It is in this movement of voluntary personal service, on the part of the earnest men and women, engaged in all these works and acting in the highest sense of patriotism and public duty, that the hope of the solution of the criminal problem lies in the future; and it is for this reason that I have adverted shortly to a movement that is proceeding in this country at the present time for the better nurture and education, and control of all that enormous number of boys and girls who, though they must profit to a certain extent under a system of free compulsory education, will not be transformed by education alone into useful and honest citizenship. Side by side with the machinery of the public elementary school system, there must be agencies at work of which the high purpose is not only to secure that the defective child shall be treated in accordance with scientific method, and that the pauper child shall not have less favourable opportunity than his fellows, but that all classes of children after satisfying the standard of literacy ordained by the school authority, shall, during the period of adolescence, be subject to such influences as shall secure them, when they attain maturity, a fair chance in the competition of life. Therein lies the prophylactic of crime. No Prison Authority can be indifferent to the great social effort now being made, the effect of which is perhaps already visible in the diminishing number of young persons convicted of crime. In future years, it is hoped that it will not be a commonplace, as it is now, for many old offenders to attribute their downfall, and their persistence in a criminal career, to neglect during infancy and early youth, and to the absence of any controlling influence to save them during the initial years preceding maturity from acts of mischief, or of fraud, until Prison, as the automatic and unvarying penalty, destroyed in them the germs of hope and confidence, and self-respect, without which a foothold in honest life could with difficulty be regained. (2) THE PROBATION ACT, 1907:--