which, nevertheless, when encountered in a manful spirit, improves and elevates the character. All the objects of punishment will be thus attained. There will be continued destitution unless relief is sought by exertion, and hence there will be labor and suffering; but with exertion there will not only be the hope, but the certainty, of recovery, whence there will be improvement in good habits and right thinking. And the motives put into operation to produce effort and economy, being also of the same character as those existing in ordinary life, will advantageously prepare the prisoner for their wholesome action on him after his discharge.

4. . . . . After the prisoner has passed through a term of probation, to be measured, not by lapse of time, but by his conduct as indicated by the state of his account, he shall be advanced from a separate confinement into a social state. For this purpose he shall become a member of a small class of six or eight (associated by mutual consent); these classes being capable of being separated from each other just as individuals are separated from individuals in the earlier stage. The members of each class to have a common interest; the marks earned or lost by each to count to the gain or loss of his party, not of himself exclusively. By this means Captain Maconochie thinks prisoners will be rescued from the simply gregarious state of existence, which is, in truth, a selfish one, now incident to imprisonment in those jails to which the Separate System is not applied, and will be raised into a social existence.

"Captain Maconochie is convinced, by observation, that much good feeling will be elicited among them in consequence of this change. Indolence and vice, which either prevent the prisoner from earning, or compel him to forfeit his marks, will become unpopular in the community, and industry and good conduct, as enabling him to acquire and preserve them, will, on the contrary, obtain for him its approbation. On much experience he asserts that no portion of his modus operandi is more effective than this, by which, even in the depraved community of Norfolk Island, he succeeded, in a wonderfully short time, in giving an upward direction to the public opinion of the class of prisoners themselves."

To this detailed statement, much of which is in Maconochie's own words, we will add the briefer synopsis and the comments made by the Parliamentary Commission of 1863, about three years after the death of the aged reformer.

"The experience both of this and of other countries has demonstrated that it is impossible to compel convicts to work hard by mere

coercion; the attempt to do so having invariably failed, while it has produced a brutalizing effect on their minds, and increased their previous aversion to labor. On this ground, the late Captain Maconochie, many years ago, recommended that the punishment to be inflicted upon criminals should be measured, not by time, but by the amount of labor they should be compelled to perform before regaining their freedom; and he devised an ingenious mode of recording their daily industry by marks, for the purpose of determining when they should have a right to their discharge. This proposal met with so much approval from the government of the day, that Captain Maconochie was sent to Norfolk Island for the purpose of trying the system he had recommended in the management of the convicts detained there. The experiment did not succeed, for reasons which were sufficiently obvious, but into which we need not now enter. The failure, however, did not afford any reason for condemning the principle upon which the scheme was founded; and in fact, that principle has been adopted, to a greater or less extent, in all the various schemes of penal discipline which have been tried in the last twenty-five years. The result has been to establish the conclusion, that the hope of earning some remission of their punishment is the most powerful incentive to good conduct and industry which can be brought to act upon the minds of prisoners."

Such was the system which, in part, was carried out at Norfolk Island, where Captain Maconochie, accompanied by his devoted wife, arrived on the 6th of March, 1840. The state of things which he found there has often been described, yet it will be new to many of our readers. On an almost inaccessible island, fifteen miles in circumference, were collected about fourteen hundred prisoners, the offscouring of Botany Bay and Van Diemen's Land. By one or another of this wretched multitude every conceivable crime had been committed, and the punishment here inflicted was almost inconceivably horrid. It was the old brutal system of prison management, reduced to its lowest terms. By day the men were driven to labor by officers who treated them with every species of insult, and who never dared to approach them unarmed. By night they were huddled together in vile barracks, where every abomination was practised without restraint. For punishment, they were heavily ironed, and flogged in a manner only to be paralleled on a cotton plantation in the days of "the Union as it was." Mrs. Maconochie relates, that two men, Burns and Docherty, had

each, in the space of eighteen months, received twenty-two hundred lashes, and had been imprisoned for twelve months, part of the time in irons in a damp cell. The food of all, nauseous in quality, was thrown to them as to dogs, and they were compelled to eat it without knives or forks, and to drink out of water-buckets. Only a part of them could get shelter during their meals; the rest stood exposed to sun and rain, in an open yard. Every vestige of self-respect was gradually obliterated from their minds. "Let a man be what he will when he comes here," said one of them, "he will soon be as bad as the rest; a man's heart is taken from him, and there is given him the heart of a beast." When, after a terrible mutiny, a large number had been convicted, and were expecting sentence of death, Dr. Ullathorne, a compassionate clergyman, went among them, carrying the reprieve of all but a few. It was a strange and horrible scene; for, as he pronounced the names of those who were to die, each man, in turn, fell on his knees and thanked God that he was to be delivered from this hell upon earth.

To men thus circumstanced, Captain Maconochie, at the age of fifty-three, was sent to try the effect of his new theories. The men certainly were not selected with a view to the success of the trial, nor was he a young doctrinaire, full of visionary hopes and endeavors. His first address to them has been described by an eyewitness of the effect which it produced. The ferocious countenances of the men scarcely softened as they looked upon the benevolent aspect of the old seaman. But his voice and manner drew their attention; for they heard, for the first time in many years, the tones of sympathy and human interest from one above them. Before he ended, many were in tears, and he had secured their good-will for his first efforts. This was strengthened when they noticed that he went among them unarmed, without fear, and dismounted the small cannon that had guarded the Governor's house. Courage and selfdevotion make their impression even upon the most depraved. To these, and to the good sense which marked his plans for their improvement, must be ascribed his great success in governing and reforming. To quote his own words, which do not too strongly present the remarkable fact,

"I found the island a turbulent, brutal hell, and I left it a peaceful, well-ordered community. Almost the first words of Sir George Gipps's Report on it (in spite of some strong previous impressions in his mind against my plans) are: Notwithstanding that my arrival was altogether unexpected, I found good order everywhere to prevail, and the demeanor of the prisoners to be respectful and quiet.' Besides this, the most complete security, alike of person and property, prevailed. Officers, women, and children traversed the island everywhere without fear; and huts, gardens, stock-yards, and growing crops many of them, as of fruit, most tempting - were scattered in every corner without molestation. I confess that I have since looked back even with wonder at the scene, familiar as it then was to me. There were flaws in the picture, doubtless, but they were fewer and more minute than, without tracing the causes, may easily be believed."

In consequence of official misrepresentation, and the strong opposition of the colonial magistrates, Captain Maconochie was recalled in 1844, and for five years exerted himself in a private capacity, in England, to bring into notice his system of Prison Discipline. It was during this period that he published many of his pamphlets. He also appeared before committees of Parliament, appealed to ministers and magistrates, and in all ways urged the reform that was so dear to him. In 1849 he was appointed (chiefly through the influence of his fast friend, Mr. M. D. Hill, the Recorder of Birmingham) to the post of Governor of the Birmingham Gaol, from which he was displaced in 1851 by the visiting magistrates, who did not believe in his system. In both instances his successors became a public scandal for the atrocity of their government; and the mild and reasonable sway of Maconochie stood approved by its results, as compared with those of the old method. But it was not till 1855 that a fair trial was actually made of the most important of his theories, and then by men who worked without his supervision, and in another country; and he died (October 25, 1860) before the results of that trial were fully declared to the world. The Irish Convict System, though established by Sir Walter Crofton, was really founded by Captain Maconochie, whose theories and experiments were prior to those of any other advocates of the new method. But of this more hereafter.

On the continent of Europe, in the mean time, the progress of the Separate System had been steady, if not rapid, and it had found warm defenders and official support in France, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, and several of the smaller German States. The great names of Tocqueville, Ducpétiaux, and Mittermaier were registered among its champions; and although Obermaier in Munich, and Montesinos in Valencia, were giving successful illustrations of the Congregate System, these had little weight. But in 1847 a voice was heard in France proclaiming a portion of that truth of which Maconochie, in Australasia, had proclaimed the supplementary portion. Bonneville de Marsangy, for many years a magistrate, and an author as early as 1837, in the year 1847 published in Paris a thick volume on "Institutions Complementary of the Prison System," in which he devoted one of his seven chapters to what he called the "Preparatory Discharge of Reformed Convicts," and another to the "Patronage of Discharged Prisoners." These, the two final stages of the Irish System, may have been earlier advocated by some other writer, and they are implied in the theories of Maconochie; but, so far as we know, they were first developed as parts of a system by Marsangy. His work is scarcely known among us; but a later book of his, "The Amelioration of the Criminal Law," † of which the second volume has appeared within the last year, has made him conspicuous among the writers on penal law. He has been consulted by the compilers of the new penal codes of Portugal, of Spain, and of Italy, and the impress of his opinions will be felt in those countries, as well as in his own, where some of the reforms which he has advocated seem now on the point of being carried. These opinions, so far as they relate to convicts, are thus stated in a recent letter of M. de Marsangy to the Board of Charities of Massachusetts:

"During the forty-two years that I have been performing the duties

1847.

Traité des Diverses Institutions Complémentaires du Régime Pénitentiare. Paris,

↑ De l'Amélioration de la Loi Criminelle en Vue d'une Justice plus prompte, plus efficace, plus généreuse, et plus moralisante. Par Bonneville de Marsangy, Conseiller à la Cour Impériale de Paris, Officier de la Légion d'Honneur. Première Partie, Paris, 1855. Deuxieme Partie, Paris, 1864.