Now, at several of the prisons I have been shown convicts who are employed on “special service,” and whom I have confounded with the more numerous body of prisoners working at large on Southsea Common. This mistake is corrected by a friendly note from the Governor of Portsmouth Prison. “The greater number of the men,” he says, “were ordinary prisoners—in the ordinary stages, and still under the usual surveillance.” The man I referred to, who wished to be transferred from that spot, was not in the special class at all. “Had he been so,” writes Captain Rose, “the privilege of change of labour would probably have been accorded to him. He merely asked for a transfer of party—a very common demand, and rarely founded on any sufficient reason. Another point in which I wish to correct you, or I should rather say, to make myself more clear than perhaps I did during our far too hurried interview, relates to the adoption of an ‘Intermediate stage,’ from which it might be inferred that I advocated the Irish system in its integrity (the word being there employed). I was careful to guard myself against this; and in saying that I would willingly enlarge the special class to one or two hundred men, for the purpose of employing them on Portsdown Hill, without prison dress, and merely attended by a few picked officers as general superintendents (equally undistinguished by any distinctive dress), I reserved the important question whether they should be there located as in Ireland, or be still subjected to the ordinary routine of prison discipline and restraint, going to and returning from their distant labour daily by special train. The difference would be most important, and, in fact, constitutes the point mainly at issue between Sir Joshua Jebb and Captain Crofton. Should you write again, perhaps you will make this more clear.”[6] From these corrections with which I have been favoured, we gather two things. First, that the special class are exempted from surveillance: they are employed in carrying messages, and in other duties which send them abroad into the world, like the trusted members of the Intermediate class in Ireland. The application of the principle, indeed, is so fractional, that all comparisons which I see attempted between it and the Irish Intermediate system are untenable. But, secondly, the corrections appear to me to show that in England there is no resistless impulse to break through the moral restraint, and that in this respect the Englishman is quite as amenable as the Irishman. I have never been told, with regard either to Portsmouth or any other English prison, that they limit this privilege to bachelors.