The former Act has undoubtedly kept thousands of young people from prison, for which everyone ought to be supremely thankful. It was, perhaps, impossible for us to have a reform of this magnitude without some evil attaching to it, for we have not as yet discovered an unmixed good. This beneficent Act has been much talked of and widely advertised. The public generally have been enraptured with it, and magistrates have not been slow to avail themselves of its merciful provisions, though generally exercising a wise discretion as to their application. But human nature is a strange mixture, for while excessive punishment hardens and demoralizes a wrong-doer, leniency often confirms him. It is, and must always be, a serious matter to interpose between a wilful wrong-doer and the punishment of his deeds; but the punishment must be just and sensible, or worse evils will follow. The utmost that can be urged against this well-known Act is that it has not impressed on the delinquent youth the heinousness of his wrong-doing, and this is the case. True, he has been in the hands of the police, and he has been admonished by the magistrate; he has also been in the gaoler's office, and bound in recognizance to be of good behaviour. But this is all, for nothing else has happened to him. He has not been made to pay back the money stolen, neither has he been compelled to make any reparation to those he has injured. The law, then, has considered his offence but slight, and his dishonesty but a trivial matter. In his heart he knows that, though he has purged his offence as far as the law is concerned, he has not absolved his own conscience by any attempt to put the matter right with the person he has wronged; consequently, he is quite right in arguing that the law has condoned his offence. Frequently, then, he goes from the court a rogue at heart. Hundreds of times I have tried to persuade young persons, who have been charged with dishonesty and dealt with as first offenders, of the duty and necessity of paying back the money dishonestly obtained, but I never succeeded. The law had done with them; nothing else mattered. The wrong to the individual and to their own conscience was of no consequence. Human nature being, then, so constructed, it cannot be a matter for surprise that the First Offenders Act failed in conveying to young persons who had fastened around themselves the deadly grip of dishonesty that the law considered dishonesty a most serious matter. Many of the young offenders could not realize this, for, to use their own expression, "They got jolly well out of it." But such results might have been foreseen, and ought to have been foreseen.