By another article of the same code (the 67th), all children found by the authorities who have neither parents nor homes are taken to the House of Correction: nor is this plan confined to France. The boldly-benevolent sheriff of Aberdeen, imitating this law, formed his most efficient school, by causing all the destitute and friendless children in the bounds of his jurisdiction to be 'taken up' and housed in his miscellaneous but admirable academy. The law of France, by this sort of procedure, exercises a protective influence over the friendless and forlorn. The law of England, on the contrary, only condescends to notice children when they have become criminals. Here the 'eye of the law' is shut against neglected and wretched outcasts from tainted homes, or the offspring of vicious parents; but opens them wide, and darts its fiery glare, to bring these young victims to punishment, when they have committed crimes for which, as we shall presently prove, they ought scarcely to be held accountable. The sternest moralist will not deny that in a majority of cases offenders under, say fourteen years of age, ought not to be deemed criminals in the ordinary sense of the term--that is to say, as offenders who, having acquired a knowledge of the duties of civilised life, have violated them: the fact being, that the very possibility of acquiring such knowledge the law denies; whilst, on the other hand, every incentive and temptation to dishonesty is working within them. These wretched young creatures are either homeless orphans, committing petty thefts to keep life in them, or the offspring of infamous parents, who urge them to pilfer, as a means of support in their own profligacy, or are hired and taught by practised ruffian employers to plunder for their benefit. How, then, can a child of tender years, for whom the legislature has provided no means of instruction, religious or moral, who has been sent out by his parents to beg or steal--caressed when successful, and punished when unlucky; or, more frequently, a being who has been cast loose upon the world, without a friend in it--form any just notion of his duties to society? Yet, because he has not done so, the law, when it detects him in the consequences of such ignorance, sends him to the treadmill or to jail. And even there our criminal code affords no means of reformation, nor always of employment;[1] while, on the contrary, every sort of instruction in depravity, and every means of acquiring proficiency in thieving, are supplied by his prison associates. 'Prisons,' says the chaplain of the Pentonville Prison in the last report from that establishment, 'as they are throughout the country, generally speaking, are schools in which everything wicked, deceitful, impious, and abominable is practised, taught, and propagated at a great expense of public money and public morals.'