life with others similarly engaged, who have not contented themselves with simple solicitation, but who, finding this oftentimes a slow and precarious path to success, have resorted to acts of theft, and are quite prepared to initiate their new acquaintance into the mysteries of