first place, a matter for the local authorities that are responsible for the care of neglected children--that is to say, for the Boards of Guardianship [see note to page 74], and for the Poor Law Boards. The education of juvenile criminals differs but little from the education of the children cared for by the Poor Law authorities; and thus the question arises whether the care of juvenile criminals necessitates the existence of _ad hoc_ boards to administer this special department of the criminal law. Since the middle of the seventeenth century, it has been the tendency to send troublesome juveniles to institutions; and at the outset they were sent to poorhouses and workhouses to mingle with adult vagabonds and prostitutes. Not until towards the end of the eighteenth century did people begin to recognise that it was essential to separate heterogeneous elements. But even at the present day, in many countries, reformatories are so far from being worthy of their name that, like prisons, they are schools of corruption. Many reformatories have still the aspect and the organisation of barracks. In such places the children are subjected to a rigid discipline. They are managed very strictly, and yet the children are in some respects better off than free workers of the same age; they are compelled to be diligent, clean, and healthy. But their life is not truly living. The children receive instruction, but no real education. They work, but acquire no love for work. When they are discharged from the reformatory they are even less inclined to work than they were when they entered the institution; they are further corrupted, they renew outside the unwholesome friendships they have contracted within the walls, and commonly carry out, after they leave, the crimes they have learned and planned during their stay at the “reformatory.” In real advances in reformatory methods, England and the United States of America have led the way. But in the case of the former country, true progress in this respect dates only from the latter half of the nineteenth century; and in the case of the latter country, only from the year 1870. In other countries, even to-day, sound ideas have found in this matter but little application. This slow progress probably depends upon the difficulty of getting rid of the influence of the older legal theories, and upon the difficulty of assimilating the idea that a reformatory must be something totally different from a prison.