deavours to maintain themselves and lighten our shoulders of the burthen? On the contrary, I affirm that there is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent."* Perhaps the views of this eminent man on English paupers and pauperism, formed after careful observation while resident in this country, are as applicable to the present time as to the period of which they are more particularly descriptive. I think I have succeeded in showing, by irrefragable facts and authoritative opinions, that pauperism is a prolific source of juvenile delinquency. Nor is this, its inevitable and inalienable result, peculiar to our own age or nation. It has been the same, more or less, at all times, and among all civilized communities. Hence the prayer of Agur is as remarkable for its sound political economy as for its sacred wisdom :"Give me neither poverty nor riches: feed me with food convenient for me, lest I be full and deny thee, and say, who is the Lord? or lest I be poor and steal."+ * Works of Benjamin Franklin, vol. ii. pp. 358, 359. Art. "On the Management of the Poor." + Prov. xxx. 8, 9. CHAPTER II. II. COMPULSION, EVIL EXAMPLE, TEMPTATION, AND 66 HEREDITARY PREDISPOSITION. It is sad to contemplate the case of parents permitting their children to fall into crime; how much more sad is it to see parents compelling their children to adopt a vicious and criminal course, in order that the offspring's sinfulness may minister to the degraded parents' inextinguishable desires." -Liverpool Life. Vice (crime) is a contagion of the most terrible virulence. It spreads with the rapidity of lightning; and every tainted individual becomes a new focus both for the concentration, and the diffusion of the poison."- DR. JAMES JOHNSON Physician Extraordinary to William IV. How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds "A large proportion of our offenders are hereditary criminals.”—REV. J. FIELD, Chaplain of Berkshire Gaol. Ir makes one well-nigh blush for human nature to study some of its darker phases. The dizzy depths of moral turpitude and crime which exist even within one small island of our globe-and that the most civilized and christianized-need a lengthy plumb-line to fathom, and a capacious D mind to comprehend. Indeed, the possible existence of such evil would be calculated to stagger one's faith in the divine order and government of the universe, but for the conviction that such is merely the effect of accident, not of design.* Humanity cannot be viewed under a viler aspect than that of a parent corrupting his child. To find those who are bound by human and divine laws "to rear the tender thought" and direct its biases and aims, prostituting their authority and influence, and by every wary wile rendering the budding infant an imp of hell, is a sight to make angels weep! Instead of affording preceptory admonitions and salutary warnings, there are fathers and mothers so depraved in their natural instincts as not only to tempt but to terrify their youthful progeny into the commission of crime. Worse than that remorseless divinity of old which could not be appeased save with the blood of the worshipper— "Et quibus immitis placatur sanguine diro Teutates, horrensque feris Altaribus Hesus,"† these unnatural monsters demand the body and soul of their own offspring as a sacrifice to their insatiable desires. Not only is there observed a woful want of moral sentiment in criminal parents, but also an * Paley's Moral and Political Philosophy. † Lucan. lib. i. v. 439. The almost total absence of natural affection. Chaplain of the Liverpool Prison, after an experience of eleven years, testifies that he did not remember eleven cases, nor half that number, in which the parent of a child who had been committed to gaol had come to him to express any anxiety about the welfare of his offspring.* If they possess any regard, generally speaking, it does not arise from the dictates of nature, but from motives of gain. Children, as soon as they are well able to crawl, are driven into the streets for the purpose of begging or stealing, in order to support the profligate authors of their being in idleness and dissipation; often receiving severe bodily chastisement if the amount of the day's spoil does not come up to the required standard. In the Rev. Mr. Carter's journal, the following piteous incident is narrated: -"D. A., 12 years of age, a poor neglected child, twice in gaol for stealing cotton. When last committed was covered with vermin, and bruised from head to foot, the evident marks of abuse, which she declared she had received from her father 'because she did not bring home enough of cotton." "+ In such a school, with such professors, and under such influences, it does not take long for the child *First Report of the Birmingham Conference. to graduate ere he takes his degree in villany. Forced, like a hothouse plant, in a soil specially adapted for its development, he too passes from the seminal condition of innocence-if this can be predicated of his being at any period-into the sturdy adolescence of crime. To say that the child was a free agent would be saying simply what was untrue-he is quite the creature of circumstances, just as much as the unconscious seedling which cannot help shooting up when the sun's rays are concentrated upon it. It sometimes happens that when the children of miscreant parents are found stealing or straying in the streets, brought before a magistrate, and then removed to the workhouse, that they are vigilantly pursued by their vicious relatives, who frequently rail and rage until they effect their liberation. Mr. Carter mentions an instance of a youth who was detected while pilfering some wearing apparel from a house. On being taken before Mr. Mansfield, the stipendiary magistrate of Liverpool, the culprit pleaded want in extenuation of his guilt, whereupon he was mercifully handed over to the care of the overseer who, upon making inquiry, found that the boy's mother had been relieved with food and two shillings in money the previous night. A few hours afterwards this brutal woman came to the workhouse, in a beastly state of intoxication, to claim her child, and created such a disturbance that the officials |