tended measure of reformation on this head is, we conceive, a matter of urgent duty, nay of necessity. As our population becomes more and more dense, the present state of things leads to deeper and deeper shades of depravity; and each year the danger to the health of the metropolis becomes more imminent. Each year also, as the lower orders become more intelligent and more sensibly alive to the advantages of social order, the discomfort of such abodes is more acutely felt by them. We are aware that the subject has of late been much under discussion ; and we sincerely hope that the difficulties, great as they are, which surround it, will not dishearten the patriotic members of parliament who have directed their attention towards it.

The number of persons living together in illicit connexion would appear to be proportionately much greater in Paris than in London. One especial cause of the extent of this evil is stated by M. Frégier to be the great expense of the formal instruments which the law requires prior to marriage. It is true that in Paris itself these are delivered gratuitously, but only to those persons who are inscribed as indigent; and when it is necessary to obtain the documents from a distant part of the country, the expense becomes so great, and the process so difficult, as frequently among the poorer classes to render marriage almost impossible. The disadvantage of this state of things became so apparent, that a society was established under the title of La Société charitable de Saint François Régis,' for the express purpose of remedying it. The members meet every Sunday evening to aid and assist all the welldisposed and poverty-stricken lovers in Paris, as well as those who have already illicitly united themselves. The applicants on each day amount to nearly 300; and from the institution of the Society in 1826, to the 1st January, 1837, it had, with an annual revenue not exceeding 10,000 francs, afforded assistance to the celebration of the marriages, civil and religious, of nearly 8000 indigent persons, and to the legitimating of many thousands of natural children, of whom the greater part had been removed by their parents from the Hospice des Enfans Trouvés. The society has had the great satisfaction of knowing that in nearly all the marriages of this nature the first object of solicitude on the part of the parents was to reunite their children to themselves; and that they have subsequently brought them up carefully and well. A similar society on a small scale, but with equally beneficial results, has been established among the Protestants at Paris. They exist also in many of the provincial cities.

We have no space to follow our author through his disquisition on the principles of taxation, as affecting the lower classes of society. The gist of his argument is to prove that indirect tax

ation is not only just towards them, but that it tends to their moral and social amelioration.*

M. Frégier denounces loudly the mischievous tendency of the French drama-the malefactor, as well as the romantic, division of it; for our neighbours at the present moment are, like ourselves, great admirers of the Newgate style of literature. As play-going amounts to a passion with all the lower classes of the French, but with children and young apprentices especially, our author is convinced that, were the theatre strictly and judiciously controlled, instead of being, as at present, most injurious to society, it might be rendered the means of great moral good. We must decline going into this question at present; the abominable immorality of the French dramas and novels of the day has been of late sufficiently exposed in our pages-and we see M. Frégier quotes parts of our articles on these subjects without being aware of their source. Our disgust at the bad taste which can eagerly accept such productions as overwhelm ourselves at present, is, we confess, stronger than our alarm at their demoralizing effects. Our ephemeral dramas, which by the bye are vastly inferior to the similar productions of the French stage, are many of them mere remodellings of the mass of periodical trash which is now poured out upon us in a still increasing flood-each monthly issue more worthless than the last. How such works can be tolerated by the public is matter of absolute wonderment. Were their vulgarity and vice redeemed by any talent, any development of character, any graces of language, our surprise would be less: but nothing can be conceived more entirely devoid of any portion of literary merit than the mass of these works. They are written in a clumsy, matter-of-fact, jog-trot style, with about as much life and fire as would suit an engineer's report on a railway: and in their mode of dealing with their staple commodities, they are immeasurably inferior to the Newgate Calendar or the Police Reports; for they have none of that truth of detail which gives interest to those more elevated

In June, 1793, a motion was brought forward in the Convention that the poorer classes should be exonerated from all taxation. Cambon, the great financial authority of the time, strenuously resisted the proposition. Robespierre opposed it also; and M. Frégier gives, as a legislative curiosity, the following passage from his speech :- J'ai partagé un moment l'erreur qu'on vient d'émettre, je crois même l'avoir écrite quelque part; mais j'en reviens aux principes, et je suis éclairé par le bon sens du peuple, qui sent que l'espèce de faveur qu'on lui présente est une injure. En effet, si vous décrétez constitutionnellement que la misère excepte de l'honorable obligation de contribuer aux besoins de la patrie, vous décrétez l'avilissement de la partie la plus pure de la nation; vous décrétez l'aristocratie des richesses; bientôt il s'établirait une classe d'ilotes; et l'égalité, la liberté périraient pour jamais. N'ôtez point aux citoyens ce qui leur est le plus nécessaire, la satisfaction de présenter à la république le denier de la veuve. The motion was thrown out by the Convention.

productions.

productions. The writers of this class have one, and one only, device for obtaining popular favour that of conglomerating crimes. Every page must have its two or three catastrophes ; and they dibble in their atrocities, one to every twenty lines, as regularly as if they were planting cauliflowers. With them everything depends on the abundance of blood and brains-not their own certainly; and provided the murders, robberies, rapes, treasons, trials, and executions are sufficiently numerous-and they can get some poor artist to prostitute his pencil for their illustration-the sale is sure to be extensive, and the minor theatres lose no time in dramatizing the new masterpiece.

The suggestions of our author for the prevention of crime among the middle class are limited to the establishment of boarding-houses and circles of reunion for the students at the university, and evening-lecture rooms for the young men employed in commercial pursuits. Great benefit would, he conceives, result to the students from the establishment of boarding-houses under judicious management; but the system to be enforced in them must be moderate, or it will disgust and drive away the young men. It should not exceed in strictness that to which they would be subject if residing with their own families. He is not aware that more than two of these establishments exist at present in Paris.

The shopmen and commercial clerks are in general little educated; the establishment of evening lecture-rooms for these young men would be attended with important advantages, both to themselves and to their employers these latter should defray all the expenses attending them. One lecture-room in each of the forty-eight Arrondissements would be sufficient to accomplish this object; and they should be placed under the immediate control of the municipal authorities.'

These suggestions are well meant; but here, as in all similar cases, the misfortune is, that the persons who would avail themselves of these advantages would be the moral and well-conducted; the vicious and ill-regulated would reject them altogether.

From the preventive M. Frégier proceeds to the remedial means—that is, the means by which existing vice and crime can best be controlled and diminished; and he chiefly directs his attention to the three vices most widely extended and most pregnant with crime-drunkenness, gambling, and prostitution.

It is,' he says, an easy task for any political economist to point out a variety of plans which, if they could be carried into effect, would abate the vice of drunkenness: but, unfortunately, all these are good only in theory, and are means of prevention rather than of cure.-That all factory-children, whose parents are notorious drunkards, should be boarded and lodged by the manufacturer who employs them, and thus

screened

screened from the contagion of bad example at home, is one of these:that all the children of moral and well- conducted parents should perform their work at home, and, by so doing, avoid the demoralising effects of the vice-crowded factory, is another:-that societies under royal patronage should be established to procure for the entire mass of the working classes amusement, combined with instruction, during the Sundays and the other periods of idleness, is a third. All these plans would be excellent were they not impracticable. To subject every drunk. ard to punishment has been tried in Germany without success. Το increase the duties on wine and spirits has been recommended; but in a vine-growing country like France this would be a check to industry, and it would be unjust towards the sober portion of the community. Another plan is uniformly to publish in the newspapers an account of all the accidents, fatal quarrels, and crimes resulting from drunkenness. As, from the extension of education, every one will in a few years be able to read, this public exposure would tend powerfully to check the vice.'

We greatly doubt it; and, indeed, of all the suggestions brought forward in this section, there appears to us to be only one from which any important practical good might result. It is, that systematically, and by a mutual compact among all the manufacturers and master artificers, every habitual drunkard should be expelled from their establishments, however able a workman he may be. No doubt, if this system were generally and rigidly adopted, there would result from it, after a time, an important improvement in the habits of the working classes, M. Frégier does not advert to the temperance movement in Ireland and England. As he cannot be ignorant of it, his silence may, we presume, be attributed to his conviction that this singular impulse on the public mind will be of short duration.

Tolerated gambling-houses no longer exist in France; and the plan adopted by the government, of first suppressing them in the provincial towns, and then attacking the grand establishments in Paris, was politic and wise. It would appear, however, that the evil, if abated, is very far from being conquered. The vigilance of the police has, indeed, successfully put down the houses established for the specific purpose of clandestine gambling; but it has hitherto been foiled by the augmented numbers and activity of the maisons à parties. In these, high and unfair play is carried on, under the specious exterior of ordinary visiting, to a far greater extent than formerly; and our author is of opinion that alterations in the penal code are imperatively called for to meet these subtle evasions of the law.

Two diametrically opposite systems have been proposed for the reformation of the unhappy victims of prostitution. The advocates of the one, filled with the benevolent desire of reinstating

these

these women in the honest ranks of society, assert that it is the duty of the civil authorities to facilitate this object by assiduously labouring to introduce among them habits of order, forethought, and economy. The advocates of the other system reprobate, as vitally detrimental to public morals, any measures which would tend to blend these degraded beings with the respectable portion of the community, or to lessen the ignominy which attaches to them, and which forms one of the strongest safeguards, perhaps the strongest of all, to female virtue: they fear, also, that any improvements in the habits of these women would, in proportion as it lessened prostitution, augment illicit connexions more irreparably detrimental to the happiness of families. Far from promoting any objects of this nature, they are anxious to make the line of demarcation more clearly apparent than it is at present; and would willingly bring back the ancient laws which restricted women of this class to certain parts of each city, and obliged them to wear a peculiar dress. Our author inclines evidently to the milder of these systems, and so did also his great authority, ParentDuchâtelet in England this controversy is not likely to be agitated.

It is quite evident that the science of prison discipline is, of all others, the one nearest our author's heart; and his ardent partisanship in favour of the system of solitary confinement leads him, as we have already stated, to devote a very undue portion of his volumes to this especial subject. We shall not attempt to follow him through the details; the question being one which we but recently discussed, and which, if not actually decided in this country, may be considered as on the very eve of being so. The balance of evidence, we think, leaves little doubt that the bodily health does not suffer by even the most strict system of solitary confinement: but the case is by no means so clear with regard to the mind. Here, although the evidence is far from conclusive, there is strong ground for believing that long-protracted confinement, in a state of constant and absolute solitude, will injure the functions of the brain, and induce insanity, or permanent mental imbecility. The matter is one of such importance, that the only safe thing to do is at once to assume the fact to be so, and to act on that assumption. Confine a prisoner in a separate cell, interdict him absolutely and entirely from all communication whatever, either by eye or mouth, with his fellowprisoners; but give him employment and instruction—let him, in the course of each day, be visited by carefully-selected gaolers, by the master artisan who has to superintend his work, by the schoolmaster, the physician, and the chaplain-and experience has proved that there will not be the slightest cause to fear any injury to the