think for them, and act for them wisely. When a man gets into prison you become your brother's and your sister's keeper, and when he comes out he comes out with your mark upon him, for good or for evil.

71. The unsympathetic and unchristian rage against the criminal classes is both blind and unpractical; it stops short of improvement, it prevents cure.

Think how little is done to prevent crime, yet it is the shortest and most economical way of abolishing criminals. But sometimes you cannot prevent crime. Agreed; but think when crime has been committed how little is done to reform the criminal. The remedy we apply, our prison discipline, is in many cases worse than the disease.

Prisons used to be the very hotbeds of physical disease; they are still, in too many instances, the hotbeds of moral disease.

72. The person who first called public attention to the treatment of the criminal classes was JOHN HOWARD, the well-known philanthropist (born 1726, died 1790); and it is not too much.

to say that the germ of almost every moral and sanitary reform in the state of the people that has since taken place is to be found in some hint, plan, or practice advocated by John Howard.

Let us pay on the threshold of our subject a passing tribute of memory to this great and singular man.

73. John Howard, the son of a small tradesman, was born at Hackney in the year 1726. He was himself trained to business habits in a grocer's shop, but at his father's death came in to property and lived on his estate.

He was a lonely and self-centred man, with narrow though deep affections, an utter disre gard of conventional opinion, an absolute belief in his own, and filled with a severe sense of duty, together with a power of concentration which sustained and coloured the whole of his life-work.

Having fallen sick in lodgings, he was tended by an excellent widow woman who kept the house. She was twice his age, of no personal attractions, and a settled invalid, yet Howard insisted upon marrying her out of gratitude; nor did he ever repent of his choice.

In three years he was a widower, and his health being re-established he determined to go abroad. He sailed in 1755.

All England was then ringing with the news. of the earthquake at Lisbon. He had plans for relieving the sufferers, and resolved to visit the scene of disaster in person; but his ship fell into the hands of a French privateer. He was captured, and thrust into a noisome dungeon. There he was first made acquainted with the horrors of a French prison.

On escaping to England, he carried with him impressions that grew deeper with every year of his life, and although fourteen years passed before he lighted upon his wonderful career, he was not idle, but, marrying again in 1758, settled down upon his estates at Cardington, near Bedford, and spent his time and money in building model cottages and schools for his tenantry, and in studying medicine.

74. In his philanthropic method he was at least a hundred years in advance of his age, and we have done little more since than follow tardily in his footsteps.

In 1765 his second wife died suddenly, and

his affections, narrow but deep as they were, never recovered from the blow. He never forgot her, and carried her miniature into all the dungeons in Europe.

His only child, a son, seems to have been a source of unmixed anxiety and trouble to him; and the lad doubtless came into the world, unfortunately, weighted with the eccentricity but without any of the great qualities of his father. Howard never understood him, and in attempting to drive him into the groove of the narrowest religious training, he is said to have exercised undue and ill-judged severity. His unfortunate ambition was to train his son to complete self-sacrifice, which ended in the lad's being initiated, by an abandoned hypocritical though trusted valet, into all the worst vices, and ending his life in a Lunatic Asylum. This result of the narrowest form of Bible-piety cannot be too much noted and deplored.

75. On returning from his second tour on the Continent he dedicated himself solemnly to the service of God, and entered, as sheriff of Bedford, upon the peculiar sphere which has made his name so famous. He never flinched from

his unpleasant duties; he was constant at the scaffold, sat in the courts, and visited every cell in the gaols of his county.

Bedford gaol thus became twice immortal. John Bunyan in 1672 issued his "Pilgrim's Progress" from his saint's rest there; and John Howard in 1773 passed from its walls to make no ideal "Pilgrim's Progress" throughout the prison houses of the civilised world.

76. What was the state of those prisons? What was the fate of those prisoners?

Noisome cells, months of unjust imprisonment before trial, innocent persons arraigned and fined without redress, and no less than two hundred crimes punishable with death.

The gaolers were the lowest of the people, chosen for their brutal insensibility to human suffering; and the prison officials robbed and tortured the prisoners almost at discretion.

There was no regard to health or decency, and a horrible disease, known as gaol - fever, decimated the prison population.

Warwick, Worcester, Gloucester, Oxford, each fresh gaol swells the black catalogue of horrors. Little straw, bad water, rotten walls, men and