prosecutions, I will instance the effects produced by a late enact ment, empowering the payment of expenses on assaults on constables in execution of their duty. Previous to this enactment, not above once or twice a-year were such indictments preferred, and then only in aggravated cases. Whereas now not a sessions pass

but there are many such cases, all of which would have been treated, as heretofore, by the contempt they merited, but for the remuneration expected.

Another auxiliary to crime is, what may appear at first sight a paradox, but which has undoubtedly a great effect in swelling the catalogue of offenders-I mean, the efficiency of the police for the detection of crime: however efficient they may be for the detection of offences, yet, for the prevention of them, they are lamentably deficient. The object of all laws is the prevention of crime; and this is the justification of all earthly punishment, in order to deter others from committing a breach of the laws. The prevention of intended crime, therefore, is of more importance than its detection after committal: but when do 'we hear of a policeofficer standing between the intention and the act; between the thief, who is meditating a robbery, and the actual commission of it? On the other hand, if an urchin is looking about and watching for an opportunity, instead of timely information, whereby the autho+ rity of the master or of the parent might interfere, the first step of the police-officer is to see that the crime is sufficiently perpe+ trated to convict the offender. Half of the petty offences committed by the younger part of the community might be prevented by common caution on the part of the tradesman, and common diligence on the part of the constable: instead of which, the offen. der is either taken before a magistrate as soon as the offence is legally completed, and bagged for immediate supply; or allowed to run at large in the constable's preserve, till ready for consumption. Offences of a trifling nature are thus repeated, or brought at once before the public in all the parade of atrocious villany; and what formerly would have been treated with a horsewhipping on the spot, and therefore more efficacious from its summary proceeding, now undergoes the grave and often useless ceremony of a trial.

These, and many others, are undoubtedly efficient causes for an increase of crime: but I consider them secondary causes only; powerful indeed, and quite sufficient to swell the catalogue of offences beyond the limits of former times; but wholly inefficient to account for the fact, that while our population has increased only one-fifth in the last ten years, the committals for felony have doubled. To what are we to attribute this disproportionate increase of offences? To what paramount and irresistible cause are we to place the demoralisation of the people? To what, but

to the destroying, at an age when the dawn of reason has scarcely opened on their mental darkness, those feelings of shame and compunction which are the natural accompaniments of youth, and to which human nature too frequently yields a temporary obedience, even greater than to the dictates of conscience at a more advanced age. It is to the early imprisonment of mere children, and the familiarising them with the walls of a prison, which lay the foundation of that hardihood in crime which we in vain attempt afterwards to remedy or prevent. Excellent alterations and enactments have been adopted, which have in some degree lessened the evils resulting from an increase of crime; and the wisdom of the legislature, the attention of the magistracy,' and the benevolence of individuals, may do much to reform our fellow-creatures. But these enactments and exertions are, however, secondary remedies. The chief cause of the increase of crime, early imprisonment, has remained unheeded and unnoticed; and therefore the remedies that have been from time to time applied, have been inefficient. The reform of the juvenile delinquent has been attempted after the contamination of a jail; after the stigma of a verdict, and after all the dormant propensities to vice have been roused into action. I do not assert that the seeds of wickedness are sown in the hearts of the youthful culprit by his being sent to a receptacle of vice and depravity; but are there not many cases where, was it not for the indiscriminate severity which considers only the viola tion of a law, those seeds might either have been eradicated, or might have withered for want of nourishment? Hence, must it not strike every thinking mind, that by having no intermediate tribunal, before which the young culprit might be summarily convicted, human aid largely contributes to the perfecting of human depravity, and that the intercourse with hardened villains, and the being made familiar with every species of depravity, must destroy every principle of amendment. Nor is this all: in his dismissal from the walls of a prison, (to him often, in his forlorn state, his

The Warwick County Asylum, established in 1818, and supported solely by voluntary contributions, has been of infinite benefit. Out of eighty-one boys, who have been discharged from it, thirty-nine have been ascertained to have been permanently reformed, twenty-one have been since tried at Warwick, and sixteen remain. But as one thousand eight hundred and thirteen boys have been tried at Warwick in the last seven years only, and as this institution is barely supported by the contributions of the benevolent, it follows, how inefficient an institution, on so small a scale, is for the purposes intended, and how precarious is its existence when dependent only on private benevolence. Boys have occasionally been received into the Asylum without being tried and convicted; and I have it, on the best authority, to say, that the facility of reform is incalculably greater with such boys than with convicted felons. I believe this county is the only county which has founded and supported an institution of this most benevolent nature.

most comfortable home,) the juvenile delinquent has lost that feeling of shame which the name of a prison at first invariably excites. Without character, without friends, and without the means of gaining an honest livelihood, he plunges at once into those vicious courses of profligacy and crime, which increase in magnitude as they increase in number, till an ignominious death closes his career, at an age when his mind has not yet reached the first dawning of sober reflection. Can we wonder then at our jails being crowded with criminals, many of whom have repeatedly visited the same dungeons, and almost consider them as the friendly protectors of their wretchedness, than as the frowning instruments of their punishment; and, am 1 not justified in attributing to early imprisonment the most powerful cause of the increase of crime.

It is not in the preposterous hope of preventing offences, of exterminating crime, or of eradicating vice and criminality from the human heart, that I wish to draw the attention of the public to this interesting subject; but from the well-grounded conviction, that there are no propensities however rooted, no opportunities however favorable, and no temptations however great and frequent, that are not multiplied tenfold by the want of an intermediate tribunal, where boys may be saved from the most fatal of all contaminations-the contamination of a jail. And if the end of all law is the prevention of crime, and the reform of the offender; and if this object is not only not accomplished, but crimes are increased, and offenders hardened by a system which assists, rather than prevents this increase, it is an unanswerable argument for a wise and timely alteration of injudicious enactments.

Early imprisonment, therefore, is the great and primary cause from which crime originates. From this source most of the evils flow which affect the youthful offender, and at the earliest age lead him into those paths of vice from which there is afterwards no escape from which the light of hope is almost excluded; and where the tears of repentance are generally disregarded. Whatever may have been his first propensities at his first commitment, he invariably becomes worse and worse, and leaves his prison fully instructed in all the mysteries of crime. You will find the still lingering blush of shame quickly give way to the habitual stare of profligate associates; and you will hardly recognise in the familiar boldness of the felon, the distressed and desponding novice in his profession, To him, to return is as fatal as to proceed; he is impelled onwards by every impulse which bad example, bad company, and the scoffs of the world have raised in him; till at last he is driven down the gulf which has so long yawned to entomb its living victim of destruction.

In searching for a remedy by which this increasing evil may bẹ

effectually checked, the only true foundation of success must rest on the just and accurate view of the cause which produces it. It is not to save the youthful delinquent from punishment, but in order to prevent that very punishment from being the instrument of increasing the evil, that I would apply the remedy; and if, long before he has become a public spectacle at the bar of a criminal court, I could save him from so great and fatal a degradation; if before his heart is hardened in villany, or rendered desperate by a verdict of guilty, I could inflict a punishment which should produce better effects; then, I confidently assert, that a step would be gained in the prevention of crime, which would soon be felt in every part of this extensive empire.

The remedy therefore that I would propose, is not a restoration of those tribunals which formerly existed in every hundred, and every village, in the time of our ancestors; but I would recommend the adoption of the principle in which they originated, viz. the immediate and summary cognisance of offences committed by the youthful depredator; to be heard before an intermediate tribunal, where petty offences may be instantly proceeded against and punished, without sending the offender to undergo the stigma and contamination of a public prison, the publicity of trial, and all those evils which infallibly result from early imprisonment. I would change the law of larceny as affecting offenders of a certain age, and convert the offence into one of a minor character, cognisable by two magistrates, in the same way as offences now are under the Malicious Trespass Act, and many others; and by thus arming the magistracy with the power of immediate conviction, on sufficient evidence, or on confession of the parties, I would empower them to punish the young culprit by whipping, confining him in an asylum set apart for this purpose, or by discharging him without punishment at all.

That this was the principle and practice of the ancient tribunals of this country, no person conversant with the history of England can doubt. By the laws of Alfred, the kingdom was divided into shires, hundreds, and tithings; and each of these had a court or jurisdiction of its own. And in those times, so strict a disci pline was kept up, that even in the tithings (or parishes) the inhabitants were obliged to keep watch and ward every night. This must have had a great effect on the prevention of crime; for as soon as any were committed, there was a court-leet or court-baron in every manor to take cognisance of it. The suitors (or jurors) of this court were the vassals of the lord, and the jury was called the homage. They had whips, stocks, dacking-stools, and jails, (which were called cages,) for the purpose of punishment; and there, was probably very little interval between the offence and

the trial. But one of the greatest advantages attending this mode of correcting offences was, that the punishment of the offender was immediate, and took place where all his friends and neighbors lived and witnessed it; which must have had a much more powerful effect on his feelings, character, and subsequent conduct, than any distant punishment could have, were the offender out of sight of those whose opinions he cared about. I have no doubt there are few persons who would not rather work at the tread-mill for a month, than sit one day in the stocks in their own village. All mankind are influenced by opinion; and that which they almost exclusively care about, is the opinion of their own friends and neighbors. When boys are sent to jail to the county-town, they care very little for the by-standers. Besides the contaminations they contract from others in the prison, they become hardened by associating exclusively with those whose common condition is that of shame and guilt, but unaccompanied by the emotions which ought to arise from them. They feel no degradation in that society, whatever they might in another; and when they return to their homes, (if ever they return at all,) they find very little sensation has been produced, beyond that which would have been occasioned by their absence for any other purpose. Thus the effect of punishment, by way of example, is lost on the offenders and on the public; and the moral degradation accompanying delinquency is little felt by the former, and little noticed by the latter. It is impossible, from the changes that have taken place in our criminal practice, to restore those local jurisdictions, as they have been superseded by other courts, and by that system of an independent magistracy, which is justly the ornament and safety of this enlightened kingdom. But if the cognisance of offences committed by juvenile delinquents were given to a tribunal, which would proceed with immediate conviction and punishment, the expedients of moral and judicial discipline would come much more in contact with the springs of human action; and if guilt was always exhibited in conjunction with shame, pride would be one of the assistant barriers to virtue.

I am unacquainted with the number of prisoners who have been tried for felony in other counties in England; but in the county of Warwick, nearly one-half of the prisoners are under twenty-one years of age; several of whom were of an age hardly beyond childhood, and are continually returning to prison for petty thefts, sometimes committed on the very day of their discharge. For whatever propensities he might have had at his first entrance into prison, the juvenile culprit seldom leaves it so good as he entered. He endeavors to acquire by secret fraud or open violence, the means of supporting himself in every profligate pursuit, The