unless we were certain of continuous employment, nor could we with our fluctuating population and our large proportion of learners or half-skilled workers be sufficiently certain of making the large quantities of articles usually contracted for in the short period given for their supply. There was another serious difficulty: the articles when made had to be examined and passed by the official inspectors to see that they corresponded with the sample. Even articles which were practically quite good might be rejected because they might in appearance be inferior to articles made by machinery and by skilled workers. If rejected we had not the same facility for disposing of them as a large manufacturer with extensive connections selling to other buyers goods of the same nature, and they might therefore be a dead loss to Government.

The Post Office gave us a good deal of work making mail bags, baskets, &c. The Office of Works gave little or none beyond getting mats from us. It always seemed to me that Portland stone might very well have been supplied to that department from our quarries at Portland as it was for Admiralty and War Office and prison buildings, and in the same way as we supplied Dartmoor granite for the new Scotland Yard.

A good deal of work was done for the police in making boots and clothing, and this went on until the number of convicts decreased so much that we could not keep up the necessary supply. I may here refer to one of the limitations which must of necessity exist in the supply of articles by prison labour. Shoemakers, tailors, and indeed artisans generally, do not come in any numbers ready trained into prison. They have to be taught; until they have gained a considerable degree of skill they cannot turn out work which will pass scrutiny as up to the sample which supplies, whether from contractors or from prisons, must conform to. Whilst they are learning, they are more or less spoiling material, and necessarily produce inferior articles. What is to be done with these? The only answer to this is that the prison department must consume them itself. The number of skilled hands that can be created, therefore, depends on the number for whom this inferior work can be found, and in the aptitude of those who go through the training. This applies to all trades: unskilled men cannot be made into carpenters, bricklayers, smiths, masons, stone dressers, &c., except by employing them on some work which is going on, in which a small proportion may learn their trade in doing under instruction first the rougher kinds of work, and gradually acquiring skill to do the more finished work. For this reason, and because of the scope afforded to unskilled labour by large public works of construction, this mode of employing convict labour has always been preferred, a preference which has been affirmed by more than one Royal Commission, and particularly by the committee appointed specially to consider the best application of convict

labour, which reported in 1882 in favour of the construction of Dover Harbour.

What I have said so far relates to the employment of convicts whose sentences keep them several years in prison. In 1877 I was brought into relations with the question from another point of view, viz. the employment of prisoners who are under short sentences, the great majority for only a few days, and only a small proportion for more than a few weeks.

The law of prisons, i.e. the Prisons Act 1865, gives little or no encouragement to industrial employment. The report of the committee on which it was founded laid it down very distinctly that the employment of prisoners for profit, or with a view to recouping some of the cost of their maintenance, should be considered quite subordinate to the other object the punishment is intended to serve, i.e. briefly the prevention of crime. Accordingly the Act ordained that all adult male prisoners should during the first three months be employed on 'hard labour of the first class,' and also for the remainder of any longer sentence, unless specially ordered otherwise. Great efforts were made, when the bill was being drafted, to devise a general definition which should indicate what was intended by the above phrase, and a proposal which was made, though not adopted, that it should be defined as 'work which visibly quickens the breath and opens the pores,' sufficiently indicates the idea intended. The purpose of a definition was ultimately effected by giving an example. It was to be 'tread-wheel, crank, capstan, stonebreaking, or other like kind of hard bodily labour.'

Shortly before the Prisons Bill 1876 and 1877 was introduced, the Secretary of State did me the honour to consult me as to whether the period of three months for compulsory 'first-class' hard labour should be shortened. I proposed that it should be shortened to one month, so that all the rest of the sentence might be employed on industrial labour. This amendment was introduced into the bills of 1876 and 1877, and is now the rule of all prisons.

There are many persons, and I am one, who in the abstract dislike and object to this purely penal labour, but I know that it has its uses, and in this as in many other matters there is only a choice of difficulties. Prisoners who are in for only a few days, and who know of no sedentary or indoor trade which can be carried on in the prison-for instance, agricultural labourers, porters, dealers, &c.-have no time. to learn or to carry on industrial work, and must therefore either be idle or doing some pretence of work, or else be employed on that which is merely mechanical, and if this sort of labour is enforced only for a short period the disadvantage to the prisoner is practically reduced to nothing. It is also in actual practice turned to account as a spur to good conduct for those who are in prison long enough, by holding out the prospect of relief from it as a reward for conformity to the rules and orders.

An alternative is suggested by some who feel the disadvantage to the prisoner of unprofitable labour, or labour without industrial result. They think the moral disadvantage of mechanical labour, such as the tread-wheel, &c., may be surmounted by connecting it with machinery which does useful work, such as grinding corn for the prisoners' own consumption.

It seems to me that this view is founded on an amiable delusion as to the imagination prisoners are likely to indulge in on these subjects, and further in an absolute failure to perceive the mode in which, or the reason why, industrial employment may have a good effect on a prisoner's mind. According to my belief, such good effect results from the stimulus which industrial labour may give to a prisoner's mind by his efforts to do good work, or to his moral qualities, such as industry, by his desire to turn out a full amount of work, these results being before his very eyes. But such stimulus is obviously quite absent in the case of a prisoner working a treadwheel, whose share in the result is just the same as is due to the weight of a clock or the action of a mill-horse or the steam of a steam engine. Those who hold that the mind of a prisoner on the wheel is occupied in thinking of and rejoicing over the work which is being done by the millstones, and that in some mysterious way a good moral influence is conveyed from them to the prisoners who are turning the wheel, but that this moral influence is not so conveyed if the wheel is only working against a brake, must be prepared to hold that when the mill has ground as much flour as is required, and the machinery is therefore thrown out of gear, there is a sudden cessation of moral effect on the prisoners at that moment on the wheel! If there were no reason against the provision of the grinding machinery except that the moral advantage is only fanciful, there would be no harm in gratifying such a harmless delusion. But unfortunately it is a costly fancy to gratify. A millhouse with the apparatus for grinding, sifting &c. costs a good deal of money, and the services of a skilled miller are needed to carry on the work properly; and this is by no means always compensated by any saving in the cost of the product, for all these expenses, together with others, such as of carriage, very often indeed make the prison-ground flour dearer than flour can be bought by contract and ground by steam mills with the newest apparatus according to the modern method. The tread-wheel itself is an expensive mode of providing even the mechanical labour. A tread-wheel with its house giving employment to fifty men would cost about 1,600l.'; the flour-mill it would work would cost about 820l. more. Cell cranks of the best kind for an equal number would cost only 500l., and the difference amounts to a large sum in providing for a large number of prisoners. There are cell cranks which grind corn, but these are objected to on medical VOL. XL-No. 236

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grounds on account of the dust they create and the difficulty of regulating the pressure according to the strength of the prisoner-a most important necessity-so they do not afford a way out of this difficulty.

I have pointed out above that the necessities of the case arising from the shortness of the sentences as well as the law of prisons compel the employment of prisoners on mechanical or penal labour as distinguished from skilled or industrial labour. It will be well to show to what an enormous proportion of the prisoners sentenced the shortness of the sentence almost forbids any other sort of labour. In 1894-5 about 113,000 male prisoners received sentences of imprisonment in local prisons. Of these upwards of 42,000 received sentences of a week or less, upwards of 70,000 received sentences of a fortnight or less, upwards of 94,000 received sentences of five weeks or less, probably really of not more than a calendar month. This very large proportion of the prisoners must, therefore, by law be employed on labour of the tread-wheel type, with the exception, of course, of a portion excused for medical or other like reasons. And if the law did not enforce this, it would still be necessary to use it or something equally unprofitable in a very large number of cases unless somebody can suggest or devise a trade which prisoners can learn and profitably carry on with little or no instruction. Oakum picking may be said to fulfil this condition, but I do not think that those who advocate the industrial employment of prisoners would consider that this type of work satisfied their requirements. Indeed, we now and then hear of indignant complaints because an anti-vaccinationist or an unruly member of the Salvation Army who is committed to prison is employed on this work for want of anything better. But, however this may be, the oakum-picking business affords a very narrow field. The demand is gradually being diminished as wooden ships are replaced by iron, and at the same time the supply is being increased indefinitely by the adoption of this employment in tramp wards and similar institutions, and the result of this, as I have been told, has reached the point that some workhouses actually pay for the privilege of picking junk into oakum, a condition of things which shows that nobody has yet been able to discover a new mode of employment which the unskilled can be put to in a prison or workhouse, and exemplifies what we must be prepared for if, in order to carry out the doctrine of industrial work for all prisoners, those who are in prison for periods too short to acquire skill are set to execute work which for want of that skill is unsaleable.

But the figures I have given above have still to be supplemented in order to show what a small part of the prisoners sentenced can, from the nature of things, be put to industrial work with any practical result. Of the 19,000 male prisoners these figures left to be accounted for as having longer sentences than one month, all have to be accord

ing to law employed for at least one month on labour of the tread-wheel type, so that it is only at the end of that period that they can begin learning a trade if they do not already know one which can be carried on in a prison. Supposing that it takes a man a month to learn a trade well enough to do good work, then he must be in prison for at least two months before he can begin to do work of much profit. If he is in prison for another month or more, he may turn out a certain amount of useful work, or, in other words, the useful work must be done by those who are sentenced to three months or more, i.e. by about one in eleven of the whole number sentenced.

These facts have evidently never been considered by those who assume that industrial work can be introduced as the general practice in prisons, on the supposition apparently that the moral effect is the only point to be considered. It is only a small residue who can be profitably employed.

To find employment even for this limited number is not without difficulties, the principal of which is to find customers for the work they can do. Evidently the prison department itself has wants which prison labour can supply, and accordingly since the prisons have been united into one department a great development of this work has taken place, such as was not possible when each prison was an isolated unit. Tailoring, shoemaking, tinworking, weaving, knitting, and many other like trades are now carried on in certain local prisons for the supply of the whole number; a very large amount of building work involving carpentering, bricklaying, and iron work has been carried on in local prisons, and this, with the baking, cooking, washing &c. absorbs a large number of the available prisoners. But there is still a large residue for whose work outside consumers must be found, and this residue will be larger if the gross number of prisoners should again increase.

In the days when prisons were under the local authorities, matmaking and its allied trades for sale to the public formed the staple of the industrial employment of prisoners. This of course gave rise to pressure from rival manufacturers or workmen, who complained of prison competition as unfair, but the Visiting Justices of Quarter Sessions, not being elected by household suffrage, could deal with this matter on its merits, and so had an advantage over a department which acts under political heads who never can be indifferent to even ill-founded grievances pressed on them by supporters whose seats might be affected by the question.

The late Prison Committee, indeed, very truly state that the amount of the competition from prison-made mats was so small compared with the total volume of the trade that it practically could make no difference to the free employers or workmen, and the committee on foreign prison-made goods express the like opinion. But this abstract truth is of no avail against a number of agitators