esteemed a virtue it is sneered at; where chastity is at a discount, and the thief, rake, and bully is the ideal character--there is no reason for any wonder that in the face of punishments there is no lack of offenders. These people see no reason to respect our rules of conduct. Our punishments may exercise a deterrent effect on them to the extent of causing them to modify their methods of operation, but the bogey we fix up for their warning will not make them virtuous or cause them to alter the standards they have set up. Punishment does not deter the great mass of our fellow-citizens from committing crimes. They are law-abiding because they have no inclination to break the law and no inducement to do so. Let it press on them and we may hear another story. I am old enough to remember when in 1886 it was proposed to give Home Rule to Ireland; we had then professors and eminent citizens threatening to take up arms rather than allow the proposal to be carried. They were genuinely alarmed for the safety of their friends, and their respect for the law took a back seat for the time. It is an easy matter for many of us to stand by the laws, for we have not felt their pinch. That may be a reason why there is always such a difficulty in changing them, and why almost any change is supported by the poorer classes. Certain it is that even among the honest and welldoing poor there is a suspicion of the law and a reluctance to have anything to do with it. Those who are definitely at war with it and those who may be tempted to join them, are the only persons whom we may reasonably hope to deter from the commission of certain offences by our arbitrary punishment of those whom we catch; and even in their case there is no ground for the belief that the deterrent effect is such as to cause them to mend their way of living, but only to modify their methods. The real deterrent is social opinion, and when one of them comes out of jail it is quite evident that his imprisonment has not caused him to sink to the smallest extent in the estimation of those whose good opinion he values.