in every way profitable to them and salutary. Their active bodily training cannot begin too early."

Mere bodily labour, though less efficient than trained labour, is of great intellectual value. Mr Paget, the member for Nottingham, employs on his farm boys who go to school on alternate days.

"On this system," he says, they are never weary either of school or of work. At fourteen years they have received not only a very fair amount of the rudiments of learning, but they have also acquired a knowledge of the business of life, and are ready to enter into service, with all that skill arising from habits of labour, combined with hardihood from exposure in out-of-doors work, which the farmer who hires them has a right to expect. They are much better servants than the mere school boy would be. Their school life being compared, not with a holiday, but with a day of labour, they look upon it as a rest, and their associations with books are not irksome, but agreeable, so that they will retain what they have acquired. The schoolmaster also feels the advantage of this system. The boys attend more regularly than the average of children, and, remaining to a later age, their attainments are higher, and they give a higher tone to the school. Mr Spencer, the master of our school, declares that any master, who has once experienced the benefits of the system, will be very unwilling to forego them. This alternate system of labour and rest appears to be indicated by our nature, in which the activity of the body is a good preparation to the activity of the mind, and every hard-working professional man has found that the best rest for his over-tasked mind is in bodily exertion."

On the other subject to which Mr Chadwick's attention was directed the shortening the periods of mental labour imposed on children- still more important information was collected. result is summed up by the Royal Commissioners :—

Its

"I. That for children under the age of twelve years, twenty-four hours a-week is nearly the limit of profitable instruction in studies requiring mental effort. II. That eighteen hours a-week is often a more useful period of mental effort than twenty-four. III. That fifteen hours a-week, the utmost that is obtained by the factory children, is, to use the most unfavourable expression, not insufficient. IV. That much may be done in twelve hours a-week, or two hours a day, provided that those two hours be two fresh hours in the morning. V. That children who have been educated up to the age of seven in a good infant school can be taught in three years, in a school attendance of from fifteen to eighteen hours a-week, to read well, to write well, and to understand and apply the common rules of arithmetic.'

I believe that the ordinary hours of mental work and bodily confinement in the schools of the lower orders are about thirty hours a-week, and that those in the schools of the middle and higher classes are much longer, especially in girls' schools. I trust that the obscurity in which the education of the higher and middle classes is now involved may be dispelled by the Commission now sitting on public schools, and by the Commission on middle-class education, which I have ventured to recommend. But if these estimates of the hours now devoted to teaching approach the

E

truth, we are employing labour on the part of our masters, and time, health, and energy on the part of our children, not only fruitlessly, but absolutely mischievously. To arrest or merely to diminish this frightful waste deserves, perhaps more than other matter alluded to in our programme, the earnest co-operation of all the members of this Association.

Lord BROUGHAM said that every one who had heard Mr Senior's address would admit the importance as well as the excellence of it. He had not heard the first part of the address, but of that which he had heard he had formed the very highest opinion. One recommendation he would advert to was that of this Association making application to Parliament on behalf of middle-class education. The difficulties were very great with regard to the worst of the evils that had been brought before them—namely, the employment of children two years old—it was frightful to think of-at lacemaking. The education of the upper classes and of the lower classes had been much attended to of late years, but that of the middle classes not in the smallest degree. And this application to Parliament being made, he would fain hope it would prove more successful than many similar applications that had been made of late years. He himself presented in three several sessions petitions, numerously signed by most respectable persons in London and elsewhere, pointing out the notorious evil of there being no provision made for examining the schoolmasters of the middle classes. The prayer of the petition was confined to the appointment by the Privy Council of inspectors of the middle-class schools, and the answer given during three several sessions was, that the Government had not the means for providing for those inspectors. They did not deny the expediency, almost the necessity, of such inspectors, but said they could barely support the expense of the inspection at present allowed. He sincerely hoped, however, that a petition from this Association would be more effectual than those previous ones. He concluded by expressing his thanks to Mr

Senior for his lecture.

ADDRESS BY LORD NEAVES,

PRESIDENT OF THE DEPARTMENT OF REFORMATION AND PUNISHMENT,

LORD NEAVES commenced his address as follows:-The subjects assigned for discussion to this the third department of the Association relate generally to the prevention and repression of crime, including the punishment and reformation of the criminal,―subjects undoubtedly of very great importance and of very great difficulty. I shall advert to some of the principal questions thus raised, and shall state some leading principles which seem to me to apply to them. In doing so, I do not expect that what I say will always be in accordance with the opinions of even a majority of my audience; but I know I shall receive that fair hearing which is so necessary for free discussion, and which may always be depended upon in the deliberations of this Association. The primary purpose of punishment, as inflicted by society, is, in my opinion, to deter from the commission of crime. This idea may not be the origin of punishment, which probably was at first awarded as a just retribution due by the offender to the aggrieved feelings of the injured party or private avenger on the one hand, and to the moral sense and sympathy of the public on the other. But practically, and more particularly under written laws, punishment has come to be attached as a sanction to prohibitory enactments, in the hope, if possible, that, from the penal consequences they announce, the law may not be violated at all; and with the design, if it be, that the punishment of the offender may at least, as our criminal writs bear, deter others from committing the like crimes in time coming. This expression as to deterring "others" is cautiously and correctly chosen, and involves an important distinction. It is but too certain as to a large class of criminals that the infliction of punishment upon them is insufficient to prevent a repetition of their offence. The habitual and hardened criminal is in general proof against that influence. But this does not destroy the effect of punishment as an example and as a means of deterring others from crime. It may deter those who are not habitual and hard

ened offenders. It certainly does deter many of weak and wavering principles, who might otherwise yield to temptation. No man can question this who bestows a serious thought on the subject. Let it only be supposed that all punishment for crime were abolished to-morrow, it cannot be doubted that the day after we should see the effect of the change in the immense impulse given to criminal appetites and passions when thus freed from the check at present imposed on them by the terrors of the law. Viewed in this light, we not only find a full justification for human punishment in the great law of self-defence, but we also see in them, when well! regulated and adjusted, neither on the one hand so slight as to produce contempt, nor on the other so severe as to defeat their object, a noble institution which supports and strengthens the voice of conscience in the human breast, by giving it an outward utterance and a practical power; an institution also which saves men from themselves, assists them to subdue their baser inclinations, and, by planting a strong hedge on the boundary-line between right and wrong, preserves many from transgressing who would otherwise be easily induced to cross the march. Punishment in this light has even a higher function than the reformation of criminals. It tends to preserve myriads or rather millions of men from ever becoming criminal. This character of deterring from crime ought, I think, to attach to punishment in all its shapes. It ought always to be something which the mass of mankind must look upon as an infliction to be dreaded and shunned. Punishment, to be what it professes, must be accompanied with pain and privation; and if it is ever divested of these qualities, a serious shock is given to the moral sense of the multitude, and a serious disturbance introduced among the motives and forces which influence human conduct. I would not be so pedantic as the prison disciplinarian who, when a sick prisoner was ordered a glass of wine, used to put something into it to give it a bad taste. Far less would I imitate the barbarity of the Bastile jailor who put his foot on the spider that formed the sole comfort and companion of his unhappy prisoner. But I conceive that punishment must, if possible, never be made pleasant, and must never infer such a condition of things as an innocent labouring man would wish to attain in exchange for his own lot. In respect of diet, and comfort, and labour, it ought to involve as much hardships and penance as may be compatible with those sanitary considerations which unavoidably tend to temper discipline in order to preserve health. But next comes the ques

tion, if a question it be, whether, when criminals are in our own hands for punishment, we ought not to do something with a view to their reformation. The answer is clear. Both our duty and our interest require that we should attempt that task. It has been latterly forced on our attention in many ways. Capital punishments are now greatly restricted, and consequently longer periods of incarceration or captivity, or whatever we may call it, have come to be introduced, as rendered necessary by the aggravated nature of some offences not now capitally punished, and for which a lengthened confinement is required in order to give an amount of punishment commensurate with their criminality. While criminals are in the custody of the State suffering these lengthened sentences, it is manifestly most desirable that the time thus to elapse should be used in an effort for the criminal's reformation. This is the more necessary if, as already suggested, there are many criminals whom the mere punishment will not deter from committing crime. These men, when they go out of custody, if they are not better than they were, will assuredly be worse-more hardened, more resolute, more reckless. If, therefore, we can work a change upon their dispositions, we shall do good not only to them, but to ourselves, and shall escape the evils to which their liberation would again expose us. A priori there seems nothing hopeless in this task of reformation-nothing at least that excludes the prospect of some degree of success attending it. Criminality may be the result of mere ignorance-ignorance of duty, ignorance of facts as attending the nature and consequences of crime, ignorance of any trade or calling by which a livelihood may be earned in an honest manner; and these causes of criminality are capable of being removed or alleviated by judicious instruction continued during a considerable period of confinement. It may be possible in some cases to awaken special powers and talents in individuals, or to excite latent feelings and desires of a laudable kind, such as may alter the whole colour of their lives. However unsuccessful we may have hitherto been in attaining these objects, we are not entitled as yet, at least, to abandon them as unattainable. In the first place, we cannot do this until we are sure that we have hit upon the right mode of making the experiment. In the next place, the early advocates of prison discipline, or at least many of them, were perhaps too sanguine in their expectations as to its results. The work had been long and shamefully neglected; and like many other new discoveries, it was thought to be fraught with conse