die," said an old woman to me a short time ago; "I have walked seventy years, always perfectly upright."

We have here, then, a class who need careful, wise, judicious treatment. It is our shame and disgrace that they do not receive it. We house lost dogs, and provide homes of rest for tired horses, and study with scientific precision the diseases of pheasants; but for these, the lowest, the residuum, the pariahs, the unknown, what care or labour have we? They are made in God's image, they represent our Master on earth in a peculiar and especial form, they are our brothers and our sisters, and what are we doing for them? We provide churches for a select few of the best of them; we organise stray concerts, or amusements, or classes for those of them who will occasionally use them when they have no money to go elsewhere; every now and then we find some one—“so heroic and good of her, you know!"—who will actually exercise some personal influence over them by coming into close contact with them. But is this going to the root of the whole thing, and attempting lasting cure? Of course it is not.

Mr. Havelock Ellis, in his admirable book, "The Criminal," has set an excellent example to us of approaching the whole question from a reasonable point of view. Dr. S. A. K. Strahan is another writer to whom the world should be indebted. Both of these gentlemen, and many besides, have proved to demonstration that we have to deal with a peculiar, distinct, and in some cases irresponsible criminal class. Our present method with such is to continually torment them with short sentences which do not even pretend to be really reformative. At vast expense we keep up an army of officials to keep on bringing back to justice those whom previous punishments have in all probability only made worse. As things are arranged now, the prison is but the forcing-house wherein all the seeds of crime are kept alive and disseminated. Our method is costly, ineffective, and, indeed, actually harmful. Let us realise this, that to clap an instinctive criminal into a prison for a time, during which he will make other inmates worse and himself learn any fresh evil which he does not already know, is about as likely to cure him as it is to transform him into a fairy. It may punish and irritate and degrade him, and according to some it may make him fear to fall again, or at least to fear being found out in doing so. In this way prison may be a slight preventive, but then remember the vast army who

continually come back to gaol again. There are many who only know God's earth by the occasional visits they pay to it as they oscillate for brief periods from their prison life. For such as these -and they are many-our present penal system is but a grim, revengeful torture; for us, who have to pay its costly, ineffective operations, it is a mere farce and pretence of justice.

On the other hand, it may be said that it is easy to rail and find fault, but this is not all the careful enquirer will do. He will go on to propose some root-remedy; the one that seems most feasible is one not altogether new-that of Penal Settlements. Once admit (and what accurate observer dare deny ?) that there are moral maniacs, and that it is no cure for them merely to punish them, and then we see at once that which seems a harsh method is in reality a kind, because a true and lasting, one. We shut up lunatics in asylums; why should we not deal with those who are naturally and morally insane in the same way? A Penal Settlement could be made happier and more comfortable than many homes. It is true that the idea of consigning even hopeless instinctive criminals to imprisonment for life, as it would be called, might raise a fierce chorus of opposition at first; every reform, however reasonable, always does that; but even the most ignorant and self-complacent of our ruling classes might in time be taught that it is less cruel to cure, even by using the knife, than it is to let disease eat on into the very heart of our social system. As regards the submerged instinctive criminal class, even those who were made the subject of such an experiment would be happier inside the Penal Settlement walls than in all their previous hunted lives, and might by careful and judicious treatment be raised actually to a higher level. All this would need care, labour, and money; in what way could these be better applied?

What the East-end-and by that term I do not merely mean a certain portion of London, nor do I include in it here the vast army of respectable hardworking poor who inhabit a certain quarter of the Metropolis-what the East-end (that is, the semi-criminal or criminal class who happen to congregate chiefly there) wants is a cure which can really stop the disease. Education, philanthropy, religious effort, the law itself, are all failures here. Something new is wanted-something which can prevent the continual multiplication of the criminal. class by reproduction. Take an ordinary case. A boy begins by a few days for pitch-and-toss, he next gets a month for petty theft, then, as

he gets older, six months, and perhaps other sentences as well; each time he emerges he lives with his "girl." What chance have the children born of such a union? We do not let the insane go on propagating their species; why do we almost encourage these wretched ones to do so? I can imagine the incorrect, untrue answer. Because, it will be said, we wish to be kind and benevolent and Christian and generous because we wish to give all a chance: the young man who has erred may be taught a lesson by this punishment; let him return to his home, and perhaps that may reform him. Such sentiments may do very well for West-end philanthropic committee meetings; they will not hold water when critically examined. These are the specious pretences of kindly spirit which work havoc amongst whole communities. It is easy for the professional philanthropists to say that they are actuated by good intentions; why do they, then, do harm to everyone they come in contact with? Yes, the return to the home, and the lesson of past punishment-what ghastly mockeries all these phrases become viewed by the light of actual experience! In order to comfort ourselves with the cant of kindness, we go on alternately tormenting and manufacturing the criminal class, and then imagine we can make everything right again with a Mansion House fund or a free concert, with a duchess to sing them "Linger Longer, Loo."

When little children are taught from earliest infancy all the intricacies of crime, and always surrounded by every incentive to evil, what wonder that they go wrong? It should excite our surprise, however, that we are all so backward in thinking out any real cure for this state of things, and that we are all so careless as to the true welfare of the lowest and probably most unhappy class of the community.

A. OSBORNE Jay.

B

WOMEN IN THE COLONIES.

EFORE the splutter of little altar-fires, blown into musky life in

London drawing-rooms, it is pleasant to think that beyond the small buzzing centre there is the healthy scent of burning pine coals on the Saskatchewan and the odour of the apple-wood and sandal "out Thargomindah way;" the Great Bear prowling cheerily above the one, the Southern Cross above the other. It is refreshing to imagine that somewhere people are cheerfully and shamelessly sunk in apple-cheeked ignorance-though they may have, it is true, a love of old-fashioned novelists and dramatists, and do not understand the argot of our London gossips. Does it seem astounding that a London swallow does not make a Canadian or an Australian summer? that the twitter in the eaves of Fleet Street or Deborah Square does not really hurrya harvest in Greater Britain? Indeed, we have to bear with the sad fact that perverse Dame Quicklys on the St. Lawrence and the Darling and the Orange, being entreated from Deborah Square to read a commination service, do still magnanimously wish their Falstaffs babbling of green fields and safe at last in Arthur's bosom. How melancholy to feel that as we project our burning questions, upon which we throw the spice of sex, social freedom, and pictures of the New Man and the Old Woman, and the frankincense of appropriate Malthusianism, the fire, or reflection of the fire, does not lighten their darkness in Brisbane, or Toronto, or Cape Town, or Antigua, or Singapore, or Pawtucket! But, on second thought—and this even more painful—doesit crimson the sky of Aberystwith, Lochnagar, or Athlone? Let us be patient. Let us with fortitude reflect that the provincials turn upon London and call it provincial; that as they sit by noble rivers, or carouse with Nature-in the shade of great mountains, or ride fifty miles a day to a country dance across the plains (gentle people who are not unaware what befals in Piccadilly on one hand and Bayreuth on the other), they wonder why we potter so among the enigmas, not guessing that a few of the definitions they have learned in their whole

some "Colonialism," would, if learned and believed and acted on here —well, would probably empty the fervid parlours of Deborah Square. A chill sanity and that apple-cheeked ignorance would then cool the nerves of those anxious souls who are nominally the wise women of the world, but actually of a parish belonging to the Rector of Polite Bohemia.

Why should we not, as a simple corrective to our high temperature in Deborah Square, think upon the fact that though there are over four millions of people in London, there are thirty odd millions in Great Britain besides, and that there are eighty odd millions of English-speaking people elsewhere in the world? I will not speak of American women, though they actually fall under many of the influences which affect "the Colonials," but only of those who are numbered with the eight millions or so in Canada and Australia. There are South Africa, the West Indies, the colonies in the South American Republics, in India, Ceylon, Fiji, Hong Kong, and the Straits Settlements and I know something of these; but I prefer to speak of what I know very well indeed, though it is ten years or more since I lived in Canada, and over four since I lived in Australia. I will admit one thing to those who are very particular on the point: Canadian and Australian women are not strictly up-to-date. They probably are a season behind in the matter of the latest topic which made the swallows twitter in The Square; they may not quite guess what the Children of Decadence said at Mrs. Blymax Soso's luncheon; they are not particularly agile with paradoxes; they do not smoke cigarettes— though they can; they are not discoverers, they do not, having broken a crust of knowledge, immediately assume that it is new, and make it do duty for a crusade at tea-fights and crushes, and for games of emotion and syntax; they have not learned to be mannish; nor do they desire to be out and about setting the world right. Therein they are provincial.

But let me tell a little story. A traveller was once up in the Peace River Country, which is not far from the Arctic Circle, and he put up for a week at a Hudson's Bay Company's post. He talked with the Factor at night, and marvelled that a man who had been loitering near the Circle for thirty years should not be merely well, but deeply informed; that he had definitions, was not confused in his views of things or as to other people's views of things. The next morning, the 10th of June, the traveller sat down to breakfast-wild meat, coarse