fe it really is! Small wonder that
many descend to the underworld when accident overtakes them. But for
character, grit, patience and self-denial commend me to such women. All
honour to them! may their boys do well! may their girls in days to come
have less anxieties and duties than fall to the lot of working men's
wives of to-day.

CHAPTER XII. IN PRISONS OFT

If every chapter in this book is ignored, I hope that this one will be
read thoughtfully. For I want to show that a great national wrong, a
stupidly cruel wrong, exists.

Probably all injustice is stupid, but this wrong is so foolish, that
any man who thinks for one moment upon it will wonder how it came into
existence.

I have written and spoken about it so often that I am almost ashamed of
returning to the subject. Yet all our penal authorities, from the Home
Secretary downwards, know all there is to be known about it.

I am going, then, to reiterate a serious charge! It is this: no boy from
eight years of age up to sixteen, unless sound in mind and body, can
find entrance into any reformatory or industrial school! No matter how
often he falls into the hands of the police, or what charges may be
brought against him, not even if he is friendless and homeless. Again,
no youthful prisoner under twenty-one years of age, no matter how bad
his record, is allowed the benefit of Borstal training unless he, too,
be sound in mind and body. This is not only an enormity, but it is also
a great absurdity; for it ultimately fills our prisons with weaklings,
and assures the nation a continuous prison population.

It seems very extraordinary that prison and prison alone should be
considered the one and only place suitable for the afflicted children of
the poor when they break any law, but so it is.

The moral hump is tolerated, even patronised in reformative
institutions, but the physical hump, never!

Cunning, dishonesty and rascality generally may be tolerated, but
feebleness of mind or infirmity of body never! All through our penal
administration and prison discipline this principle prevails, and is
strictly acted upon.

Let me put it briefly; prison, and prison only, is the one and only
place for afflicted youth when it happens to break one or the other of
our laws.

We have numerous institutions, half penal and half educative, that exist
absolutely for the purpose of receiving homeless, wayward or criminally
inclined youthful delinquents.

These institu