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The thing most needed to assist the Reformatory working is some mode of sifting and sorting. Convicted boys want treating as cinders are treated—screening or riddling—and there should be recepticles for each species—non-criminal, criminal, and incorrigible—discovered by the process. Establishments under the Industrial Schools Bill and Reformatories will meet the two first cases—but the last—the worst and most difficult—still claims due notice. There are such cases. As it is, the judicial process—be it full formal trial before my Lord Judge or summary conviction before a local Justice—is the only machine for discrimination, and results in all three cases finding themselves within the same walls and under the same treatment, to the great hindrance of its full benefit for either. The presence of the two extremes neutralizes the full benefit of the system on its proper subjects. The Reformatory Act and The Industrial Schools Act, should allow of the free exchange of those for whom either legislates, on the representation of managers of schools, confirmed by magisterial authority.
Very curious and instructive too, did space permit, is what might be told from the experience of a Reformatory School, concerning irreligion or religion, falsely so called, in connection with crime. The dull cold callousness of the totally dark—in a fellowship of iniquity with the frequent utterer of a "Hail Mary!" or a booked passenger[1] by "The Spiritual Railway." And it is not because of their little moment, that these and kindred points are not more fully dwelt upon.
At the commencement I remarked on the political questions, that cluster, as it were, round a Reformatory inmate. These, however, are not the points which give to those engaged about it, or to the work itself its chief or essential interest. Whilst it is true that "the great social evil which has called the Reformatory movement into existence, and the removal of which forms its principal aim, is a class of children who are born, bred, and trained to crime, as the calling by which they are to live," that they are the rising generation of the caste of professional criminals whom society does not know how to reform, can no longer banish, and dares not exterminate, this terrible picture in its political and social aspect, does not supply what characterizes the work. This world to each responsible being in it is but a vast Reformatory School. To use its destiny of work, and its religious and educational instruments, for the correction of the evil,
- ↑ The mother of a truly criminal boy, sent her son lately a rapturous piece of poetry under the above title, with up and down lines leading, in violation of all Railway experience, from and to totally conflicting termini. In the note that accompanied this description of an Express Train to Heaven and somewhere else, she mentioned to her son that she had given up living with some one with whom for a time she had been cohabiting, because she found him unworthy of her regard!I need not say such things are never given to the boys; all correspondence on either side is previously inspected.
