The Royal Commissioners personally examined Mr. Imeson, the Master of the Central London District School; Mr. Mosely, Master of the Stepney Union School; and Mr. Todhunter, Master of the South Metropolitan District School; and considered the communications collected by Mr. Chadwick. I will read to you a portion of that evidence.

“Q. 4,500. (Mr. Mosely.) The drill has been in use with us for eighteen years.

"4,501. (Chairman.) Do you attach great importance to it? -Yes, and I will tell you why: Once during the past thirteen years we were without a drill-instructor, and all the smartness of the boys entirely went; they were slovenly in their dress; there was no neatness or pride in themselves in any way whatever. Now, with children of the class which I have had to teach, it is a most difficult thing to inculate any good habits of any kind, and I found at the end of those three months that the children were no more like what they had been while the drill-master was with us than, I might say, chalk is like cheese— there was no comparison, in fact.

"Mr. William Smith, Superintendent of the Surrey District School. "You have had experience of the effect of the military drill on the mental and bodily training of young children in this establishment? -Yes; but the effect of the military drill was most shown by the effect of its discontinuance.

"In what way was it shown?-In 1857 the drill-master was dismissed by the guardians, with a view of reducing the expenditure. The immediate effect of the discontinuance of the drill was to make the school quite another place. I am sure that within six months we lost about 2007. in the extra wear and tear of clothing torn and damaged in mischievous acts, and wild play, in the breakage of utensils from mischief, and damage done to the different buildings, the breakage of windows, the pulling up of gratings, and the spoiling of walls. A spirit of insubordination prevailed amongst the boys during the whole of the time of the cessation of the drill. In the workshop they were insub. ordinate, and I was constantly called upon by the industrial teachers, the master shoemaker, and the master tailor, to coerce boys who were quite impudent, and who would not obey readily. The moral tone of the school seemed to have fled from the boys, and their whole behaviour was altered, as displayed in the dormitories as well as in the yards. The chaplain joined with me and the schoolmasters in urging the restoration of the drill.

"The drill having been restored, has order been restored?Yes, excellent order."

"Drill exercises," says Mr. Macleod, the master of the School in the Royal Military Asylum; "if universally adopted, would be beneficial not only to the appearance and health of our pupils but to the discipline of our schools. The very punishment inflicted on children frequently arises from a neglect of those

laws which we cannot violate with impunity. We keep them sitting for an hour or two on hard and uncomfortable seats, without any movement of the body; tired of sitting, they get restless; inhaling impure air, they become heavy, dull, and stupid; disorder and neglect of lessons are the results, and the master resorts to punishment, which only increases without removing the evil."

But the utility of collective bodily training is not limited to the school. In Mr. Chadwick's "Communications," will be found the evidence of eminent engineers and machinists, among whom are Rawlinson, Whitworth, and Fairbairn, as to its permanent utility in after-life.

"In my opinion," says Mr. Rawlinson, "based on experience and observation, I think school drilling and training would prove of the utmost consequence to the boys in after-life. I may give a few instances. In all engineering and building trades men are frequently required to use their strength in concert, lifting, carrying, and drawing; men, to use their joint strength not only effectively but safely, must have confidence in each other. Two trained men will lift and carry more, easily and safely, than four untrained men. Drill and training would probably double the effective human power of any establishment, especially if numbers are instructed in joint feats of strength. That which is taught to youth is never forgotten in afterlife."

"I would consider," says Mr. Whitworth, "a youth of double the value, who had a previous training in a drill which gave him habits of order and cleanliness. I do not mean his own personal cleanliness, but keeping everything he has to do with in a high state of cleanliness. A youth who has had a training of a nature of a drill has a pleasure in attending to commands, whilst another not so trained is dull and dilatory and inefficient. The drill, besides correcting defects, brings out special bodily qualifications."

"A greater benefit," says Mr. Fairbairn, "could not be conferred on the population than to provide for them a military and naval drill, interspersing with their school instruction systematic gymnastics. It would be in every way profitable to them and salutary. Their active bodily training cannot begin too early."

Mere bodily labour, though less efficient than trained labour, is of great intellectual value.

Mr. Paget, the Member for Nottingham, employs on his farm boys who go to school on alternate days.

"On this system," he 66 says, they are never weary either of school or of work. At fourteen years they have received not only a very fair amount of the rudiments of learning, but they have also acquired a knowledge of the business of life, and are ready to enter into service, with all that skill arising from habits of labour, combined with hardihood from exposure in out-of-doors work, which the farmer who hires them has a right to expect. They are much better servants

than the mere school-boy would be. Their school life being compared not with a holiday but with a day of labour, they look upon it as a rest, and their associations with books are not irksome, but agreeable, so that they will retain what they have acquired. The schoolmaster also feels the advantage of this system. The boys attend more regularly than the average of children, and remaining to a later age, their attainments are higher, and they give a higher tone to the school. Mr. Spencer, the master of our school, declares that any master who has once experienced the benefits of the system will be very unwilling to forego them. This alternate system of labour and rest appears to be indicated by our nature, in which the activity of the body is a good preparation to the activity of the mind, and every hard-working professional man has found that the best rest for his over-tasked mind is in bodily exertion."

On the other subject to which Mr. Chadwick's attention was directed, the shortening the periods of mental labour imposed on children, still more important information was collected. Its result is thus summed up by the Royal Commissioners:

"I. That for children under the age of 12 years, 24 hours a week is nearly the limit of profitable instruction in studies requiring mental effort. II. That 18 hours a-week is often a more useful period of mental effort than 24. III. That 15 hours a-week, the utmost that is obtained by the factory children, is, to use the most unfavourable expression, not insufficient. IV. That much may be done in 12 hours a-week, or two hours a-day, provided that those two hours be two fresh hours in the morning. V. That children who have been educated up to the age of seven in a good infant school can be taught in three years, in a school attendance of from 15 to 18 hours a-week, to read well, to write well, and to understand and apply the common rules of arithmetic."

I believe that the ordinary hours of mental work and bodily confinement in the schools of the lower orders are about thirty hours a-week, and that those in the schools of the middle and higher classes are much longer, especially in girls' schools. I trust that the obscurity in which the education of the higher and middle classes is now involved may be dispelled by the Commission now sitting on Public Schools, and by the Commission on Middle Class Education, which I have ventured to recommend. But if these estimates of the hours now devoted to teaching approach the truth, we are employing labour on the part of our masters, and time, health and energy on the part of our children not only fruitlessly but absolutely mischievously. To arrest or merely to diminish this frightful waste deserves, perhaps more than other matter alluded to in our programme, the earnest co-operation of all the members of this Association

72

Address

BY

THE HON. LORD NEAVES,

ON PUNISHMENT AND REFORMATION.

T

HE subjects assigned for discussion to this, the Third Department of the Association, relate generally to the prevention and repression of crime, including the punishment and reformation of the criminal,-subjects undoubtedly of very great importance and of very great difficulty. I shall advert to some of the principal questions thus raised, and shall state some leading principles which seem to me to apply to them. In doing so I do not expect that what I say will always be in accordance with the opinions of even a majority of my audience, but I know I shall receive that fair hearing, which is so necessary for free discussion, and which may always be depended upon in the deliberations of this Association.

The primary purpose of punishment as inflicted by society is, in my opinion, to deter from the commission of crime. This idea may not be the origin of punishment, which probably was at first awarded as a just retribution due by the offender to the aggrieved feelings of the injured party or private avenger on the one hand, and to the moral sense and sympathy of the public on the other. But practically, and more particularly under written laws, punishment has come to be attached as a sanction to prohibitory enactments, in the hope, if possible, that, from the penal consequences there denounced, the law may not be violated at all; and with the design, if it be violated, that the punishment of the offender may at least, as our Criminal Writs bear, deter others from committing the like crimes in time coming.

This expression as to deterring "others" is cautiously and correctly chosen, and involves an important distinction. It is but too certain as to a large class of criminals, that the infliction of punishment upon them, is insufficient to prevent a repetition of their offence. The habitual and hardened criminal is in general proof against that influence. But this

does not destroy the effect of punishment as an example and as a means of deterring others from crime. It may deter those who are not habitual and hardened offenders. It certainly does deter many of weak and wavering principles, who might otherwise yield to temptation. No man can question this who bestows a serious thought on the subject. Let it only be supposed that all punishment for crime were abolished to-morrow, and it cannot be doubted that the day after we should see the effect of the change in the immense impulse given to criminal appetites and passions, when thus freed from the check at present imposed on them by the terrors of the law.

Viewed in this light we not only find a full justification for human punishments in the great law of self-defence, but we also see in them, when well regulated and adjusted, neither on the one hand so slight as to produce contempt, nor on the other so severe as to defeat their object, a noble institution which supports and strengthens the voice of conscience in the human breast, by giving it an outward utterance and a practical power; an institution also which saves men from themselves, assists them to subdue their baser inclinations, and by planting a strong hedge on the boundary line between right and wrong, preserves many from transgressing who would otherwise be easily induced to cross the march. Punishment in this light has even a higher function than the reformation of criminals. It tends to preserve myriads, or rather millions of men from ever becoming criminal.

This character of deterring from crime, ought, I think, to attach to punishment in all its shapes. It ought always to be something which the mass of mankind will look upon as an infliction to be dreaded and shunned. Punishment, to be what it professes, must be accompanied with pain and privation, and if it is ever divested of these qualities, a serious shock is given to the moral sense of the multitude, and a serious disturbance introduced among the motives and forces which influence human conduct. I would not be so pedantic as the prison disciplinarian, who, when a sick prisoner was ordered a glass of wine, used to put something into it to give it a bad taste. Far less would I imitate the barbarity of the Bastille jailor who put his foot on the spider that formed the sole comfort and companion of his unhappy prisoner. But I conceive that punishment must, if possible, never be made pleasant, and must never infer such a condition of things as an innocent labouring man would wish to attain in exchange for his own lot. In respect of diet, and comfort, and labour, it ought to involve as much hardship and penance as may be compatible