"trivial"; and the result appears to be exactly the same whether the offender be bound over to come up for judgment when called upon and/or to be of good behaviour. The insertion of a clause about keeping the peace would rather seem to weaken the recognizance, as definitely indicating that clemency is to be forfeited only by the commission of a fresh offence.

However, even before the Act of 1907, a real if imperfect probational system had been evolved in this way. Magistrates are not obliged to decide the fate of an offender on the first occasion on which he appears before them. They may remand the offender in custody from week to week, or adjourn the case for a longer period, when the offender is allowed to return to his home; and in the meantime cause inquiries to be made through the police or otherwise. The establishment in London of remand homes for children, and the presence in the police courts of such philanthropic agents as police court missionaries, and officers of the N.S.P.C.C., has much facilitated inquiries, especially in children's cases. A remand or adjournment, of course, is only available before the decision of the case, and is primarily a method whereby the magistrates can postpone their decision, until they have satisfied themselves of the guilt or innocence of the offender. But the magistrates can and do use the remand or adjournment to gain time and an opportunity to consider with the missionaries and their other allies what is to be done with the offender after conviction. Meantime sentence is in the air, and the offender, whether he be in custody in a remand home or prison, or out of custody and merely subject to the visits and advice of the missionary in his own home, has a lively sense of his precarious position. He is not unlikely to discover a genuine contrition, and may even be induced to make some reparation for the injury he has inflicted in earnest thereof.

Such remands and adjournments do not, as a rule, last for

more than one or two weeks; but for children's cases the magistrates of one London court, at least, and the Birmingham magistrates made a free use of adjournments for as long a period as three months—after satisfying themselves of the commission of the offence charged-with excellent results. The adjournment might be accompanied by the threat of a whipping on the receipt of a bad report of the offender's conduct during the interval. The offender returned to his home and the court provided for his supervision there. The London magistrates used the missionary for this purpose, the Birmingham magistrates used members of the police force, specially detached for this particular service and called "Probation Officers." In either case the plan kept the magistrates pretty well informed of the offender's behaviour, and seldom failed to keep the offender on his good behaviour for the three months of the adjournment; though that period is all too short for a full test. In America probation usually lasts for six months and not uncommonly for a year.

There is this to be noticed in the method practised in London and Birmingham: if the reports on the offender made by the court's emissaries were favourable to him, there was no conviction. At the end of the period of adjournment the magistrates simply discharged the offender whom they did not punish; they might even dispense with his reappearance in court for the purpose of being discharged.

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Here the Act of 1907 seems to have borrowed a hint: "The court may, without proceeding to conviction, make an order, &c." indeed it would appear that the magistrates cannot convict any offender, whom they propose to submit to probation, even if they would. The offence is proved a probation order is to be made, under which the offenders will be subjected to a disciplinary treatment; but there is to be no "conviction." Is this anything more than a sop to sentimentality?

The Larceny Act 1861, s. 108, seems to have set the precedent, permitting a magistrate to "discharge an offender from his conviction" on the payment of damages and costs. The Summary Jurisdiction Act 1879, followed suit, allowing the court "without proceeding to conviction" to dismiss the case and to order at the same time, if it thought fit, the payment of damages and costs. It is not logical to mulct a man in damages on a criminal proceeding without convicting him; it is still less logical to subject him to correction without convicting him. Even under the Act of 1879 a recognizance to appear for judgment when called upon was only taken after proceeding to a conviction.

This Act ordains, not only that magistrates may exact damages and costs, though there has been no conviction, but even that under a probation order an offender shall enter into a recognizance to appear for conviction and sentence when called on. And yet, presumably, no probation order will be made at all, until an offence has been proved.

A conviction means properly the proof of an offence and nothing else; and the abuse of language sanctified by the Act culminates in the absurdity of sub-section (4) of the Ist section, which enacts that a probation order shall, "for the purpose of revesting or restoring stolen property, and of enabling the court to make orders as to the restitution or delivery of property to the owner ... have the like effect as a conviction." Indeed a probation order in the eyes of everyone will be very like a conviction.

And all this circumlocution is so gratuitous; it would have been easy and unobjectionable to have taken away by a single clause after the model of the Youthful Offenders Act 1901, all such slight legal disabilities as ipso facto attach to a conviction. No doubt, underlying this prevarication, there is a generous impulse to distinguish between the fully and partially responsible. But such merely verbal

distinctions are as dangerous and disingenuous here as the theological doctrine of re-interpretation elsewhere.

It would probably be a wise thing to presume generally that children are only responsible for the offences they commit in a minor degree, and so to treat their cases separately in a special kind of court and on special principles. Such children would not be convicted in the ordinary sense; for they would be, as it were, no longer "under the law"; and the language of the old dispensation would not naturally apply to their cases. That would be a wholly diverse thing from anything attempted by this Act, which pretends merely to introduce an improved machinery into the ordinary law.

This true terminological inexactitude is no doubt imported in deference to those persons who think that a conviction brands the offender with an indelible stigma, whatever be the moral quality of the offence. And yet even the lowest of the low distinguish crimes by their moral qualities, and in assessing a man, pay scant regard to the question whether he has been convicted or not.

In these bye-law ridden days a criminal conviction is not necessarily even disgraceful; and, on the other hand, it is to be hoped that a disgraceful action will still brand a man, whether he be convicted for it or not. It is beneath the dignity of the Legislature to go a-tilting with bugbears of this description.

Perhaps the point has been over-laboured, and in itself no doubt the incident is slight; but it is symptomatic of a mawkish trend of thought, that looks over-nicely to the outside of the cup and the platter, and is careless of the contents. Verbiage is only too capable of obscuring principles, and the echo of a seductive phrase is only too apt to delude the well-meaning man and frustrate the realisation of some valuable end. It really matters little whether the child is convicted or not; it matters much whether he is taken to a police station or not.

The first section of the Act also fixes three years as the maximum period of probation. From the Home Secretary's memorandum it appears that he anticipates "that the ordinary term of probation will be six months, and that orders for more than a year will be rare and exceptional." American experience and our own would confirm the Home Secretary's prognostication, and it may be assumed that six months would often suffice; but where the case has halted somewhat between success and failure in its initial stages, a longer period of supervision might prove of great advantage.

But there is this difficulty. Though the court can under sect. 5 vary the conditions of or wholly discharge the recognizance before the full period fixed in the probation order has expired, if warranted by the good conduct of the offender, it is by no means clear that it can extend the term of probation when it has once been fixed, however advisable that may be. In the circumstances, it would seem a wise course for the magistrates to specify at least a year as the period of probation in the first instance, and to exercise freely the power to discharge the recognizance after six months of good conduct. The London magistrates, at any rate, appear to have adopted a year as the ordinary period in making a probation order.

So far the Act has done nothing more for probation than to provide for the taking of recognizances in much the same fashion as earlier legislation; but by sects. 2 and 3 the Act makes a great new departure.

Sect. 2 authorises the court to have a condition inserted in the recognizance “that the offender be under the supervision of such person as may be named in the order during the period specified in the order"; and it is the insertion of such a condition that constitutes a probation order. The court may also insert subsidiary conditions for securing such supervision, for keeping the offender away from evil