started practice there it was no uncommon thing to find at a single sessions a dozen or more high-spirited but low-lived young men of wealth and sometimes of position on trial for outrages on policemen, private enemies, or public decency. Now they said such things were unknown, and ninety-nine out of every hundred prisoners belonged to the class of habitual criminals, defence of whom was profitless in two senses, since they could pay no fee worth receiving and their faces alone were sufficient to convict them on view.

That oriminal face is, certainly hard to get over; when a prisoner possesses it, as most habitual criminals do, it is a difficult job to induce either judge or jury to believe in his innocence. And yet it is a type of face not infrequently borne by men of blameless lives. The late Mr Henry Labouchere once wrote of a distinguished lawyer politician that he undoubtedly possessed a very legal face; but somehow it did not remind one of the bench or the bar or the well where solicitors sit; and nevertheless you could not see it without thinking of a court of justice. And I myself, when strolling about Paternoster Row and looking at the portraits of the reverend authors of the religious books so much sold there especially those of the Methodist persuasionoften find my mind reverting to the days when I practised at Clerkenwell Sessions. And it has even been reported that

the late Mr Justice Hawkins was requested to leave a certain suburban bowling-green, as the company-who did not know him-were respectable people and not accustomed to associate with ticket-of-leave men. This misunderstanding, however, may have been due not to the out of his lordship's face but to the cut of his lordship's hair: my own opinion is it arose through the combination. However, I have said enough to show that the stamp of face characteristic of habitual oriminals is not confined to them alone.

Still, when one meets it in persons belonging to a certain class of society, it, as one might say, carries conviction. A story is told of the late Lord Justice Mathew which shows its effect on his mind. His lordship was walking one morning up the Embankment on his way to court when one of those rogues who swindle simple people by selling to them painted sparrows saw him and thought he looked a likely customer. Sidling up to the judge, he producod from under his coat the painted sparrow. "Pardon, gov'ner," he said, "but this 'ere bird flew inter my bedroom this morning. It seems a rare 'un: can yer tell me what kind it is?" The judge took out his glasses and looked hard at the bird. Then he looked harder at the man. "No, no," he said thoughtfully, "I can't tell you what kind of bird it is, but from the company it keeps I should guess that it is a jail-bird."

A law lecturer I once knew Was & gentleman with a hot temper and a caustic tongue. If there was anything that irritated him more than another, it was being interrupted in his lecture by a question, especially when the question was silly, as such questions are apt to be. Once when he was discoursing on the subject of legal disabilities, he had naturally to refer pretty often to idiots and lunatics. A student broke into his lecture to ask what was the difference between an idiot and a lunatio. "I'll tell you," answered the lecturer grimly; "if you were born as you now are, you are an idiot, and if you became as you now are, you are a lunatic."

It would perhaps have been more accurate, and it certainly would have been more polite, if he had described an idiot as a person who never had any brains, and a lunatic as a person who had brains but had lost the use of them; after all, a man must have a head in order to go off it. Dryden has said that great wit is near allied to madness, but nobody ever suggested it was near allied to imbecility. Cunning is, how ever, near allied to it. Now the average habitual criminal is an imbecile or semi-imbecile, and he has much cunning, and it is just this cunning which gives the police and the law yers their greatest difficulty in dealing with him.

The average habitual orimi

nal's imbecility is almost incredible. The rule concerning him is one criminal one crime. He learns how to sneak umbrellas at a hall door or luggage at a railway station or parcels from a street van, or to pick pockets, to snatch watches or to play the confidence trick, and whichever of these he learns he does, and he does nothing else. So well is this known to the police that whenever a particular kind of crime is reported as prevalent in a district, they have no doubt as to the quarter in which to find the oriminal, though they may not be able to find the evidence to conviet him. And so persistent is the habitual criminal in committing his one crime, that you will often find him arrested for committing it again on the very day he is released after "doing time" for committing it before.

This circumstance led my brother, the late Dr S. A. K. Strahan, who was both & barrister and a physician, to inquire into the cause of habitual criminalism, and he came to the conclusion that in most cases it was impulsive: the poor creature had a longing to do a certain act, which was so strong that he could not resist it. brother wrote a paper setting out this view, and recommending, among other things, that instead of sending wretches suffering from this this disease back again and again to prison, an indeterminate sen

My

tence not of a punitive character should be passed on them, and that they should be detained and treated as mentally sick men until their minds showed some sign of improvement; and if after a reasonable time no such sign appeared they should be detained permanently, not as oriminals but as idiots. This paper he read before the British Association in 1891. It attracted very wide attention, and the lay press, which ignorantly misunderstood it as a recommendation of gentler treatment for persistent wrongdoers, raised a howl of indignation against it and its author. At the present moment almost everything he recommended has been made part and parcel of the law of the land; but he experienced only the persecution-he did not live to enjoy the triumph of a social reformer.

That is the imbecile side of the habitual criminal. The cunning side is usually as noticeable. Sometimes it is shown in the way he commits his crime, sometimes in the way he hides all traces of it, sometimes in the astuteness with which he conducts his defence, and sometimes in the acting by which he deceives his judge and jury. I only once prosecuted in murder case, and to this day I am not sure whether the prisoner did or did not deserve a hanging.

It was on the face of it a brutal wife murder. The prisoner was a degenerate of the first water, who, decently con

nected, had sunk into poverty and lived by what he could steal and what he could wring out of the labour of his wretched wife. That miserable woman had come home one night with less money than he had expected, and he began knocking her about as usual. This time, however, he went a little too far, and she died. The happy relief came early in the evening. The murderer remained along with the corpse all the long night. In the morning he issued from his room carrying a carvingknife, and finding a neighbour had, on leaving his oottage for his work, forgotten to bolt the front door, be entered the house and attacked the wife still in bed with the carving-knife, stabbing her badly in the face. Then he fled, and happening to find another front door on the latch, he entered another cottage and attacked the woman there. Some workmen heard her screams and rescued her and arrested him.

When he came for trial the defence set up was insanity. My instructions contained statements of the prison surgeon and a distinguished alienist, who had been sent down from London by the Home Office to inquire into the state of the prisoner's mind. Both were absolutely convinced that the prisoner suffered from the mania of persecution, and that it was under the influence of this mania he had committed the three crimes. In face of such evidence from my own expert

witnesses and of the strong view of it taken by the judge, there was little chance of a conviction; and yet before the trial was over I had, and I believe many of the jury had too, grave doubts of the prisoner's insanity. From the

moment he came into the dock he conducted himself, I thought, just a little bit too much like a lunatio. He professed to want to plead guilty, he interrupted his own counsel, and he hurled abuse at his own witnesses. And yet when, in opening the case, I suggested that possibly his attacks on the two women and his conduct generally since the murder might be intended to suggest insanity, I saw him start violently; and when the judge asked the jury whether it was necessary to call evidence for the defence, I saw a leer of satisfaction show itself on his face. The judge, whose eyesight was far from perfect, saw none of these things; but I think some of the jury did, and suspected that his antios in the dook were mere acting, for they would not take the judge's hint, and it was only after witnesses for the defence had given evidence of the existence of insanity in the prisoner's family, and under strong pressure from the judge, that they reluctantly acquitted. The evidence of family insanity took the police by surprise, and I was not astonished to learn later that on investigation they were far from satisfied that it was true.

I say the jury reluctantly

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aoquitted under strong pressure from the judge. That to any one accustomed to criminal courts elsewhere is one of the most striking characteristics of English criminal courts. Rarely has an English judge to appeal to an English jury for a conviction: not unfrequently he has to appeal to them for an acquittal: everywhere else the juries are only too ready to acquit, and not unfrequently the judge's heaviest and most disagreeable duty is to urge on them to conviot when publio justice and public safety alike demand it. Ireland, north and south, this is sometimes the case-not merely in political or agrarian offences where fellow-feeling may affect the jurors' minds, but in ordinary crimes where their own wellbeing and proteotion are at stake. We have all heard of the case of highway robbery tried at Tralee. The evidence for the prosecution showed that highway robbery in Kerry had become a public danger, and that the prisoners were the leaders of the robber band; yet the jury acquitted them. The presiding judge showed his view of the case by requesting the High Sheriff to detain the innocent men in custody until he had got a good start on his way back to Dublin.

But Kerry, it may be said, is a county by itself even in Ireland. Did not Baron Dowse allege that once when he was the judge of assize there, when the jurymen in waiting were directed to go into the box to be sworn, they all instinctively

All the same, dislike or rather irreverence for the law, and in a lesser degree for its representatives, is common throughout the country, and by no means confined to the poorer or disloyal classes. Even the judges themselves have not the same respect for the letter of the law as English judges. Professor Dicey, K.C., once told me how much he was struck by this on one occasion when on a visit to Dublin he was invited to a seat on the Bench in a criminal court. The case being tried was one in which everybody's sympathies were naturally and rightly with the prisoner; but there was not and there could not be any doubt that, how ever justified morally he might be, he had deliberately committed the offence charged against him. An English judge would have directed the jury that they must convict, dropping a hint at the same time that the prisoner was not likely to suffer severely if they did; and the jury would have promptly convicted. The Irish judge, a Tory and a Protestant, told them that undoubtedly the prisoner had broken the statute made in that behalf, but, he added, they would be a queer set of Irishmen if they could not find a way of getting round an Act of Parliament. Of course the jury acquitted.

And this irreverence for the law extends, as I have said, in a lesser degree also to the law's representatives. For instance, the bearing of counsel towards English judges is far more

counsel towards Irish judges, though the social position of the latter in the little world of Dublin is infinitely higher than that of their English brothers in the great world of London.

I myself am inclined to regard this want of reverence for the law as due not to any sympathy with crime, but mainly at least to the fact that the law in Ireland is not Irish law: it is the law of the stranger; and however just it may be-and once it was very unjust-it commands no loyalty and allegiance as an institution native to and racy of the soil. In England it is very much the reverse. The whole civilised world has produced only two great systems of law-the English and the Roman-and between them they now divide it. Englishmen did not forget this when their law was merciless; they are not likely to forget it now when it is merciful. But something must also be allowed for the national temper. The Englishman is strong and sensible, but he is slow in observing imperfections in anything he has become accustomed to. Unfortunately, however long an Irishman may be accustomed to anything, its imperfections are the first thing he sees in it, and if he is a true-born Irishman it is often the only thing he sees. Sometimes this difference of nature reminds me of the explanation an American Sunday-school teacher gave to one of her class who found some difficulty in understanding how if God was almighty