The Express.
London, England, 1859-01-10 00:00:00

LONDON, MONDAY EVENING, JANUARY 10, 1859.

&woes in the some simple, charming style she nar-
rates the adventures and exploits of some children
of the settlers who had lost their way. Scarcely a
summer passes over the colonists in Canada without
losses of children from the families of colonists from
a similar cause. Many thus lost have perished in
the wilderness. Happily our young Crusoes are soon
discovered and led back, but not till they had seen
much of forest scenery, and had been put to many
shifts, here told with great animation, and with a
view to impress on the young the natural resources
of the colony. The Canadian Crums has now
reached a second edition, and is likely long to retain
its hold upon the
young. After all, no writers CAA
surpass the ladies in the art of instructing or charm-
ing youth. The Canadian Crumes is anothet
illustration of this most ancient truth. _ .

Youth requires, however, something more for its
mental food than fiction, or tales of adventure or
foreign travel, or past history. There is no teaching
like that which takes us to the grave of the great
and gifted. There are no lessons Wm those we learn
when we study the secret of their success, and no
moralist can suggest more as to the vanity of the busy
dream we call late than can the voice that comes to
us from the tomb. Mr. Grinsted, in his Relies of
Genius, is aware of this. He viiits the last homes
of poets, painter, sad player., and adds a few unpre-
tending biographical notes. A few engravings ac-
easapany the letter press. The list of worthies ben
commented on is numerous—and, in some respects,
too comprehensive ; but the volume is very readable,
and is very prettily got up, and, on the whole, we
doubt not will prove an acceptable present at this
season of the year.

REFORMATORIES AND PLACES OF
REFUGE.

The sudden and remarkable impulse which has
been recently given to the public sympathy with re-
spect to institutions like the above is a fact that
cannot be got over, and it is a most remarkable one.
We know that economists, especially those of the
(Jradgrind school, have a great deal to say against
both Reformatories and Refuges, and especially the
latter; but the universal public are, after all, seldom
wrong ; and the manner in which, during the
Christmas week, they have poured in their donations
to such of those institutions as were specially pointed
out to them, proves beyond question their opinion to
be that Reformatories for the frail and Refuges for
the destitute are matters which ought to find place
amongst the institutions of a humane and civilised
nation. With respect to Reformatories it is
often urged, and with much plausibility,
by those self-complacent philosophers whose
metier it is to talk while other people are acting,
that such institutions are a premium upon juvenile
crime, inasmuch as that for children who have
fallen away they provide a home and a shelter,
while those who have not as yet strayed from the
paths of rectitude are left to their destiny of desti-
tution and the streets. The answer to this is, that
juvenile delinquency is a great and appalling fact;
that it existed before reformatories were thought of;

that it daily increases, from causes with'whicli
reformatories have nothing to do; and that if the
latter should have any effect in checking or dimi-
nishing the gross amount of youthful demoralisa-
tion, they will have achieved an amount of positive
good quite sufficient to counterbalance any set off
that may be shown of problematical evil. The truth
is that Reformatories, which happily are daily be-
coming more and more general, are the effect, and
not the cause of the melancholy moral condition of
our poorer youthful population. Humane people
could not walk through our streets by day or by
night without noticing that every noisome corner
festered with ragged children, whose obvious
alternative must be to steal or starve, nor could
they take up a newspaper without having their
attention attracted by a police report in which the
principal figure was " A miserable child, whose head
scarcely reached the dock," and whose biography,
when elicited by the benevolent interrogatories of
the magistrate, might generally be summed up in a
few but expressive words, such as " No father, no
mother, lives in the stints;" or, "Bad father, worse
mother, trained and coerced into thieving by parental
authority." And these were not isolated cases, only
disfiguring the police report* by single instances or
at long intervals. They turned up daily, in scores,
nay in hundreds, leading to the inevitable conclusion
that the land was in danger of being speedily over-
run by a moral pestilence. What was to be done?
The disciples of Malthus might tell us that such
children ought not to be there, but there they were.
They could not be written off the account like a bad
debt in a merchant's ledger, nor could we, in imita-
tion of our neighbours in revolutionary times, insti-
tute a Noyade and send them all to the bottom of
the Thames. The English mind, although not
deeply philosophical, is happily very practical
while the English heart is generally admitted to be
" in the right place" after all. Accordingly, English
people whe had leisure from their own affairs, and
who rightly deemed that they owed that leisure
to their country, busied their heads, opened their
hearts, and relaxed their puree strings, the result
being the establishment of the Reformatories already
so flourishing, and which have become so numerous
aa to necessitate the formation of a Central Union, to
which all might tarn for advice and asesiatanoe, and
which should give the benefits of consolidation and
extension to the good work.

Against the nightly Refuge the economists have a
stronger case, but the advocates and supporters of
those institutions have, as we think, a still stronger
defence. When we hear the storm howl, the rain
beat against the window panes, see the snow, and
feel the frost, our thoughts and hearts, if we have
any, involuntarily tarn to the poor child, or the
fragile emaciated adult, whom we have seen huddled
up at the workhouse gate, with their naked shoulders
quivering in the cold, and their faces puckered up in
the ghastly wrinkles of hunger. It is of no use tell-
ing us that by finding for such outcasts a temporary
shelter we are encouraging idleness, and defrauding
the lodging-house-keeper, to whew "twopenny
rope " they most have applied if we had
not found them a lodging; or that we
were only establishing so many rendezvous
for thieves, from which they can sally out
in the morning like giants refreshed to their
daily game of plunder. Thieves are seldom desti-
tute, for they are strong and unscrupulous, and like
beasts of prey know how to provide themselves
with food. They are an organisation and a frater-
nity, they have their stock purse, and their haunts,
far removed from the ken of either the philanthro-
pist or the policeman, and they will shun with the
instinctive cunning of their class all places which
are known to be under the supervision of honest
men. Here, however, we must repudiate an argu-
ment in favour of places of refuge which has been
put forward by one of oar contemporaries, namely,
that they might be made subservient to purposes of
detection, by collecting together the vagrant popula-
tion of the streets, and thus offering opportunities for
acquiring intimate knowledge of their ways and faces,
with greater facilities for future recognition. If our
nightly refuges are to be so many traps set to catch
and brand thieves, their purpose will be defeated
altogether. Like the Poor-law Commissioners, the
promoters of the nightly Refuge have only to
do with one fact, which is that of destitution.
They find the homeless wanderer shivering in
the streets, they know that if let there, even for
a few hours, he must t erish, and that even though
he be &thief, our law is not so Draconic as to ordain
that even a thief should die of cold and hunger.
Let us hope then that there may be no intelligence
between the Refuges and Scotland-yard, but that the
promoters of the former will deem their mission
achieved when they have given a night's shelter to
the half.naked starving claimant, without inquiry
as to his moral character, or " marking" him for the
convenience of the Police. Another objection to
the spread of pieces of refuge in the metropolis is, that