No. 4.--_The London Christian Observer’s notice of Rev. Mr. Field’s work on the advantages of the separate system of imprisonment._ In our last number we inserted, entire, an article on Mr. Field’s work, from the “London Medical and Chirurgical Review.” The February (1849) number of the _London Christian Observer_ devotes ten or fifteen pages to it, and inclines “to agree to a considerable extent in the author’s opinion, that the separate system is superior, not only to every other system that has hitherto been tried, but also to any that shall be, or can be hereafter devised.” This is rather more than we should be willing to say of any human device, but we are glad to see an English periodical of so much influence and reputation committing itself so heartily to the right side. The “Observer” has strangely fallen into the notion, that absolute solitude without labor or instruction, was ever adopted _as a system of discipline in the United States_. He speaks of “our good friends in the United States,” as having run into the extreme of “entire solitude for six or ten months together in prisons of the most wretched description,” but when the effects were seen, “the system was abandoned at once.” He expresses thankfulness, that this dreadful system was never tried in England, but that they have been permitted to learn better by the experience of their neighbors. There is no doubt, that studious efforts have been made by the opponents of separation in our country to confound it with solitude, and to give the impression, that whatever evils are imagined or proved to result from the latter, are necessarily incident to the former. But we should have looked for a little more discrimination in the Observer, and for evidence of more thorough knowledge on a subject of so much interest. Indeed, we might almost suppose, that the needful supply of knowledge and discrimination is at hand, when the inquiry affects the good repute of the “sea girt isle,” and only fails when the institutions of “young America” are presented for review. “We come now,” says the Observer, “to the separate system as we have it _amongst ourselves_, and we must request our readers to bear in mind, that this system is essentially different from the _Solitary_, properly so called--different in its objects, in its working, in its effects. The separate cell is but the sick room, in which the morally diseased is put under treatment for such time as his case requires. The solitary cell is (or rather was, for it no longer exists among civilized nations) the grave; where the patient is left as being past treatment and without hope of recovery. Yet the two methods have been, and are confounded, and the failure of the one, with all its attendant circumstances of horror, is used blindly or unscrupulously as an argument against the other.”--p. 129-30.