Jottings from Jail. By the Rev. J. W. Horsley, M.A.
(T. Fisher trnwin.)—This is a terribly interesting book. Mr. Horsley has had many opportunities of observing the causes and developments of crime, and he gives the results of his experiences in these " Notes and Papers on Prison Matters." Very sad results they are, and the only possible consolation is that at least we know the worst. There are
countries where these things are hushed up, where no one ventures, or no one cares, to publish them. Here there is no such secrecy ; and this gives us some hope. We are not really so much worse than others as to be hopeless. Perhaps the most instructive and interest- ing of the contents of the volume is the diary. of Mr. Horsley's last month at Clerkenwell. He kept it because it was his last month, not because there was anything exceptional about it. And its value lies in its being an average experience. Of all the conclusions which Mr. Horsley has formed from the oases that he has seen, there is none more firmly fixed in his mind, or, in his judgment, more absolutely certain than this,—tbat workhouse schools are the prolific cause of evil. " When will people understand," he writes on p. 47, " that no list of the causes of hereditary pauperism, of crime, and of prostitution, would be complete or honest which did not include the workhouse training of the young, and especially of girls ?" With workhouse schools must be mentioned public-houses,—" public ourees," Mr. Horsley calls them. Yet here surely something might be done. Why not endorse, and after two endorsements cancel, the licence of any house to which a case of drunkenness, perhaps we might say, drunken. ness with crime, could be traced P Another curious point is the religious profession of criminals. Oat of 8,932 admissions in 1878 at Clerkenwell, only twenty-one were olassified as non-Christian, and some of these were Mahommedans or Chinese. Oat of twelve consecutive cases where "Atheism" was given by the prisoners, scarcely one could be described as having any kind of conviction on the point. This is a most suggestive volume.
Previous page
