of social development, as, for example, in the days of slavery or serfdom, but they are manifestly out of place in an age of unrestricted freedom, when a man may work or remain idle just as he chooses.  A society based upon the principle of individual liberty is a society of which the members are supposed to be gifted with the virtues of prudence, industry, and self-control; virtues of this nature are indeed essential to the existence of such a form of society.  Unfortunately, a certain portion of its members do not possess them even in an elementary degree, and no amount of seclusion in prison will ever confer these qualities upon them.  Imprisonment, to be followed by liberty, however rigorous it is made, is accordingly no solution of the difficulty; the only effective way of dealing with the incorrigible vagrant, drunkard, and thief, is by some system of permanent seclusion in a penal colony.  All men are not fitted for freedom, and so long as society acts on the supposition that they are, it will never get rid of the incorrigible criminal.

[48] At a recent meeting of the Statistical Society, Mr. Murray Browne gave some interesting information respecting the work of Prisoners’ Aid Societies among habitual offenders.  “A question,” he said, “had been addressed to all Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Societies asking what was their experience with regard to prisoners who had been four times arrested but not sentenced to penal servitude, and had been arrested during a given period, say a year.  How many of them has turned out (a) satisfactory, (b) unsatisfactory, (c) re-convicted?  Detailed replies were received from fifteen different societies, not all working in the same way, or with the same machinery, giving a total of 253 such cases.  Of these only 95 were reported as satisfactory, 55 were reported as unsatisfactory, 66 were re-convicted, 37 being unknown or unaccounted for.”

It has also to be remembered that a considerable proportion of incorrigible offenders are not only mentally but also physically unfitted to earn their living in a free community.  Almost always without a trade, and very often the children of diseased and degenerate parents, the only kind of work which they can turn to is rude manual labour, and this is exactly the kind of work they have not the requisite physical strength to perform.  It is only in skilled trades that the physically weak have a chance at all, and if a feeble person is not a skilled artisan he will, unless possessed of superior mental gifts, find it rather a hard matter to earn a comfortable livelihood.  Should it be the case that such a person is below the average in body and mind, to earn a livelihood becomes almost an impossibility.  Now, this is exactly the position of many habitual criminals, and more especially of that large class of them which is being continually convicted and reconvicted of petty offences.  What can be said of them, except to repeat that they are unfit to take a part in working the modern industrial machine; what can be done with them except to seclude them in such a way that they will be no longer able to injure those who can work it.