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many have been criminals abroad, driven hither to find a safer harborage of crime, or have been made fierce and desperate, either by want or governmental persecution, till society seems all their enemy, and, with some wild theory of an outlaw's justice, they avenge themselves by organizing fresh bands of freebooters and depredators, a new and formidable addition to the dangerous classes already gathered and enrolled among us!

We omit to speak further of such causes as unjust laws, and the legal or political outlawry of whole races and tribes of men. Those we have mentioned are not legal or accidental, but social and permanent causes, which will follow out their dreadful tendency, till some radical cure is applied./ Law, it is not doubted, does already much to keep them in check. Beneficent organizations are doing much to redress their mischief. Schemes of Christian instruction, followed here and there, already save hundreds, it may be thousands, from the dreadful fate to which they seemed born and bred. But, however checked and partially healed, the evil still exists, with its tendency to gather strength with the natural increase of population. It is great enough, if not to alarm us personally, at least to make us anxious in behalf of others. Society suffers from the existence of this outlaw race, in purse, in health, in morals, in hope of the future. In all these ways the classes spoken of are dangerous to the well-being of the state. Take first the loss of wealth. In England, it has been reckoned that every thief costs the community a thousand dollars and upwards for the average, profits of his theft, about three hundred more for his conviction, besides the police force to keep him down, the jail system, the transportship, and the destruction of property by accidents of violence and revenge. "The more profligate the person, the greater burden is he to the community." Miss Carpenter cites an instance in which a family circle of eight thieves "have mulcted the public to the amount of £ 13,000" within seven years, — their annual support thus costing, children and all, more than eleven hundred dollars each. "Every freeman in this country is at present taxed to support in idleness every pauper and every criminal." A thief's average earnings, by the above

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estimate, are equal to those of at least eight of the best-paid honest laborers. In Liverpool, their depredations are reckoned at eight and a half million dollars in a single year. Thus the criminal and vicious classes are the most costly of all, without return, the most costly part of the political system, except the equipment and organization of war.

They are dangerous to the public health. Mr. Carlyle quotes the story of a poor woman in Edinburgh, who, being refused shelter and left to perish in the streets, took the typhus-fever, and by the infection killed seventeen others in the neighborhood. So it is that a vicious and neglected class spreads secret poison through all our veins, in some a scalding leprosy and rottenness of the bones, in all the terror of some cholera-scourge or some epidemic fever that breeds in the lurking-place of wretchedness and crime. Feeble and barbarous tribes, that to our sceptical judgments seem smitten with a mysterious decree of extermination, perish by no mystery at all, but by the poison of civilized vices, which their inferior temperament makes quickly fatal. But the same poison, of squalor, of licentiousness, of strong drink, preys upon our own population also, and will do so until the resources of a Christian civilization are more fully understood, and the efforts of our humanity more wisely and vigorously applied.

We have portrayed, with constant reference to the aim and purport of the volumes before us, some of the features of that great social peril, of which they would aid both in the illustration and the cure. Unless in very rare and exceptional cases, the evil cannot be met full-grown with any prospect of eradi\cating it. "Train up a child in the way he should not go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." The practical question-one which every moment's consideration presses more closely on the conscience is, Cannot something be done to rescue the "children of the perishing and dangerous classes"? There is no need that the unfitness, the utter and horrible mischief, of the jail, as a place of cure for juvenile offences, should be again exposed. Setting this aside, with an unanswerable exhibition of its results, these volumes proceed to demonstrate, first, that the recovery of young offenders is possible, in a large proportion of cases;

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next, that it can be had not by penal, but by moral and relig ious agencies alone; next, that the true and most hopeful methods are precisely the cheapest, while the present method of habitual neglect, with occasional violent interference, is as costly as it is shown to be ineffectual; and finally, that the state must interfere by law, to take the exposed child out of evil hands, to give authority of detention to those who seek his recovery, and to establish permanently, and on a large enough scale, the agencies required for that end. The practical importance of these positions, and the revolution they would work in existing practices if fully carried out, will be seen at a glance. They are regarded here as propositions to be sustained with great weight of evidence, to be forced upon the thoughtful understanding, rather than barely commended to the popular mind and conscience. Voluntary endeavors、 have done what they could; government must now furnish the needful authority and needful funds to carry through an experiment which is proved beforehand to be successful. The examples of the police arrangements in Aberdeen, wholly suppressing the juvenile vagrancy of that district; of the juvenile prison at Parkhurst (Isle of Wight), with its discipline of terror and its costly failure to meet the end in view; the religious labors of the Brotherhood of St. Vincent de Paul, first organized at Mettrai, in France, and extended afterwards into more than forty similar establishments, showing the wonderful practical skill of the Romish Church in organizing relig ious effort for a definite end and creating the religious societies needful thereto; the reform-colonies of Evangelical Protestantism at Dusselthal and the Rauhe Haus near Hamburg, rivalling the above named in their practical wisdom and marvellous success; the State Reform Schools of New York and Massachusetts, all are described with sufficient detail, making chapters of most interesting incident, and of singular value, in the history of moral enterprise. None of this testimony do we consider to be without worth in view of the efforts making in our own country in this direction, efforts which no one will regard as aught but the beginning of a vastly more extensive work required to be done.

We think that the readers of these volumes will be struck,

not merely with the religious motive and feeling that prompted and guided their composition, but also with the fact, that the only successful steps taken in this enterprise have hitherto been the inspiration of a very positive religious faith. "First and above all," says our author,* "there must be in the minds of those who plan, and those who carry out the work, a strong faith in the immortality of the human soul, the universal and parental government of God, and the equal value in his sight of each one of these poor perishing young creatures with the most exalted of our race." No motive or conviction less powerful could prompt to the labors here recorded, or could undertake them with hope of the same result. The School at Mettrai, and the Rauhe Haus at Hamburg, stand as the best known and most successful examples respectively of Catholic and Protestant reform.† In each case, the founder engaged in his task with a fervor of religious devotion to it, which would have been pronounced fanaticism or mysticism if it had taken a less practical direction. We mention this fact, so striking if not in nature at least in degree, because it is one of which the practical consequences become more important day by day, as experiments are more widely made. The state, as Miss Carpenter has shown, has the power of availing itself of an almost unlimited amount of earnestness, strong conviction, and working ability already existing; and if its efforts are wisely directed, it may be competent (as no other agency can possibly be) to grapple with the subject in its length and breadth, and cure the malady at the root. But no device of state machinery, however costly, will do the work. Unbought and unpurchasable agencies, of affection and pious motive, must still be the main-spring and heart of this work of reform, for those who "by crime are constituted children of the state."

The working of the institutions in this country, already in operation, may be so easily learned by any who have a motive for the inquiry, that we have not thought it best to

*Reformatory Schools, p. 73.

† In the former of these institutions, says Mr. Hill, in the speech previously cited, "the amount of reformation reached to what I at first thought the incredible proportion (but which I fully verified) of eighty-five per cent."

trouble our readers with statistics and details, which each month would outgrow. Neither, although we have paid some personal attention to the methods followed in the several directions before alluded to, do we feel qualified to speak at length of practical details, of which so much must depend both on a man's peculiar fitnesses, and on his sphere of operation. That the public mind should be made fully aware of the nature of this enterprise, and of the powerful motives urged on us for giving it our heed and our effort, is the chief object we have had in view. Especially do we hope that such works as those to which we have had peculiar reference will have their due place and weight among the serious literature of the day.

ART. VII. Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. By MRS. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1854. 2 vols. 12mo. pp. lxv., 326, 432.

THESE volumes are less a continuous record of journeyings and experiences, than a magnified reflection of the idiosyncrasies of the writer, (or rather writers,) and of the massive and unique features of the Beecher family, from the broad mirror of Transatlantic scenery and society. They are intensely subjective, and therein lies their charm for the reader,

- their sure hold upon a very numerous public. It is this, in great part, that induces us to give them more than a passing notice; for travellers in every zone and on every soil, in their competition for literary fame, are treading one another down into oblivion, and the review that did mere justice to the respectable and well-written itineraries of the quarter would have little room left for other matter.

The circumstances under which Mrs. Stowe visited England were perilous to her discretion, modesty, and patriotism. Invited on account of her successful hostility to one of the established institutions of her own country, paraded before crowded audiences and aristocratic coteries as presenting an

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