n the Minories; went along with them, and continues in a
course of vagrancy and crime."

And what else could have been expected? The government, having sown
tares, had no right to gather wheat. Yet, had this boy been provided
with a home, either in a family or a reform school, with sufficient
labor, and proper moral and intellectual culture, he might have been
saved. Of the three thousand persons annually in prison at Newgate,
four hundred are less than sixteen years of age; and twenty thousand
children and youth under seventeen years of age yearly pass through the
prisons of England. "Many of the juvenile prisoners," it is said, "have
been frequently in prison, and are very hardened. Some, from nine to
eleven, have been in prison repeatedly, and have very little fear of
it."

The officers of the Liverpool Borough Jail are united in the opinion
that, when a boy comes once, he is almost certain to come again and
again, until he is transported. And, of every one hundred young persons
discharged from the principal prisons of Paris, seventy-five are in the
custody of the law within the next three months. A professed thief said
to the Rev. Mr. Clay, of England, "I am convinced of this, having too
bitterly experienced it, that communication in a prison has brought
thousands to ruin. I speak not of boys only, but of men and women also."
And Mr. Hill, Recorder of Birmingham, says of the sentences imposed in
his court, "We are compelled to carry into operation an ignorant and
vengeful system, which augments to a fearful extent the very evils it
was framed to correct." A few years ago, there was a lad in a New
England prison whose experience is a pertinent illustration of the evil
we are now considering. His father, a resident of a city, died while
the boy was in infancy. He, however, soon passed beyond the control of
his mother, and at an early age was selected by a brace of thieves, who
petted, caressed, and humored him, until he was completely subject to
their will. He was then made useful to them in their profession; but at
last they were all arrested while engaged in robbing a store,--the boy
being within the building, and the men stationed as sentinels without.
In this case, the discretion of the court, which distinguished in the
sentence between the hardened villains and the youth, was inadequate to
the emergency. The child, unfit for the prison, and sure to be
contaminated by it, ought to have been sent to a house of ref