maintain anti-social blackguards in comfort? There seems a general tendency to look more upon prison as a reformatory for criminals than as a deterrent. The success of a prison system is supposed to be established when it has been shown that a large proportion of those confined subsequently become honest men. That, no doubt, is an achievement much to be desired; but it is very far from being the sole object of a prison system. I should say, rather, that that system was most successful which most effectively deterred men from going wrong at first. Doubtless reformation is best achieved by mild and humanizing treatment; in every sphere of life harshness results in anti-social feelings, while kindness results in moral elevation. But the principles of deterrence demand considerable severity; there appears to be here a direct contradiction between the requirements of deterrence and of reformation; and it would be fatal if our zeal for the latter caused us to overlook the demands of the former. With advancing civilization men are deterred from crime by the prospects of punishments much less grim than heretofore; and it is right and proper, therefore, that there should be a corresponding relaxation in the rigors of prison life, such as is now in progress. But the other side of the picture has to be remembered; enthusiasm for the criminal must not outrun enthusiasm for the safety of society.' As to the mode by which reformation should be achieved, the principles of Herbert Spencer's article on PrisonEthics (Essays, vol. iii.) appear to be The prisoner should unanswerable. be made to earn his own living, to pay The warning in the text is more than justified by a perusal of the recently published Blue Book of Criminal Statistics [Cd. 5473], from which it appears that the progressive diminution in crime during last century has given place to a steady increase of crime during the present century. Mr. H. rent for his cell, the maintenance of warders, etc., the conditions of labor being, however, always more arduous than prevail outside. The criminal thus costs society nothing, and he is inured into the kind of habits which it is desired he shall continue on his release. He should be made, as far as possible, to refund to society some of the value he has abstracted from it; an aim which is best achieved by utilizing his labor to pay all the expenses of keeping him, and taking also a great part of whatever additional profits ac crue. There is another mode by which he may be made to refund real value to society. I am aware that in promulgating this mode I shall be considered by many worthy people a gross and brutal barbarian; nevertheless in the interests of criminals, of society, and of humanity itself, I venture to suggest it. Nine-tenths of all the suffering that afflicts the human species is caused by disease of one kind or another. The extinction of disease would therefore be a boon to humanity, of desirability far exceeding any other that we can imagine. The project, moreover, impracticable as it first appears, and still remains, is becoming less chimerical every day. It is beginning to be recognized that the zymotic diseases (which constitute the large bulk of all disease) are already almost within our power to eliminate. The magnificent achievements of modern physiology and medicine have been attained largely as a result of experiments on living animals; and one of the greatest difficulties standing in the way of further progress has been the impossibility of making experiments upon human beings. My proposal is that B. Simpson, C.B., in his introduction to the Blue Book, says: "It is permissible to suggest that the steady increase of crime during the last ten years is largely due to a general relaxation of public sentiment with regard to it." criminals should be used, where desirable, for purposes of scientific experimentation. Suppose, for instance, that a man has been convicted of a particularly brutal rape, or of swindling poor people out of their life's savings; and suppose that an important discovery towards the cure of cancer might be made by inoculation experiments on living men; will any sentimentalist be so blind to reason, so deaf to the plainest calls of humanity, as to say it would be wrong to inoculate that criminal with the cancer and make the observations which might be followed by untold benefit to the whole race? I confess I cannot understand the mental attitude of anyone who will object to this. On the one hand we have a coarse and hardened scoundrel, on whom we have in any case determined to inflict severe penalties; on the other hand, we have an odious and agonizing disease, from which about 50,000 persons are said to be now suffering in England and Wales alone. Is it more normal or more humane that the penalties inflicted on the criminal should be penalties useless to society, rather than penalties useful to society? Can we reconcile it to our conscience to allow thousands and thousands of our best citizens to be tormented and succumb to this frightful disease, merely beIcause we have not the nerve to try experiments upon one or two heartless wretches, who do not deserve our slightest commiseration? Philanthropic sentiment is by many subordinated to philozoic sentiment; are they also prepared to subordinate it to philokakurgic sentiment? I have taken this particular instance merely as a concrete example of what might be done; but many greater or lesser varieties of experiment might be tried. I think it can be shown that, as in the case of capital punishment, the deterrent effects of human vivisection would be greater, and the actual pain inflicted far less, than is involved in penal servitude. In other words, from the points of view of humanity and deterrence, such punishment combines all the virtues of an ideal punishment. And it does something else, too, that capital punishment does not do. It makes the criminal refund to society benefits equivalent to the injuries he has inflicted upon it. The demands of abstract justice could scarcely be more completely satisfied than by making the offender render back to society in his own physical person some part of the evil he has inflicted upon other members of society. That his person should be held sacred, never to be dedicated to the service of humanity, appears so monstrous a doctrine that I hardly know how to characterize it. The proposal is not altogether new. In the reign of George the First the Law Officers of the Crown gave it as their opinion that the King could lawfully grant a pardon to a malefactor under sentence of death, on condition that he should suffer himself to be inoculated with smallpox (Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors). Not long ago a Filipino prisoner was infected with dysentery by the ingestion of cultures of the dysentery bacillus. At the present day enthusiasts occasionally come forward and offer themselves for experimentation in subjects on which they are interested. What enthusiasts will do for the advancement of science may surely be demanded from criminals in whole or part commutation of their other punishment. I began this essay by pointing out that our social institutions are based not upon reason, but upon sentiment. There are many who would like to make reason all-powerful, and drive out sentiment with a pitchfork. There are many others who dread the time when sentiment may have vanished from the world. Both the hopes of the one and the fears of the other are groundless. Mankind must in the future, as in the past, continue ever to be governed by sentiment. But the sen timents greatly change. The harsh revengeful sentiments of primitive times are altogether to be deprecated; but they are not more dangerous than the soft and maudlin sentiments which by excessive reaction are apt to succeed them. Let us clearly recognize the danger of those pusillanimous sentiments that shrink away from the ugly facts of life, and pervert the high authority of humanity to cover a knock-kneed apprehension of the surThe Nineteenth Century and After. geon's knife, by the use of which alone can we march forward to health and strength. Let us clearly recognize that only those sentiments are magnanimous which impel us to face facts as they are, the painful no less courageously than the pleasant facts; sentiments which are not to be deterred by the bitter racking pain of the moment from taking such steps as are indicated by a calm foresight for the greatest ultimate welfare of our people. Only so can the great goal of humanity be achieved; only so can the success and prosperity of the British people be maintained. Hugh S. R. Elliot. LONDON AS SHOWN BY SHAKESPEARE. Lord Byron, in speaking of London. refers to it in these words: A mighty mass of brick and smoke and shipping, Dirty and smoky, but as wide as eye Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping In sight, then lost amidst the forestry Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy; A huge, dim cupola, like a fool's cap crown On a fool's head-and there is London Town. These lines from Don Juan, though of a somewhat cynical character, do afford an impression of London under a certain aspect, both from the æsthetic and the practical point of view. In all Shakespeare's writing, in spite of the fact that the greater number of his years were spent in the City (and there is evidence from his writing that he was thoroughly imbued with its life and atmosphere), there is no passage and there are very few words of description or poetic allusion to the town as a whole, or to any of its wellknown historic or æsthetic features. This is, at first sight, somewhat a remarkable fact when we consider the wonderful power of appreciating the influence of surroundings which the poet possessed. London at the time at which he wrote must have been a very beautiful spot. For illustration, let us consider the view from Charing Cross to the Tower-the lovely river with waters far clearer than they are now, stretching in an unbroken sweep to old London Bridge with its varied ridge of houses; gardens on both sides extending down to the edge, and, raised above the mass of greenery, the quaint and gorgeous outline of the Elizabethan mansions on the North Side, terminating with the splendid pile of Old St. Paul's on the one bank, and the graceful tower of St. Mary's, Southwark, on the other to form a point d'appui for the vision. The buildings, too, whose picturesque beauty, hallowed by historic association, we all know, must then have been equally impressive, more especially as some of the stirring events that occurred in them took place in the memory of the poet. While Gray writes of the Tower: Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame, By many a foul and midnight murder fed Shakespeare, although he constantly mentions the Tower, has no longer allusive passage to it than the words of the young Prince in Richard III.: "I do not like the Tower of any place. Did Julius Cæsar build that place, my lord?" and in another scene as "ill erected," and of "flint bosom." Even the theatre in which Shakespeare acted, which he probably partly owned, and for which he might have manifested some feeling, has but the scant reference, "This wooden O," and "this cockpit," with regard to it in the famous prologue to Henry V. Scarcely anywhere is even an adjective brought into the service of adding any detail or adornment to any ungarnished name: "proud London" is the extent to which the name of the capital as a whole is dignified, and this once only. This to us. perhaps, curious abstention from description does not arise from want of appreciation or eye for his surroundings. His plays are crowded with allusion to natural objects, so that Milton has been led to say of him: Sweetest Shakespeare! Fancy's child! Warbling his native wood-notes wild. Nature, in all her varying moods, appealed to him most keenly, and he is constantly at pains to refer to scenic and natural effects and to draw metaphors from them. Lear approaches Dover cliff, and the scene is brought before us with vivid intensity Come on, sir; here's the place; stand still, how fearful And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low; The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles; halfway down Hangs one that gathers samphire; dreadful trade! Methinks he seems no bigger than his head, The fishermen that walk the beach apappear like mice. The murmuring surge That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes. Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more Lest my brain turn. Burgundy, in Henry V., speaking of his native land, thus dilates upon the engrossing theme with a plethora of exact detail that could only have been written by a keen observer of Nature: Should not in this best garden of the world Our fertile France put up her lovely visage? Alas! she hath from France too long been chased, And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps, Corrupting in its own fertility: Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart, Unpruned dies: her pleached, hedges even Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair, Put forth disordered twigs; her fallow leas The darnel, hemlock and rank fumitory Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts That should deracinate such savagery; The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth The freckled cowslip, burnet and green clover, Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank, Conceives by idleness and nothing teews But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs, Losing both beauty and utility. Behold the English beach Pales in the flood with men, with wives, and boys, Whose shouts and claps out-voice the deep-mouth'd sea: Which, like a mighty whiffler, 'fore the King, Seems to prepare his way: so let him land And solemnly see him set on to London. So swift a pace hath thought, that even now You can imagine him upon Blackheath. But now behold, In the quick forge and working house of thought, How London doth pour out her citi zens. The Mayor, and all his brethren, in best sort, Like to the senators of antique Rome, With the plebeians swarming at their heels, Go forth, and fetch their conquering Cæsar in. It will be noticed that, in this last passage, Shakespeare stops in the narration of events to give an illustration from the sea, from which he is constantly drawing metaphors, but there is no word of the appearance of the town or the view which Henry must have had of his capital, spreading out before him, from the heights of the south. Nevertheless, in this passage, perhaps, may be found the key to the lack of descriptive reference to urban surroundings in the dramatist. Surely it is the human element which Shakespeare, above all, endeavors to depict, and which absorbs his interest and his powers. He is essentially the poet of "men"; he carried out in practice the precept of Pope, "The noblest study of mankind is man.” Truly a wonderful picture of an entry into a town! Richard II. is brought to trial in Westminster Hall, that splendid building which has been the scene of so many tragedies and celebrations; but although the human action and speech are closely described, not one word is given to the aspect of the place or the setting of the solemn scene, so keenly is the power of the writer taken up in the living drama. We may compare this with poetry upon another solemn scene that took place within its walls but a year ago, and we may notice the difference in treatment. Shakespeare is essentially the poet of human life and character; others, such as Milton or Wordsworth, may have rivalled him in their descriptions of |