The public mind of England awakes periodically, and with a start, to a sense of the danger it incurs by the presence of a large criminal population in the very heart of the community, which is dealt with on no rational or consistent system, watched by no adequate police, and disposed of in no conclusive manner. We rave against the evil, we abuse our rulers, we insist upon a remedy being found, we listen eagerly to every quack and every philosopher, we discuss the subject passionately, illogically, and superficially; and we end by adopting some fresh plan which touches only a small fragment of the mischief, and darns only a small rent in the tattered garment, and which is usually some ill-digested and unworkable compromise between old habits and new fancies. We then grow sick of the subject, ashamed of our panic, and stupidly satisfied with our mild aperient and our emollient plaster, and go quietly to sleep again for another term of five or seven years. Meanwhile, however, there are two classes of men who never sleep: the criminals, who are always at work to invent new modes of preying on society and new dodges for evading justice; and the officials, who are always, after the fashion of their kind, and by a sort of ineradicable instinct, wriggling back into the old channels, and falling away into their normal inertness. There was such an awakening as we have described in 1853; there was another in 1857; there is another now. Let us see whether this last cannot be made to yield some better and more lasting fruit than its predecessors.