respects, and it is desirable to send away vagrant boys from the city into the country, there are many that will not remain upon a farm, that need for their discipline the more active training of the shop, and who give a far better promise of being rescued from the temptations of the streets, if they have a remunerative mechanical trade. Besides, many months in the year the farm offers little. work for these institution boys to perform. The shop and the ship are the great promising openings for them.

It is still, however, the era of experiment, and the newer institutions are coming upon the field with the accumulated wisdom of a half century's trial to aid them at the start. The great leverage of loss still in these establishments—the fall of so many that have enjoyed their instructions show that there is further work for thinkers and executive minds to busy their thoughts upon. While the reform schools have been multiplying, the work of prevention has been carried on with an equal pace. The remarkable success of Dr. Chalmers, in Glasgow, in 1820, in carrying the day schools and religious institutions into the most vicious and degraded portions of the city, and changing the whole physical appearance of the vicinity, as well as the moral character of the inhabitants; and the repetition of the experiment in Edinburgh in 1845, in streets to which Burke, by numerous murders, had given an infamous notoriety — where one-fourth of the population were on the poor roll as paupers, and another fourth were known to be street beggars, thieves or prostitutes — awakened general interest. Within five years, by the introduction of the simplest form of religious and intellectual culture, the whole character of that locality in Edinburgh was changed. So practicable and effectual was the work, that in this short period it was not known that a single child of a family resident within the "West Port" was habitually absent from school, and from being a dangerous neighborhood, day and night, it became one of the most orderly and safest quarters of the city. The success, also, of Sheriff Watson, in the Scotch city of Aberdeen, in clearing all the streets of young vagrants by supplying plain clothing, food and instruction, and requiring all children found in the streets without regular employment to attend upon them at the peril of being committed to the penitentiary; and of the English ragged schools, originated by that remarkable crippled shoemaker, John Pounds, of Portsmouth, in his experiment with his "little blackguards," as he called them, inspired christian men

and women on this side of the Atlantic to explore the dark wastes of vice in our large cities, and carry with them the resources of the gospel and opportunities for intellectual and industrial training. What transformations have taken place in the Five Points and fourth ward of New York, in Bedford street, Philadelphia, and in North Street, Boston! The moral wilderness and the solitary places have been made glad by the presence of devoted men and women; the wolf has been made to dwell with the lamb, and a little child has led them.

One of the most thoroughly organized preventive measures of the day is the extended system of the children's aid society, in New York, embracing temporary lodgings for little street merchants, day and evening industrial schools, and a constant, vigorous deportation of the vagrant youths of the city streets to those portions of the country where the pressing demand for even juvenile labor secures for these "little wanderers" a comfortable home and an agricultural training. The past twenty years has witnessed the rapid increase of orphan institutions, Magdalen asylums, city and midnight missions, and almost every conceivable variety of associated effort to carry the blessing of the gospel to the dangerous and perishing classes. There is, doubtless, a great want of economy in this multiplication of agencies with paid agents. It is not altogether an unfounded taunt on modern philanthropy, that it is made to cost two dollars to give a needy person one.

There is a special call at this hour for some central board in states or municipalities to systematize and harmonize these multiform agencies; but, after all these obvious evils are admitted, it must be said that their very multitudinousness calls the greater number of workers into the field, and secures a wider exploration of the seats and nests of vice and crime, the breaking up of which will be one of the most important and successful steps toward depleting our prisons and decreasing the criminal class. We bid God-speed to all these thousands of laborers in the great common field. Their efforts will disclose their efficiency in the transformations they secure. They will

IV. THE IDEAL OF A TRUE PRISON SYSTEM FOR A STATE.

By Z. R. BROCKWAY, Superintendent of the Detroit House of Correction.

As, in poetry and the fine arts, ideality forms one of the chief constituents of creative genius, so, in political affairs and civil progress, it is an essential element. It is the image of the real-that which may be; not of the visionary, the fanciful. Plans for improving society, deduced from cloistral meditation, may be chimerical; but practical reforms come from actual contact with the classes considered. A prison system, devised by the philosopher, may or may not be practicable; but a system, drawn from experience, is likely to be true; and such is the ideal I wish to evolve.

The prison system of a state, being a department of the state government, should partake of the same spirit with the other parts; and, since all good government is beneficent and promotive of the prosperity and happiness of society at large, through its individual members, a true prison system will seek this end for that portion of society, for whose special benefit it is created. The true interests of the individual are never antagonistic to, but always identical with, those of society. Whatever may be their character or conduct, this remains ever true. No social ostracism can change it. Disregard of this principle is sure to bring disaster in one form or another. Legalized degradation or destruction of any class or any criminal inflicts injury upon the whole social organism directly or reflexively; while efforts for the highest and best welfare of any person or any portion of society promote the general good-positively when successful, negatively always, and necessarily upon the active agents of such efforts, whether successful or not.

Not only should there be unity of spirit in the general government and the prison system of the state, but identity of aim. The grand aim of government is to protect the people in the exercise of all the liberty they can rightfully claim, and thus to secure the highest development of their natural faculties and powers. So the central aim of a true prison system is the protection of society against crime, not the punishment of the criminals. Punishment the instrument, protection the object; and, since it is clear that there can be no real protection against crime without preventing it, prevention must be placed fundamentally in the principles of a true prison

system. This widens the scope of a prison system, embracing causes of crime, mediate and immediate, and the classes from which criminals come, as well as the treatment of criminals themselves. It includes, of course, a system of prisons, but much more than this, if it is to be of any great service.

The causes of crime are primarily in the person, secondarily in the circumstances that surround him. The quality of being that constitutes a criminal cannot be clearly known, until observe as belonging to the class from which criminals come, for the peculiarities of an individual may be purely personal, indicating nothing definite as to the law that governs his actions; while the same facts, found to follow a class, would reveal at least the existence of a law, though possibly not yet definable. The science of man forms the foundation of all systems for his government. A true prison system, therefore, should take cognizance of criminal classes as such, for purposes of investigation, to bring to bear such forces as may modify their common character, thus diminishing the tendency to crime. Surely, much may be gained for repression of crime. in a community, through facility of access to, and information. concerning, the criminal class, and also much for finding the true principles of prison administration, when we can classify society and designate the conditions that develop criminal practices. See the significance of the following facts, gathered from an examination of 100,058 prisoners from 15 different prison establishments, as well county prisons for the confinement of those convicted of misdemeanors, as state prisons for felons: 53,101 were born in foreign countries, leaving 46,957 natives; but of these, full 50 per cent were born of foreign parents, making over 76 per cent of the whole number, whose tastes and habits were those of such foreigners as emigrate to this country. The inmates of the two classes of prisons, viewed apart in this particular, show that, while 61 per cent of the county prisoners were actually foreign born, only 39 per cent of the state prisoners are so reported, thus exactly reversing the ratio. Of this 100,058 prisoners, 58,159 were living without the influence of family life, and 41,899 laid claim to family connections. Now, if we consider, in connection with this, what we know as to the life of these latter-the low type of their family relations — we have another social fact in reference to criminals, of much importance. Again, of the same aggregate, 16 per cent were between the ages of 16 and 20 years, 42 per cent between 20 and 30

and 42

per

years, cent over 30. Or, 58 per cent were under 30 years of age, and 42 per cent over; in the county prisons 52 per cent were under 30, and in the state institutions 70 per cent. The following facts as to the previous occupation of this 100,000 prisoners convicted of crime point unmistakably to its prolific conditions, viz: 82 per cent were laborers and servants, 16 per cent only were artisans, less than 2 per cent "professional loafers," and only 874 of the whole number from the educated professions. It is known, too, that the education of prisoners generally consists in the ability to read and write simply; but few can do any mathematical work, and not one per cent are classically educated, and these but superficially so. The statistics in ny possession show 27 per cent not able to read; 17 per cent read a little, but do not write; thus 44,000 of the number under consideration are without education, and the remaining 56,000, being able only to read and write, are without systematic mental culture. If we add to the above one other fact, viz. : that 82 per cent admit themselves to be intemperate, in bondage to their animal appetites, only 18 per cent claiming to be temperate, while many of these were committed for crimes, the consequence of their excesses, we have an array of statistical information as to the social condition of the classes from which criminals come, and inferentially as to the constitutional condition of criminals, that cannot be ignored by any prison system justly entitled to the name, and certainly not by the true ideal system.

Not only does there devolve upon the department of criminal administration the gathering and arrangement of social statistics that bear upon crime, but the duty of generalizing them. No sound prison system can be devised until examination is had of antecedent social phenomena. Whence these unfavorable conditions among men? Why does crime follow in their train? What is the molecular condition or quality of those who gravitate to vicious and criminal society and practices? How is the mind affected by a degraded physical organism? How are the tastes formed, the purposes and desires moulded, and the moral sense obscured by such a mind? Do men make themselves what they are voluntarily, or is there a law of transmission pervading the moral and intellectual nature, as well as the physical? What kind of culture intensifies the natural tendency? What cures and tones up? How can a system be planned, a department of state government formed, to cure criminals, to stamp out crime, and to heal the