woman was arrested, tried, and convicted. Previously to her execution she refused to make any confession, but said: 'If I were to tell all that I know, it would give the hangman work for the next twelve months.' These murders were not confined to the children. Wives, in many cases, have administered poison to their husbands who were members of a burial-club. This is one of the blackest pages in the history of human society. The future chronicler of England's glory will turn with horror from details so terrible, so fearfully humiliating. Yet the fact that 'A Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee,' should be no argument against habits of prudence and providence. There are other ways in which these habits can be exercised besides the burial-club.' Indeed, strictly speaking, they are not exercised there, for the murderous member of the burial-club merely pays down a small sum, which he knows will bring him in a large return as soon as he pleases. There is no prudence or selfdenial involved in such a devilish transaction. The honest labourer, mindful that 'hard times' may some day come, seeks out some upright means of providing against them. We cannot do better than recommend him some large enrolled friendly society, or life insurance; or, if he be unmarried, and have only to think of himself, a government deferred annuity will afford him a resource when old age comes upon him. ART. IV.-1. Chaplain's Reports on the Preston House of Correction. Preston: Clarke. 2. Testimonials of the Rev. John Clay, B.D. Preston: Clarke. 3. Preston Guardian. November 27, 1858. 4. Preston Chronicle. November 27, 1858. "THERE are in every county in England large public schools, maintained at the expense of the county, for the encouragement of profligacy and vice, and for providing a proper succession of housebreakers, profligates, and thieves. They are schools, too, conducted without the smallest degree of partiality or favour, there being no man (however mean his birth or obscure his situation) who may not easily procure admission to them. The moment any young person evinces the slightest propensity for these pursuits, he is provided with food, clothing, and lodging, and put to his studies under the most accomplished thieves and cutthroats the county can supply. There is not, to be sure, a formal arrangement of lectures after the manner of our universities; but the petty larcenous stripling, being left destitute of every species of employment, and locked up with accomplished villains as idle as himself, listens to their pleasant narrative of successful crimes, and pants for the hour of freedom that he may begin the same bold and interesting career. This,' wrote Sydney Smith in 1821, 'is a perfectly true picture of the prison establishments of many counties in England.'* Preston Gaol was one of those from which the portrait may have been drawn. It is now a model prison.' In the very year in which the passage we have quoted from Sydney Smith appeared, an officer was appointed to the staff of Preston House of Correction, to whose efforts it chiefly owes its present high position in the catalogue of English prisons. 6 To the late lamented chaplain of that gaol, the Rev. John Clay, its improvement is mainly to be attributed; and we shall endeavour in the following pages to indicate, by extracts from his invaluable reports, not only the means by which that amelioration was wrought, but the important aid he rendered to penal science itself by the light his benevolent zeal, sagacity, and experience enabled him to throw upon the causes of crime and the habits of criminals. 'It is impossible,' wrote the Bishop of Manchester to Mr. Clay, in 1854, 'to have ever read your valuable reports without acknowledging the very complete manner in which you have devoted yourself to the reformation of prison discipline, the prevention of crime, and the improvement of those around you. impossible to have visited, as I have done more than once, the House of Correction at Preston without perceiving that yours is not a mere theory or benevolent dream, but a system based on long and extensive observation and experience.' It is Your successive reports,' wrote Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, have faithfully traced the connection between the neglect of all the means of Christian civilization and crime. In establishing this, by reiterated demonstration, you have strengthened the hands of all who prefer prevention to punishment. The advocates of all the means of humanizing, instructing, and evangelizing the mass, turn to your reports as to an armoury of facts from which to prove that society encounters all its most serious dangers from the neglect of these means.' + It is deeply to be regretted that many of these reports are no longer to be obtained. From 1824 to 1836 they were only printed in the local journals, and few, if any, are now in existence. From 1837 to 1845 the newspaper type was put into double columns, forming a quarto pamphlet; but of these scarcely any are remaining. It was not until 1846 that the document assumed its permanent octavo form. Sixteen reports, ranging in date from 1837 to 1858, out of the thirty-three published by Mr. Clay, are all we have been able to procure. We believe, however, that they include the most important among those he issued, and they certainly 6 * Edinburgh Review,' July, 1821, p. 286. + Preston Chronicle,' Nov. 27th, 1858. 'Testimonials,' pp. 11—14. afford afford far more passages of deep interest than the space at our command will permit us to transcribe. But before we enter upon the public career of the chaplain of Preston Gaol we will mention a few details of his early life. JOHN CLAY, the fourth of five sons, was born at Liverpool on the 10th of May, 1796. His father, an ironmaster of that town, though member of a family which had long been settled in Derbyshire, died while he himself was yet a boy, leaving him and his brothers to make their own way in the world. When a child he was very delicate, and, according to the judgment of those at home, rather dull. As a young man he was chiefly famous as being about the best rider, fencer, runner, cricket-player (cricket then being in its infancy in the north), singer, actor, and lightweight boxer in Liverpool! With such qualities he was, of course, a great favourite in society; so much so, that all his elderly relations prophesied that it would be the ruin of him. Mr. Clay was educated at Liverpool, where he was the pupil of Mr. Wylie. He acquired many accomplishments, besides an acquaintance with the more solid branches of knowledge. Thus in after life he used the pencil and brush with proficiency; he was conversant with most modern languages, and, with a taste for almost every science, he was as able as he was ready to lecture upon geological, antiquarian, and, indeed, nearly all subjects which could be thought useful or interesting to an English audience. He was originally destined for a commercial career, and served two apprenticeships with different mercantile houses in London and Liverpool. It was the failure of the second firm, when he was about twenty-four, that first led to his abandoning commerce and taking orders. At this time he went on a visit to a connection of his family residing near Preston. Intending originally to stay ten days, he remained more than a year, and, having determined upon entering the church, he occupied this time in reading for ordination. He was ordained in 1821 by the Bishop of Chester as a literate person.' He then entered himself at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and in due time graduated as a Bachelor of Divinity. In 1828 Mr. Clay married a daughter of Mr. Fielding, of Myerscough House, near Garstang. Soon after their marriage Mrs. Clay's fortune, a large one, was almost all lost. Misfortunes never come alone, it is said, and Mr. Clay was now attacked by brain fever, the result of overwork. Happily for his family, and happily for mankind, he recovered, and at about the same time a turn in the tide of fortune relieved him from pecuniary troubles. With restored health, and freed from anxiety, he spent several years as happily to himself as usefully to his fellow-creatures, Made Chaplain of Preston Gaol. 59 with the exception of one period of intense suffering arising from a domestic calamity. This was the death of his eldest son, a boy whose great abilities and wonderful personal beauty had so endeared him to his father, that the grief occasioned by his loss endangered Mr. Clay's own life. We return now to the date of Mr. Clay's ordination as a deacon, when, in 1821, he was licensed to the assistant-chaplaincy of Preston Gaol, and commenced those labours which, through the reports in which they resulted, have obtained for him a world-wide reputation. He was appointed, at a salary of 1007. per annum, for a year, the chaplain, Mr. Harrison, being then in infirm health. The following year the appointment was renewed, and in 1823, on the death of Mr. Harrison, he was unanimously chosen by the court of annual sessions as his successor, with, however, no augmentation of salary, no improvement having yet been made at Preston on the prevailing rule, to which Sydney Smith alluded when he wrote, But the poor chaplain should be paid a little better; every possible duty is expected from him-and he has one hundred per annum.'* Still, this sum was twice the amount received by Mr. Clay's predecessor, who, of course, could not afford to give all, or, indeed, much of his time for so small a remuneration. In the November after Mr. Clay's appointment, however, the magistrates of Lancashire resolved that the chaplains of the several prisons of the county should in future bestow their whole and undivided attention to the duties of their respective offices.' Their salaries were all advanced; that of Mr. Clay to 2501. About 1850 it was increased to 3507., at which it remained until his retirement from office.† Yet how inadequate a recompense is even the latter sum for such services as he rendered, or, indeed, for the services of the chaplain of any large gaol, who conscientiously discharges his duty-a duty of overwhelming importance, absorbing his whole time, bringing him hourly into contact with the vilest of mankind, taxing his powers of endurance both physical and moral, to the uttermost, and sometimes, indeed-as was the case with Mr. Clay-far exceeding the limits which regard for health should place to its demands! Mr. Clay had, we are told, a peculiar aptitude for statistics. The compilation of his annual reports was a work which he liked, and here is the secret of its being so well done. He mapped out the crime of England, and exhibited at a glance the amount of criminality in various counties, endeavouring to trace the difference observable to specific causes. . . . He shed a flood of *Edinburgh Review,' July, 1821, p. 299. * as chapel than in those where the prisoners cach other. ae question of social worship in chapel and isolated worship, rom the chapel clerk a return of the offences committed in Canteen weeks ending on the 30th of April; and I find that upon the average 290 men present daily, there were only hat these were-5 for looking about, 6 for inattention, 6 sleeping Chaplain's fault more than the prisoners), 1 turning round, and another prisoner's book, which is no offence. I can only say that seers are spoken to in chapel earnestly and intelligibly (for that is the speak to them so that they can understand you, I never saw a behave so well.'* eabless their excellent behaviour was to be chiefly attributed, ant to the shortness of the services-a point which Mr. Clay to be essential to their good effect and still more to his mer of conducting them. Mr. Frederic Hill says:- Relious and moral instruction are conveyed in an admirable manner the chaplain in the daily and weekly services in the chapel. .. The benevolent and earnest manner in which Mr. Clay addresses the prisoners, and the clearness both of his language and matter, are very striking, and must give great force to his counsel and admonitions.'t He strikes so deep,' is one of the many testimonies to his power in addressing the prisoners which we meet with in their own narratives. 6 Mr. Clay appears (for many years, at least, after its adoption in Preston Gaol) to have preferred cellular imprisonment under all circumstances (except in the few cases in which regard for bodily and mental health forbade it) to any other system, and to have reconciled himself with difficulty to the association during labour even of men upon whom a long period of separate confinement had exercised its beneficial effect. It must be remembered that he had long been compelled to witness the horrors of promiscuous imprisonment, while he had yet to gain experience of the advantages resulting from modified association. The change in his opinion wrought by that experience may be gathered from passages in his later reports, as well as from his evidence before the Committee of the House of Commons on Prison Discipline in 1850,§ and still more conclusively from an extract from his journal cited by Mr. Frederic Hill, of which we insert a portion :— 'April 14th.-Many of the prisoners who would be otherwise confined in the corridor, and who have undergone a certain term of "encellelulement,” are now employed in the open air in taking down the old buildings, &c. The super II. C. Report of Committee on Prison Discipline, 1850, p. 362. Thirteenth Report of the Inspectors of English Prisons, Northern District, 1848, p. 2. § Report of House of Commons Committee,' p. 365. intendence |