with a royal freedom of well-doing, sets an example that might be hopefully followed by other and wealthier charities for healing the sick. {273} WITH THE PRISONER. What is the first greeting which a convict receives when he or she is discharged from prison? Imagine, if you can, the shivering, shrinking, bewildered feeling of the man or woman who, after, undergoing a term of penal servitude, some of it passed in hours of solitary confinement, has all this great city suddenly opened again, with its wilderness of streets, its crowd of unfamiliar faces, its tremendous temptations, its few resources for the friendless and the suspected, its great broad thoroughfares, where on every side may be seen evidences of wealth and plenty; where the tavern and the gin-shop offer a temporary solace to the wretched; and where, also, in every neighbourhood, there are evil slums in which vice finds companionship, and the career of dishonesty and crime can be resumed without difficulty or delay. Those who have stood outside the walls of Clerkenwell or Coldbath Fields prison, and have watched the opening of the gates whence prisoners emerge into a freedom which is almost paralysing in its first effects, will tell you how the appearance of these poor wretches is greeted in low muttered tones by silent slouching men {274} and women who await their coming. How, after very few words of encouragement and welcome, they are taken off to some adjacent public-house, there to celebrate their liberation; and how, almost before a word is spoken, the male prisoner is provided with a ready-lighted pipe from the mouth of one of his former companions, in order that he may revive his sense of freedom by the long-unaccustomed indulgence in tobacco. I should be very sorry to cavil at these marks of sympathy. They are eminently human. They do not always mean direct temptation—that is to say, they are not necessarily intended to induce the recipient to resume the evil course which has led to a long and severe punishment. That the result should be a gradual, if not an immediate, weakening of that remorse which is too frequently sorrow for having incurred the penalty rather than repentance of the sin that led to it, is obvious enough; but what else is to be expected? Not many men or women come out of gaol with a very robust morality. Without entering into the question how far our present system of prison discipline and management is calculated to influence the moral nature of culprits who are under punishments for various crimes, scarcely ever classified, and never regarded in relation to the particular circumstances under which they are committed or the character and disposition, the social status, or the mental and moral condition of the offender, it may be broadly and barely stated that our penal legislation is not effectual in promoting the reclamation of the criminal.