These are all very good notions for a Boston jury, or any other jury to entertain, but suppose we should transform all these jurymen into Legislators, and give them a seat in the House of Representatives; and suppose a proposition were submitted to enact a law, making it compulsory on all parents to give their children a certain amount of schooling every year, and in default thereof, authorizing and requiring the proper authorities to remove such children from the custody of the parents, for the purpose of schooling them. Would they then and there take the same view of the subject? Would no misgivings arise about the bearing which their advocacy of such a stringent law might have on their political prospects? Would they advance as directly and as boldly to the application of the remedy as they do to the exposure of the evil? It is obvious from the language of the report, that the Suffolk Grand Jury have a much clearer idea of the disease than they have of the cure. The class of persons to whom they refer as “committed for first offences” are nevertheless “convicts,” and nothing can remove the “mark of the penitentiary” but an executive pardon. And whether there is “an apparent opportunity for their reformation,” is not an easy question to determine. When the distinction comes to be practically applied, it would be found very perplexing. Our Houses of Refuge are intended to receive those who have entered, or are just entering upon a course of life, which ordinarily ends in the penitentiary; and they have doubtless saved scores of youth from the convict’s infamous doom, and returned them to their families and to society, with every prospect of usefulness and respectability. And we had supposed that the State Reform School at Westborough, which has been so successfully conducted, was designed to answer exactly this end. The boys who are committed there, are generally sent for first offences, and the discipline is strictly reformatory. Does the report of the jury then contemplate an institution between the Reform School and the State Penitentiary, or between the Reform School and “the House of Reformation for Juvenile Offenders,” at South Boston? If the former, what ends are expected to be answered, which the institution at Westborough fails to accomplish; and if the latter, what class of offenders would they find between those at Westborough and those at South Boston, for whose case neither of these establishments provides?