THE IRISH QUARTERLY REVIEW. No. XIII. JANUARY, 1854. ART. I. OUR JUVENILE CRIMINALS :-THE SCHOOL-MASTER OR THE GAOLER. 1. Report of Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles. Presented to House of Commons, in December, 1852. 2. The Condition and Education of Poor Children in English, and in German Towns. By Joseph Kay, Esq., M.A. of Trinity College, Cambridge, Barrister-at-Law; Published for The Manchester Satistical Society. London: Longman and Co., 1853. 3. Memoirs of Convicted Prisoners; Accompanied by Remarks on the Causes and Prevention of Crime. By the Rev. H. S. Joseph, Chaplain of Chester Castle. London: Wertheim and Mackintosh, 1853. 4. A Place of Repentance; or an Account of the London Colonial Training Institution and Ragged Dormitory, for the Reformation of Youthful and Adult Male Criminals, Great Smith Street, Westminster. By Samuel Martin, Minister of Westminster Chapel. Second Edition. London: James Nisbet and Co., 1852. 5. Juvenile Depravity. £100 Prize Essay. By Rev. Henry Worsley, M. A., Late Michel Scholar of Queen's College, Oxford, Rector of Easton, Suffolk. Dedicated By Special Permission to The Lord Bishop of Norwich. 1 vol. London: Charles Gilpin, 1849. 6. London Labour and the London Poor; A Cyclopædia of the Condition and Earnings of those that Will Work, Those that Cannot Work, and Those that Will Not Work. By Henry Mayhew, 2 vols. London, 1851. VOL. IV.-NO. XIII. 1 7. The Million-Peopled City; or One Half of the People of London Made Known to the other Half. By John Garwood, M.A., Clerical Secretary to the London City Mission, and Editor of "The London City Mission Magazine." 1 vol. London: Wertheim and Mackintosh, 1853. 8. The Rookeries of London: Past, Present and Prospective. By Thomas Beames, M.A., Preacher and Assistant of St. James', Westminster. Second Edition. 1 vol. London: Thomas Bosworth, 1852. 9. Meliora: or, Better Times to Come. Being the Contributions of Many Men Touching the Present State and Prospects of Society. Edited By Viscount Ingestre, 1st series, 2nd Edition 1852: 2nd series, 1853. London: John W. Parker and Son. 10. The Social Condition and Education of the People in England and Europe; Shewing the Results of the Primary Schools, and of the Division of Landed Property, in Foreign Countries. By Joseph Kay, Esq., M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge, Barrister-at-Law; and Late Travelling Bachelor of the University of Cambridge. 2 vols. London: Longman and Co., 1850. 11. Chapters on Prisons And Prisoners. By Joseph Kingsmill, M.A., Chaplain of Pentonville Prison, London. Second Edition, 1 vol. London: Longman and Co., 1852. 12. Prison Discipline; and the Advantages of the Separate System of Imprisonment, with a Detailed Account of the Discipline Now Pursued in the New County Gaol, At Reading; By the Rev. J. Field, M.A., Chaplain. 2 vols. London: Longman and Co., 1848. 13. University and Other Sermons. By John Field, M.A., of Magdalene Hall, Oxon, Chaplain of The Berkshire Gaol, Reading, 1 vol. London: Longman and Co., 1853. 14. Crime: its Amount, Causes and Remedies. By Frederick Hill, Barrister-at-Law, Late Inspector of Prisons, 1 vol. London: John Murray, 1853. 15. Crime in England, Its Relative Character and Extent, as Developed From 1801 To 1848. By Thomas Plint. London: Charles Gilpin, 1851. 16. Report on the Discipline and Management of the Convict Prisons, and Disposal of Convicts, 1852, With Notes on the Convict Question, Construction of Prisons, Hard Labour, &c., &c. By Lieut. Col. Jebb, C. B., SurveyorGeneral of Prisons, Chairman of the Directors, &c. Presented to both Houses of Parliament, by Command of Her Majesty. London: 1853. 17. Reports of the Directors of Convict Prisons on the Discipline and Management of Pentonville, Parkhurst, and Millbank Prisons, and of Portland, Portsmouth, and Dartmoor Prisons, and the Hulks, for the year 1852. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty. London: 1853. 18. Social Evils: Their Causes and their Cure. By Alexan der Thomson, Esq. of Banchory. London: James 19. Reformatory Schools, For the Children of the Perishing and Dangerous Classes, and for Juvenile Offenders. By Mary Carpenter. London: C. Gilpin. 1851. We have already written, * at considerable length, upon the lamentable moral and social condition of the laboring poor in our town and agricultural districts; but painful as that essay, in all its patent facts and indisputable evidences was, it disclosed its chiefest, and most appalling truth, in the statement that the mode of live revealed was not guilty in the eye of the Legislature, though black and hideous in its habitual sin, judged by the unchanging laws of an omniscient Almighty. Thus having placed before the mind of the reader, the state of those who are not criminal according to the national code, we shall, in our present paper, display the causes which conduce to make those guilty whom the law so considers, and we shall indicate the failures and the successes of the various methods of reformatory punishments which the Executive has adopted, under the different species of Prison Discipline-referring particularly to the state of our destitute and criminal juvenile poor, or, as they have been, with woful appropriateness, designated-"our Home Heathens." Why, it has been frequently asked, is crime so prevalent *See IRISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, Vol. III. No. 10. p. 299. Art.The Garret, The Cabin, and The Gaol. and so glaring, in a country great, and intelligent, and noble as England? Upon whatever shore her sons may reside, her freedom and her Bible become the first gifts which these sons offer to the people amongst whom they sojourn. England expends millions annually in propagating scripture truth: in every island of the far off seas her Missioners raise the hymn of praise, and teach the fierce savage the law of love, of truth, and the great mystery of expiation. At home, in our own Kingdoms, churches rise in every quarter of the land, and devoted to the service of Religion is a Press, able and honest, and issuing publications so cheap that none who desire to read them can, through poverty, fail to obtain the wished for work. Schools, and hospitals, and poor houses, charitable institutions that give a christian nobleness to the name of England, are open to all who need their aid. An active, intelligent, police watch over the internal peace and security of the Nation, and our prisons are in all points calculated to secure the custody of the offender against the laws:-yet, notwithstanding the Christianity, the care, the wealth, the wisdom, which distinguish the policy of England, the great mass of our poor are ignorant of God's law, thousands of our criminals know not the name of Christ, our juvenile poor are every day becoming, more and more, a race of juvenile yet hardened offenders-whilst childrer in years cursed with all the evil propensities of menthe great majority of our prisons are but the seminaries of vice, the plotting places of crimes, whilst our criminal law is little less than legislative vengeance, as cruel and undiscriminating as it is unphilosophical. We call Caligula a monster because he hung his table of edicts so high that none could read them, though all were punished for any infraction of the code-but the laws were written: we, a Christian Nation, treat our criminals worse than this heathen emperor treated his subjects-we punish their crimes, but we never taught them virtues. Despite these laws, and through these laws, crime has increased, and the number of the criminal population of London is now double that of the entire population of the city in the reign of Richard the Second. The criminal population to which we refer is not that polluted by great offences against morality. True, we must bear in mind that murder, and foul crimes, are noted in the statistics of the prison reports, but the minor offences are those to which the legislator or the philanthropist must direct his chief attention. Death to the murderer is the decree of the law, transportation is recorded against the robber; but the murderer may have been once but an ignorant man of strong untutored passions, the robber may have been a petty thief, who knew no law but the law of hunger, and whose instincts were only those of an animal. To check, to guide into christian peace, the violence of the former; to teach the rules of honesty and self-dependent industry to the latter, would have been the duty of a wise government had the offenders been before within the walls of a prison; had they been guiltless of former crime, their minds should have been blessed with sound education, and the principles of religious training; and had parents been unwilling to send them to educational institutions, the legislature should, in the exercise of its great power, have compelled the parents to permit the attendance of the child. The whole philosophy of the important books before us tends to prove the accuracy of these statements. The course of crime is not an impenetrable mystery; and he who reads the calmly reasoned deductions adduced by Mr. Field, and Mr. Kingsmill, in detailing the sad experiences of their ministry, will learn that, although the convict may be frequently but sufferring a just punishment for his crime, yet still more frequently he endures punishment for an offence, the primary cause of which may be fairly attributed to the imperfection of our system of legislation upon subjects affecting the social and moral state of the people. Though Crime in these Kingdoms, is of many phases of atrocity, it can, in most instances, be traced to its sources. The Rev. Mr. Kingsmill, Chaplain of Pentonville Prison, has had opportunities such as few men possess, of examining into the causes of crime. He took the cases of one hundred convicts, and from their own confessions arrived at the conclusion-and with this conclusion the reader of his book must agree that the chief springs of vice are found in the bad example of parents, ignorance of religion, the difficulty of obtaining employment, bad company, idleness, poverty, bad books, and vicious amusements, such as cheap theatres, and dancing saloons, where, to other vices, the giant evil Drunkenness is superadded. The Report of Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles affords remarkable evidence in support of this statement, and it is in all points most fully corroborated by Mr. Kay, by Mr. Field, and by Mr. Thomson. None who read our Prison Reports can doubt that paren |