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or that my missing Quarterly has not, to be sought for in the housekeeper's room. Every lawyer and every doctor knows what a serious influence it would have on his professional success if it got abroad that he was greatly addicted to the bassoon, or very fond of shuttlecock, or much given to charades and small plays. People would say, How can Mr So-and-so be possibly engaged in the serious work of his profession with such tastes these? Are these the habits that indicate deep thought or grave reflection? And if this be true as to men whose education and training are all favourable to versatility, what are we to say to a class singularly limited in their range of knowledge, and almost one-idea'd on every subject, indulging in discursiveness? We want concentration, and how do we seek to provide it? By everything that distracts_attention and disperses thought. Jeames has to do with lamps and decanters -he is a creature of spoons and finger-glasses and lap-dogs-and we want to make him a subscriber to the Saturday Review' and a reader of Bulwer Lytton. Surely this is absurd. You would be afraid to trust your interests to a lawyer who had a passion for fossils, and passed much of his time in his laboratory, and yet you are quite ready to concede all the privileges of varied pursuits to a creature whose highest day-dream should never rise beyond a coal-scuttle, and who, instead of unrolling a mummy, should be folding a napkin.

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Domestic service is a profession, and to follow it well the fewer distractions a man has the better. If I see the butler with the 'Times in his hand, I am prepared to find the claret shaken; if I see Jeames ' with 'Bell's Life,' I understand at once why my boots are lacking in lustre. Try a free press on board of a man-of-war, and see how much I discipline you will get; and yet a household must be ruled pretty much like a ship. You want

promptitude, activity, exactness, and obedience; and how much of these are you to expect from a set of creatures puffed up with the self-importance of a mistaken status, their heads turned with all the projects an ill-judging philanthropy has devoted to them, and full of Penny Journalism and 'Once a Week'-erie?

Alphonse Karr tells us that from the moment he furnished a house he ceased to be an independent creature. "From that hour," said he, "my chairs and tables that I thought I owned, owned me. They were the masters of my whole destiny, and my duty it was to see that they met no ill-treatment, were not scratched, smashed, nor abused." So it is with servants. You want to have a butler, for instance. Have you ever stooped to give your nearest friend such a thorough account of your life and habits, have you ever made such a confession of your tastes and tempers, as to this Priest of the Sideboard? How many months you pass in the country, how long you reside in town? Where do you go for a watering-place, and when? What are your habits of hospitality? Do you give dinners, and what sort of dinners? What wine is your usual drink? You narrate your hour of rising and retiring to rest, and you fill up a full sketch of your private history but how often, notwithstanding all the insidious flatteries you insert about the ways of the family, "White Choker" is obdurate! He is not used to gentlemen who drink sherry, or go to Harrowgate, or dine early-he deplores the hard necessity of refusing you, but he sees that you would never hit it off together, and he retires, leaving you to go over the same details to another "gentleman" then waiting in the hall.

I am the most long-suffering and patient of men-friends who know me intimately call me Job; but I own that scenes like thisand I have gone through some

scores of them-have whitened my whiskers and threatened me with apoplexy.

The truth is, what between our listless laziness and self-indulgence, we have surrendered our lives to a set of insolent rascals, who have contrived to exact the very highest rate of pay for the very smallest modicum of service.

Why can modern mechanical genius do nothing for us? Oh for a steam butler and a self-acting housemaid! Oh for a cook that a man could wind up like an eight

day clock, and never think of till the end of the week!

Take my word for it, the fellow who makes your toast or fills out your madeira has more of your daily happiness in his keeping than it is at all pleasant to acknowledge; and to elevate him to a position where this mastery becomes a tyranny, is as repugnant to good sense as to good economy.

I am ready to subscribe for an asylum for all ill-treated and ruined masters to-morrow, but for a "Flunkies' Home" I'll give never a sixpence.

I am not, so far as I know myself, one who takes a gloomy view of human nature. After more experience of life than happens usually to most men of my age-which shall be set down at anything you like medieval-I am led to regard humanity on the whole as a better thing than I thought it on first acquaintance.

I have found the same to be the result of the experience of nearly every thorough "man of the world" I have ever questioned on the matter. Let me not be misunderstood. I am no warm believer in what is called progress. If the world be better than it used to be, it is in some such inappreciable quality that is of no value, just as astronomers tell us we are so many hundreds of thousands of miles

nearer the sun than at some remote era—a matter that, so far as the consumption of coals is concerned, the most economical householder will scarcely rejoice over. We are better pretty much as we are healthier. There are a few old maladies that we have learned to treat more skilfully, and some two or three new ones have dropped down on us that are puzzling us sorely.

I think the most hopeful thing to say of us is, that we do not grow worse with age; and the more I

think of it, I deem this no small praise.

But apart from all this question of progress, I think well of the world. I think there is a great deal of kindness, a great deal of generosity, and a great deal of tenderness in human nature -ay, and in quarters, too, where one would not look for it-grains of gold in rock that had not a single feature of quartz. Any one who has looked closely at life, will tell you how struck he has been by the daily spectacle of small sacrifices, small concessions, he has witnessed. The tender, uncomplaining, untiring care of a sick child; the devotion that did not alone become an office of love, but grew into the whole business of life; the high-couraged submission of a poor suffering wife or mother, bearing bravely up under pain, to make one in a family where her empty chair would be a gloom and a sadness; the weary man of toil throwing off his care at his door, that his tired brow should not cast a shadow on the bright circle round the hearth. If I have called these small sacrifices, it is not from disparagement. I only mean to distinguish them from the great heroic efforts which have the world for an audience, and of which I am not thinking just now, and

which, be it remarked, as they cost more effort, are also, from that very reason, supplied with more force from within the heart of him who makes them, than these little daily demands on time, temper, and endurance.

On the whole, I am satisfied that the good preponderates largely over the bad. Ay, and I even believe that people are very often better than they know themselves; that is to say, capable of sacrifices and of self-denials to an extent which, having never been called for, they would deem impossible.

Now, it was necessary I should declare this opinion of mine thus broadly before I assert what is my object at this writing-that, well as I think of humanity in the gross, I have the very smallest and shallowest faith in what are called "Reformatories," and I implicitly believe that they are as flagrant failures as are to be found in this grand era of soap-bubbles.

First of all, crime of every sort and I take the word crime, as I desire to speak of prisons and prisoners-crime, I say, stands, with respect to the moral man, in relation very closely resembling what disease presents to the physical man, an abnormal condition, proceeding from a complication of causes, partly structural, partly accidental, and largely from a due want of that care, abstention, and self-control required to restrain men from doing what impulse suggests, but right reason and judgment would repudiate.

Disease is not more varied in its aspect than crime, for crime takes its characteristics from all the circumstances which fashion and mould disease. The individuals vary in all the different shades that age, sex, habit, training, physical conformation, passions, and temptations can impress. The agile youth who has stolen your watch is not a bit like the muscular scoundrel that broke open your plate-chest, or the oily, smiling vil

VOL. XCVI.-NO. DLXXXIX.

lain who forged your acceptance; and yet these three men, sentenced and imprisoned, would be subjected to exactly the same reformatory discipline. Now, what would we say of the doctor who treated a sprained ankle, a dropsy, and an apoplexy by the same remedies, ignoring all consideration of both patient and disease, and simply regarding him as a sick man?

Prisoner or patient, there is the discipline you must undergo. Why, Morrison's pills or Mr Somebody's ointment is nothing to this! Let us be fair to the quacks in physic. They almost all of them insist upon a long course of their peculiar panacea, and in the letters of testimony that they publish we constantly read, I have now been taking your invaluable drops for upwards of thirty years; "whereas the reformatory people turn out their cases in three, six, or twelve months, and a housebreaker goes out a cleansed leper, strong from the dietary, and vigorous in the ethics of prison discipline.

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Now, I'll not enter upon the far too wide field of the immense liabilities to deception, the prisoner being as constitutionally a hypocrite as a thief; but I will return to my illustration, and ask, What would be said of the physician who only intervened when cases were all but hopeless, who had little to suggest for prevention, but kept all his science for those in extremis ?

There was once on a time a very charitable lady in Ireland, Lady Lwho established a refuge for her fallen sisters; and when one morning a fine fresh bright-eyed young girl, ignorant of the nature of the asylum, presented herself for admission, the patroness, deeply compassionating so young a victim, proceeded to ask the circumstances of her fall, and, to her astonishment, discovered that she was no derelict from virtue at all, but perfectly pure and innocent. Ah, then, we cannot receive you, my

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Here is the essence of the whole reformatory system. The hardworked poor man, wearied with labour and crazed with rheumatism, has no interest for you. You have no counsels, no encouragements, no wise precepts for him. He may fag his weary way through life without one word to cheer him; he may plod on to the grave unnoticed and unaided: but let him only steal a loaf, or knock over a rabbit, straightway is he dear to you. Then has he gone and qualified, and at once all the stores of reforming tenderness are opened to him, and hopes and promises, which in the days of his integrity he had never heard of, now shower down upon his head, an ill-doer and a criminal.

Reformation almost invariably begins from within. It is the result of a reasoning process by which the individual arrives at the conclusion that he will be healthier, or richer, or more long-lived, or something or other, than he would wish to be, if he were to abjure this and adopt that.

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For the most part, men make these reformations in pure deference to public opinion. They argue somewhat thus: There is impression abroad that theft is immoral. Men have built up an arbitrary system of what they call property; and though I am persuaded it is a narrow-minded unbrotherly view to take of human nature, yet as I am in the minority, I succumb, and for the future Í will work instead of rob. I don't mean to say I like it, but the odds are so terribly against me in the one case, that after mature deliberation I accept the other.

Now, when honesty is said to be the best policy, it is a mere trick to say that it is best in the sense of worldly advantage. It is best on grounds of morality-best in whatever regards man's highest and greatest interests; but that it is

and a score more- -a mere set of from-hand-to-mouth adventurers a few years ago, and now amongst the richest men in Europe! Look at the ex-minister in Italy, with his railroad scheme jobbed at the price of a quarter of a million sterling. But why take examples? Simply ask yourself, Is it amongst the rigidly scrupulous, the strictly fair-dealing section of your acquaintances, you would seek for the men who are likely to make great success in life?

The fact is, the pursuit of money has all the characteristics of a grand chasse, and the men of consols and shares have an ardour fully as high, and a courageous daring not a whit inferior to that felt by the fox-hunter or the deer-stalker; and neither have time enough to be scrupulous. What a man does every day not merely enlists his sympathies and engages his interests, but blunts his susceptibilities as to its effect on others. He looks upon it as a thing that must be; and I have no doubt that your great Rothschilds regard "dividends" as a part of the universal scheme fully as confidently as they trust the earth will go round the sun.

Now, as heavenly bodies have their aberrations, so will earthly ones; and men enlisted in any pursuit which engrosses them deeply are more prone to become gamblers than they know of.

I remember here an anecdote a very dear old friend once told me. He was rector of a parish in the north of Ireland, where, from the habits of the Scotch Church prevailing largely, it is not unusual to find some two or three men taking

rank and place amongst the congregation, and assuming, with the Episcopalians, somewhat the character of elders in the other community.

One of these, a man of hitherto unblemished integrity, had been accused of some sharp practice in money - dealing, and the case was reported to the rector. My friend sent for the man, narrated the charge, and anxiously asked, Could it be possible that such an imputation could attach to him?-" for," said he, "I have refused to credit it, Mathew, nor shall I, till you yourself declare to me it is true."

"And it is, your reverence," said he, submissively, and much sorrowstricken; "it is just true, and there's no denyin' it! But," added he, with an effort, "it's unco hard to be 'in grace' in the flax season."

Now, I take it, most of us have our "flax seasons." "But where have I left my reformatories all this time? Let me go back to them.

Let us take the case of the thief. Theft, like gambling, indisposes a man to any laborious effort to earn his livelihood. The fellow who can by a stroke of address provide himself with a week's or perhaps a month's subsistence, will certainly feel no vocation for hard work simply because it is an honest calling.

Now, when we tell such a man that honesty is the best policy, he says, "With all my heart; follow it if you like; but I like my own system better." If he comes, however, to see that he is usually found out, and that each new discovery heightens his punishment, and that at last the fight against the law is unequal, if he be a fellow of any wit, he will address himself to another handicraft; but it is neither you nor your system that has reformed him. It is simply the man himself, who, having some experience of life, has learned that roguery doesn't pay. Nor is it easy for him to come to this conclusion, no more than it was easy for the jus

tice, who sentenced him, to give up snuff, or the justice's clerk to abandon gin-and-water.

If the thief's experiences are, however, more rose-coloured-if he has dodged the law successfully for a number of years, and only been "nabbed" by an accident, and slightly sentenced-take my word for it you'll not reform him, no more than you will persuade that bland old gentleman with the rubicund nose to give up port, or the thin man in spectacles beside him to forswear short whist. Make vice unprofitable—that is, make crime, so far as you can, certain of detection-and then you will reform criminals. As to your persuasive efforts, your orderly habits, your wise precepts, &c., I never trust them the day after their exercise has ceased. You cure for the time, but you can't prevent the relapse.

I remember hearing, once on a time, of a certain great meeting held in Dublin, to hear the report of a committee on the subject of the conversion of the Jews. The substance of the report was so far favourable, that several Jews had been brought to embrace Christianity; but here came the drawback: it was always found that when the efforts of the controversialist had ceased, and the convert was pronounced safe, he had invariably gone back again to his old belief.

This was disheartening, certainly; and while the meeting was in the act of deploring such a calamity, a young naval officer, who happened to be present, observed that he had within his own experience one case, which certainly gave a more cheery aspect to the question, and with their permission he would be glad to relate it. It was, of course, very interesting to obtain testimony, and from a quarter so unlookedfor, and he was politely requested to mount the platform and address the meeting.

After a brief apology for his deficiencies as an orator, he related