ns; I debarked them without an iron
clanking among them. I am told that this is the first and only instance
of convicts removed from Norfolk Island having had their fetters struck
off during the voyage, and being landed totally unfettered. They were
almost uniformly double-cross-ironed and chained down to the deck,
everybody being afraid of them. I was among them at all hours and the
prison doors were never once shut during the day. To God be all the
glory." Three Governors of Tasmania expressed their high opinion of Dr
Browning's system and of its subsequent effects upon their behaviour.
(Vide "Christianity amongst Prisoners." Howard Ass.:)

In the famous Dartmoor prison and at Borstal in Kent experiments are
being made to secure a greater number of reformations among the younger
convicts. It is too early to estimate the value of the systems being
tried, but they are being watched with much hope and expectation. In
America there is a decided tendency to substitute State reformatories
for prisons, especially in the case of the young. The Elmira Reformatory
has been established for more than a quarter of a century, and its
claims to have reformed 82 per cent. of the men committed to it has been
upheld by the special enquiry instituted in 1890.

If these different systems were more closely studied there would result
a great awakening as to the possibilities of the criminal, and society
would discover that its best interests were served by reforming its
offenders and making them moral and industrious servants of the State,
instead of by committing them to institutions where they were brought
into contact with consecrated villainy and where the unwholesome
influence is calculated to confirm them in criminal habits and make
them a constant menace and expense to the community. That our criminal
population is on the increase, and that the proportion of recidivists
grows larger every year, is scarcely to be wondered at in the midst of
such influences. Notwithstanding all that has been done to improve the
state of prisons from what they were even fifty years ago, yet the motto
"once a criminal always a criminal" is often too sadly true. The report
of the English commissioners of prisons shows that amongst those who
have been convicted during the year 1902, 51.9 per cent. of the men and
70.6 per cent. of the women had been previously convicted. In the past
these results were regarded as inevitable. Now they are regarded with
muc