M. Verdier deplores the fate of English juvenile offenders in their being subjected to condemnation, or as we should say, in being convicted; and contrasts their treatment in this respect with that which the same class meets with under the law of France. There, if the jury believe that a prisoner under sixteen years of age has committed his offence from thoughtlessness or want of knowledge, he is acquitted, as having acted "sans discernment," just as in England a person of unsound mind who has committed an offence is found "not guilty on the ground of insanity"; and as with us the lunatic thus acquitted is detained in confinement, so the courts of France have the power of detaining the juvenile offender until he is twenty years of age, or for any less period of time. But as regards all other penal consequence his acquittal is considered to be unqualified. Condemnation, however, in France and in England, with regard to such of its attributes as press on the kind spirit of M. Verdier, differs materially. In France, a convicted offender suffers "la degradation civique," which, among other privations, excludes him from voting at elections; prevents him from wearing any decoration-an incapacity very galling to French nature; he cannot be a juryman; as a witness his evidence is received with many restric tions for instance, he can attest no instrument; he can take no part in the family council, a domestic forum endowed with important privileges and much considered; except to his own children he cannot fill the office of guardian; he is deprived of the right to carry arms; he can neither serve in the National Guard nor in the Army or Navy; he cannot keep a school, and cannot be employed in any except servile offices. This is a fearful catalogue of disabilities, and is evidently regarded by M. Béranger, the President of the Court of Cassation, from whose valuable work, De la Repression Pénale, I extract it, as by no means creditable to the French code.

In England both the law and the habits of thinking prevalent among the people place all offenders, and more especially the juvenile class, in a far better position. Nevertheless, although I am unable to view the consequences of a conviction in England in the light in which they naturally strike a Frenchman, yet I should be glad to see our law made to conform, as regards juvenile offenders, with that of the Code Napoléon,

I am, &c.

M. D. HILL.

The name of the Recorder of Birmingham reminds us, that, in his Charge delivered to the Grand Jury, assembled at the Borough Sessions, held at Birmingham, Monday, July 7th, Mr. Hill addressed to the jury, some very important observations on the subjects of the necessity for a more stringent code of legislation against receivers of stolen goods, and likewise upon a subject of equally grave importance, the inutility of short imprisonments, particularly when considered in relation

with our present, in many cases maudlin, system of light punishment.

Mr Hills Charge is as follows-quoted from The Midland Counties Herald of July 10th, 1856, a journal devoting considerable space to all matters connected with the Reformatory Movement, and with Education in the Mining Districts.

Gentlemen, in one or two of the cases to come before you, persons will be indicted for receiving stolen goods, knowing them to have been stolen. I have no doubt that you will agree with me that that is a dangerous offence; and that such persons stand in the place of employers of thieves-stand in the same relation to the thief that the honest master manufacturer does to the honest work manthat is to say, furnish him with the capital by which his operations are carried on. It has been often said, and with perfect truth, that if there were no receivers, there would be no thieves; because a thief cannot live upon the consumption of the articles which he may steal, many of them not being capable of being so used; he lives then by taking the articles to the capitalist-the criminal capitalist-who buys them at a reduced rate, and who thereby supplies the thief with money for the purposes of his maintenance. It has always, therefore, been thought of great importance that such offenders should be severely punished, but the difficulties of conviction are very great, insomuch that since I have sat here, now a period of seventeen years, I have had before me very few indeed of these capital receivers. Now and then some casual receivers have been brought before me, but their cases were not of a nature to render their detection very useful to the community. With regard to the individual cases to come before you I shall say nothing, knowing as I do how competent you are to deal with them according to their deserts. At the same time, allow me to observe, that the difficulties which stand in the way of convicting the practised receiver of stolen goods who keeps a shop for taking in this kind of property, have turned the attention of many persons to consider whether a trade of this kind ought to be permitted to be an open trade, and whether it should not be controlled and regulated by license. If there were licenses for such shops, they should only be granted on one condition. No person should receive a license unless he could show that he was a respectable person, by bringing the signatures in his favour of a given num. ber of persons-householders of known honesty and integrity. Again, it has been proposed that all such houses should be so constructed as not to be out of the observation of the police, and that the occupiers of them should be required to keep a book containing an account of the articles purchased by them, and the names of those persons who bring them. All this has been done in the town of Liverpool, and perhaps elsewhere. Certainly we know that this course has been followed at Liverpool, under the powers of a local act; and I am informed that the results are very beneficial-that it has restrained and diminished the number of thefts, by throwing impediments in the way of the thieves disposing of stolen property,

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because they dare not take it to a really respectable man for fear of detection, and must take it to a person who either positively and absolutely knows that it has been stolen, or at all events shuts his eyes, and takes care not to know that the article is stolen. As to nice distinctions between one man and another in such cases, I will not attempt to draw them. The line, indeed, which separates them is very fine, and I will not occupy your time in endeavouring to trace it. If, however, we could have in Birmingham such a regulation, I think we should find it to act as usefully here as it has done in Liverpool, where, I understand, it was principally adopted to prevent thefts in cotton, Liverpool being the great port for that staple article, which is required to an enormous amount for the manufactures of Lancashire. Here it would be principally useful in preventing thefts of metal, in which most of the trades are carried on, and the effect is to furnish great temptations to the working people, and especially to the young. The great body of the artisans of the town are, I firmly believe, far raised by moral character above such temptations, but they do fall with great weight upon the young and inexperienced; and it would be a great blessing, not only to the owners of property which is liable to be stolen, but to all, high and low, connected with the town, and indirectly to the inhabitants of the country, if a check could be given to those nefarious practices. I am informed by his worship the Mayor, who sits by my side, that the local bill, which was prepared to be submitted to Parliament this session, contained a provision for this object, copied from the local act in operation at Liverpool. I regret to find that the bill was not prosecuted, as to the cause of which I may not be correctly informed, as it is no part of my duty to obtain an accurate knowledge of such questions; but I do say, that the particular clause, of the insertion of which I am cognisant from a draft of the bill having been sent me, was likely to have been exceedingly useful to the town of Birmingham, and I regret that the measure was not submitted to Parliament. I trust that on a future occasion it may have a better fate. There is only one further observation which I have to make, and it is this, that I see no amelioration in one important particular, for if our treatment of criminals had been well adapted to reform them, we should not have had such a list as comes before us to-day. There are ninety-five prisoners for trial; and with regard to more than one-half the number, they are persons who have previous convictions recorded against them, and who consequently have not been deterred by the fear of encountering punishment from repeating their offences, or reformed by the discipline to which they were subjected. Now, gentlemen, the main reason why the latter object is not attained is this, that they are not under the control of the prison authorities for a sufficient length of time. How can you expect a person, old or young, to undergo any decided change of character during a confinement of a fortnight, a month, two months, or three months?and until public opinion, instead of complaining of harshness when prisoners are committed for long periods, is led to perceive that it is a kindness even to the offenders, to place them under circumstances by which their character may be reformed, and that it is a

false notion of kindness to desire that they should be speedily exempted from discipline, I can see no ground on which we can fairly expect any diminution of the evil. I am afraid that until this conviction forces itself upon the public mind, the duties of grand jurors will year by year become more onerous. I believe that commitments for short periods are a sort of education in crime. A prisoner discovers that imprisonment can be better borne than he imagined; and finding, when he comes out of prison, that the difficulties of maintaining himself by honest means are greatly increased, and having lost his dread of the gaol, and, what is worse than all, having lost friends in the honest classes of society, and acquired them among those who look favourably upon him in proportion as he became more unprincipled, sinks still lower into the depths of iniquity. Sentences must be passed in accordance with public opinion, and it is often impracticable to resort to such as would be very humane, and indeed are sanctioned by law, because the principle on which they would be based is not generally recognised, and its partial operation would engender the feeling that offences were punished not according to their magnitude, but to the district in which they were committed. Every year, the public are becoming more and more sensitive on this subject, and punishments are becoming lighter and lighter. I am now an old man, and have been engaged in the duties of my profession nearly forty years, and when I contrast the state of punishments, as I first knew them, with what they now are, the change is enormous. In many respects that change has been for the better, but I think that we are now running into a dangerous extreme of an opposite kind, and that if the system of light punishments is to be persevered in, we had better have no punishments at all. They neither deter nor reform, whereas they have the bad effect of bringing poor creatures into contact with those who are worse than themselves, and teaching them to pursue a life of crime.

There are few men in these kingdoms more worthy to be heard on the subject of Reformatory training, than the Rev. Sydney Turner; and he now comes before us as a lecturer on that most important of all subjects, connected with the full developement of the Reformatory Principles-the Training of Reformatory School Teachers. His lecture, delivered before the National Reformatory Union, last June, is as follows;we take it from The Law Amendment Journal ::

GENERAL MEETING OF THE NATIONAL
REFORMATORY UNION

The Lord Bishop of St. David's took the chair soon after halfpast two o'clock, in the afternoon of the 24th.

Among the others present were-Lord A. Churchill, Hon. W. W. Addington, Dean of Salisbury, Mr. W. Miles, M.P., Mr. Adderley, M.P., Rev. Sydney Turner, Captain Maconochie, Mr. E. B. Wheatley, Mr. Silver, Mr. L. Lewis, Mr. Dunn, Mr. E. Webster, &c.

The minutes of the previeus meeting were read and confirmed. The Rev. Sydney Turner read the following paper on a normal school for Reformatory schoolmasters.

TRAINING OF TEACHERS FOR REFORMATORY SCHOOLS.

My Lord and Gentlemen,-The subject on which you have done me the honour to request me to address you, the training of Reformatory Schoolmasters, is one of the most important that the friends of Reformatory action can have before them.

The Reformatory teacher is undoubtedly just now the one thing specially wanting to give efficiency and permanence to our efforts for the rescue of the youthful criminal. Every one who has practically interested himself in this good work must have felt how much the success of his exertions depends on the qualities and capacities of the agent, the teacher, and master he employs. Many have had the painful experience that money may be raised, premises secured, friends enlisted, a school founded and filled, and yet all end in disappointment, or be attended with continual discouragement and difficulty, from the want of a superintendent and manager capable of really influencing the minds and softening the hearts of the pupils placed under his control.

There is nothing to suprise us in this. A man must be qualified to build a cottage or make a road; how much more to form a man an honest, faithful, intelligent, useful, above all a Christian man; how much more still to do this when the elements and materials to be employed have been distorted and injured-when we have much to undo before we can begin to mould and form at all-when perverted feelings, blunted conscience, low habits, have to be dealt with; and you undertake the task, not merely of enlightening and teaching ignorance, but of turning the neglected and corrupted child from license to self-restraint, from lawlessness and vice to order, decency, and goodness.

I know that there are many, even among the friends of the Reformatory cause, who think that in views like these we exaggerate the difficulty--many who think that any man who can wield a spelling book, or handle a spade, will do that you have merely to say to the young criminal, come learn, and he learns; or go dig, and he digs; and as he learns and digs, he reforms. I have not found it so. I have seen the young criminal become week by week a more ripened scholar, and a more finished and industrious labourer, and yet in no effectual manner armed against the seductions of lust and sensuality-in no way weaned from the practice of dishonesty and fraud. I speak of course of the town boy more than the country one-of the boy of London, Leeds, Manchester, &c., more than all. I speak, that is, of the vast majority, those whose depravity and vice really trouble us-whose reclamation and care we really are concerned in; for I may frankly say that if the youthful crime of the large towns, &c., be done away with, we might almost cease to vex ourselves with that of the country; the latter is comparatively so light, so easy to be dealt with as to depth and permanence, that one might almost leave it to the pauper schools to remedy. It is the town-bred union of vice and crime that offers us the real field of