RESOLUTIONS.

HC Deb 10 May 1872 vol 211 cc608-31

SIR CHARLES ADDERLEY

, in rising to call attention to the subject of Reformatory and Industrial Schools, and to move the following Resolutions:— That all Schools for poor children, aided by public money, should be under one general Education Department. That Industrial Schools should not be treated as penal institutions, but that children of tender age, whether merely vagrants or convicted of minor offences, should, after any due correction, be sent to such schools for the rest of their childhood, as to educational establishments where they may be trained to industry. said, he thought that the Bill lately introduced by the hon. Member for West Kent (Mr. J. G. Talbot) evinced a growing complication of the subject, which deserved discussion. These schools might be now established under four distinct Acts of Parliament—two Acts of 1866, the Elementary Schools Act, 1870, and the Bill now nearly enacted just alluded to. They were supported from four sources—voluntary subscriptions, Treasury Grants, school rates, and county or borough rates. Public elementary schools of all sorts were scattered separately under separate departments—Elementary Schools being under one department, pauper schools under another, and reformatory and industrial schools partly under one Department, and partly under another. All schools supported by public money should be placed under the Education Department of the State, both as regarded inspection and finance. Whatever varieties of circumstances might affect their inmates, the want of education was common to all, and so far as the object was the supply of that want at the public expense, the Department superintending such supply should be one and the same. It was neither wise nor just that any of these educationally-aided classes should have its education under the control of a department which had nothing to do with education. In the instance of industrial schools, which dealt with children who had not even fallen into crime, it would be admitted at least in their case that the State, in assuming locum parentis, though perhaps obliged to lodge and feed as well as educate, need not educate a child on the score of its desertion as a different animal from an ordinary child. Again, it was a growing conviction in the minds of all who had paid any attention to the subject that pauper schools should not be placed in workhouses, but that they should be separated from them, and great expense had been incurred in making large pauper schools, of which there were a group near London, which had given the nickname of "Pauperia" to the locality. The feeling, however, which had dictated that large outlay was to get the children out of workhouses; and the growing practice of this country was to go a step further still, and get such children to the national schools or the other schools of the country—at all events, to get them out of the workhouses, because the workhouses were not proper places for education, nor should the Poor Law Board be brought into the workhouses for educational purposes. The educational superintendence should be the same for all classes of children, from whatever cause thrown on public aid for education. It was a growing practice in Parliament to treat every detail of the same subject with isolated legislation and separate machinery. Every sort of factory had a distinct Factory Act and set of Inspectors. A central Education Department does not fulfil its post unless it embraces every kind of education to which the people contribute. Each kind of school may be distinct; but the superintendence and inspection of all belongs properly to the central Ministry established for that purpose. One incidental objection to the present system was that Parliament never had presented to it the total cost of public elementary education, for one item came in the charge for one department and one in another; the power of the House to check expenditure was taken away, although the division of control was in itself a cause of waste. He (Sir Charles Adderley) was in favour of what the right hon. Member for Droitwich (Sir John Pakington) had often urged—a Minister for Education who should be directly responsible to Parliament for all educational expenditure, instead of the provisional arrangement still continued from the earliest tentative essays on the subject, leaving the subject in the hands of a subaltern officer of the Privy Council, without authority to guide the policy of the Department, and in a situation which prevented his feeling full responsibility.

To come now to an exclusive consideration of the two kinds of public elementary schools referred to in the Resolution—namely, reformatory and industrial schools, they were now both treated practically as identical, whether that House wished them to be so or not: his own idea, however, always had been that they were identical, not only in inevitable practice, but originally in idea. He drafted the first Bill on the subject of reformatory schools, which was taken up by Lord Palmerston and passed as a Government measure, with the chief alteration of substituting the title "juvenile" for "youthful" offenders, and he had for many years been engaged in the practical management of those institutions. The original idea of a reformatory was, that a number of children in all great towns being wholly without parental care ran about the streets and fell into crime; and that it was the interest of the State not only to punish them adequately for their offences, in order to deter them from crime, but after their punishment not to let them go back to their old neglected condition, but to step in, in loco parentis, and give them that education the want of which threw them into crime. The idea of industrial schools was that it was felt by a great many magistrates that the reformatories were made of too penal a character for the class of children who came into them; and more and more so, because the class of children who existed at first ceased to exist, by the mere fact of police interference having, however roughly, broken up the nurseries of youthful crime, and therefore they wanted a less penal class of schools to be adopted. The origin of the industrial schools was much the same as that which led to the establishment of houses of correction, under the mitigating notion of secondary gaols. As they relented from a Draconic code of hanging and imprisoning children, former habits lingered, and even now many still failed to embrace the full idea which substituted reformatories for prisons and death to criminal children. Although some attempts had been made to distinguish between the class of children sent to industrial schools and those sent to reformatories, yet, generally speaking, the inmates of both were in practice the same, for both were children utterly neglected and thrown upon the streets; and, so far from being children whom the Education Department should "shunt" to other agencies, they were the very class which that Department should take primarily under its supervision; because its business was not to give education to all, but to those who were unable to get it in any other way. In fact, they were the very class for whom the hon. Member for Birmingham (Mr. Dixon), much to his credit, tried to introduce the compulsory system, in order to force them into schools. They were, in fact, the only subjects of compulsory education they yet had, and the system developed, would probably supply all they wanted to have. There was great truth in the Jewish proverb that "the parent who brought up his child in idleness brought him up as a thief!" But convictions were not always a test of criminality. The convicted were often the most innocent. Besides, magistrates often committed children indifferently to reformatory or to industrial schools from reasons totally unconnected with their criminality, and sometimes even almost trumped up a conviction in order to get a neglected child into a good reformatory. He wished to assure the House that he was not at all trying to represent reformatories and industrial schools as having failed in their object. His purpose was to make them more perfect and more consistent with their true intention. It was the greatest satisfaction to him to think that it was to the Reformatories and to the Discharged Prisoners' Aid Societies that they were indebted for, what they might now hope to be, the permanent reduction of crime in the country. Reformatories had broken up the nurseries of crime, and there was now no longer the class of hardened juvenile criminals such as there was some 25 years ago. It was true that there were individual cases occurring every day of juvenile offenders quibus malitia supplet œtatem; but those offenders should be sent to prison and dealt with as adults. He was, therefore, the last man who would deny that reformatories and industrial schools had done great service; but he would be also the last man who would allow any old prejudices to stand still in the way of their complete and perfect success. That brought him to the main point of his Resolutions, and that was that these educational institutions were misused in being made penal in their character. The fact of their being treated as penal frustrated, in many important particulars, their intention. It was the greatest possible mistake to identify punishment with education. They were two separate ideas, and had only the relation to each other that medicine had to food; but they would never think of feeding a child during the whole period of childhood on medicine, and drugging all his food. They were trying to make their prisons schools and their schools prisons; whereas, it seemed to him that the special object of reformatories was, and ought to be, to raise the children in them out of the criminal class. As education was only incidental to the infliction of imprisonment, so punishment should be only incidental to the curriculum of school. They were giving long terms of imprisonment to try to reform character in places where punishment only was possible; and, on the other hand, a number of children, led into crime before their character was formed, were subjected to prolonged punishment during all their childhood, by way and under the parental pretence of education. That was a doubly false policy, both the treating of prisons as schools and of schools as prisons. There was folly as well as injustice in fixing for life the convict stamp both in a child's own consciousness and in the world's opinion of him. The chief object in making reformatories was to get neglected children out of the category of criminals as soon as possible, and not while whitewashing to continue staining them during the whole time they were in their charge. If they wanted to rescue from criminal character, why stereotype it? Why destroy the self-respect they wanted to set up? Why bar the entrance to honest ways of industry which they wished to open? At present the entrance to several kinds of industry was barred to youths who had been educated at reformatories. The principal services of the country were shut against them. The Navy was shut against them. No captain of a ship-of-war would take a boy from a reformatory, unless the boy were first further whitewashed by passing through some intermediate employment in the merchant service. The Army and Militia were closed against them. No colonel of a regiment would allow a recruiting sergeant to take a boy from these institutions; and if those who had been in reformatories were sent to the colonies, the colonies felt insulted, although they were the best trained class of emigrants for many purposes that could be sent. He would point out to the House another evil arising from the penal character of these institutions. He had information which showed that magistrates were often unwilling to impose a sentence of the full period of childhood to a reformatory or an industrial school, thinking it hard to give such penal treatment to a child; although, at the same time, they knew that the consequences of a shorter sentence would be turning out the child before the completion of his education. It was a stigma on a civilized country that it should by law treat penally for all their, younger years children for whose previous neglect that country offered the remedy of education in loco parentis. Such treatment of a child of the upper class who might commit a crime, though not so excusably, would be considered monstrous. Magistrates, as he had before observed, were sometimes almost tempted to trump up a charge against children, merely for this absurd penal qualification for schooling, that they might be sent back again, after a too early discharge, in order that their education might be completed. In practice these institutions were educational, and their usefulness as such was impeded by their being nominally penal. He must remind the House that his Resolution did not apply to reformatories, and that it merely proposed that industrial schools, stripped of their penal character, should, be transferred from the Police to the Education Department. Before he sat down he would anticipate one or two objections which might be made against his proposition, and which he had attempted to gather from circulars sent up and down the country with the view of getting up an opposition to this Motion. By-the-by, he was rather surprised that these circulars should have emanated from the Government Inspector of Reformatories, and must say that it was not that gentleman's duty to get up agitation on the subject one way or another. Most of the objections raised in these circulars amounted to an expression on the part of very excellent managers who had got institutions of the kind in question very comfortably in their own hands and did not like any change—"We are very comfortable as we are; why cannot you let well alone." He thought, however, that he had shown that the circumstances of these schools were not "well," and that they ought not to be let alone. In his view, these institutions, the value of which to the country had been established by their success, might be further carried out to their first intention, now that the old notions of child-imprisonment and hanging had subsided, and become of even still more value. It had been urged against his proposal that it would be positively immoral to treat bad children on the same footing as the good; but was it reasonable to declare that a child that had once been criminal must always remain criminal? Was the opportunity afforded to it for becoming an honest and industrious citizen, and yet was it immoral to treat it as anything but a criminal child all the while? But it was not proposed to put them to the same schools as the "good children." The proposal was that their schools should be in the school department. It had further been argued that disgrace should continue to attach to these children while they were in these schools in order to prevent parents from encouraging their children to commit crime, with the view of getting them into these institutions. Such parents were not tempted by such motives at all; but if they were, the proper check was to make the parent pay, at least, as much as the child's maintenance at home would have cost, and if the law on that point was not carried out, it was the fault of those who ought to enforce it. It was rather owing to the distinction now made, and which he wished to remove, that these schools enjoyed a tempting superiority to the ordinary elementary public schools of the Education Department. Another objection was a mere sentiment, that these schools were places of detention, and therefore must be under the Home Office. Now, all schools were in some sense places of detention, for if a boy ran away from Eton, he was caught and sent back. [Mr. BRUCE: By his parents.] Exactly; and unless the State stood in loco parentis to these children, whom it took from their neglectful parents, the entire justification of such institutions ceased. If compulsion was to be carried out under the Act of 1870, all public elementary schools would be connected with the police, and, according to this objection, should be under the Home Office. There was legal detention in apprenticeship; but must apprentices, therefore, be in the department of police? He, moreover, wished that the penal part of the treatment of criminal children should be in the hands of the police, but the educational part in those of the Education Department. A child thrown into lawless habits or acts by want of education should be punished, and after suffering punishment should be sent to school; while, if he ran away, the police should catch him. The less of prison for a child, even in his punishment, the better. Whipping had high authority and successful experience to support it for children. Flogging, however, seemed the sole remaining privilege of the higher classes; and it seemed to be considered the privilege of children of the lower class to be deemed criminals during the whole period of their schooling. As to the objection that the Education Department could not give the peculiar treatment required by criminal children, and would be too intellectual in its education of them, he would reply that the Department should be adapted to the discharge of all its duty, and not the duty allowed to be partly out of the reach of its Department. Dislike of that Department was at the bottom of the opposition to this Motion, for the benevolent persons who had for 30 years conducted the reformatory and industrial schools and spent large sums of their own money in a most useful manner, aided by grants and inspection, under the quiet shade of the Home Office, feared that the Education Department, being always exposed to criticism as the avowedly responsible office for such matters, and in perpetual turmoil, and subject to debate on all its actions or orders in Parliament, would be constantly involving them in trouble. That, however, was not a good reason why the Department should be allowed to hide part of its proper duty in another Department unsuited to it. The Education Act of 1870 allowed school boards to undertake such institutions, and the Bill of the hon. Member for West Kent (Mr. J. G. Talbot) would leave them in a doubtful position between the prison and the school authorities. There was, therefore, a transition state already introduced, and the law was becoming complicated. He hoped, therefore, that the House would give their serious consideration that year to the Resolutions which he thus offered to their notice; and if the Government did not next Session undertake to deal with the subject, he should attempt an amending and consolidating Act, placing the schools in question on the simple footing they were intended to occupy, under the public elementary school Department.

Amendment proposed, To leave out from the word "That" to the end of the Question, in order to add the words "all Schools for poor children, aided by public money, should be under one general Education Department; and that Industrial Schools should not be treated as penal institutions, but that children of tender age, whether merely vagrants or convicted of minor offences, should, after any due correction, be sent to such Schools for the rest of their childhood, as to educational establishments where they may be trained to industry,"—(Sir Charles Adderley,) —instead thereof.

Question proposed, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question."

MR. MELLY

said, as representing the managers of several of those institutions, among whom he might instance the name of a lady well-known in that House, Miss Mary Carpenter, he must object to the Motion. He had paid great attention to the subject for many years, and his complaint was, that the schools were not penal enough; and that the first necessity in these schools to which children were sent should be strict penal restraint. If there were to be penal institutions—juvenile prisons, in which the first motive power was the policeman, the second the magistrate, and the third the conviction, they ought, of necessity, to come under the control of the Home Office, as they properly did at the present time. He had always thought there ought to be only three kinds of schools for the poorer classes—namely, national day, workhouse, and criminal schools; and were the last class transferred to the Education Department they must either be crippled by the principle of payment for educational results, or a different scale of payment must be devised for them. Moreover, the adoption of the course proposed by the right hon. Gentleman would seriously add to the burden of Poor Law relief in each district, and would deal a heavy blow to the whole question of education, for, even under the present system, parents had only to be drunken, dissolute, and neglectful enough, and the magistrates would send their children to the industrial schools, which were, in fact, boarding schools, at the rate of £18 a-year. Several stipendiary magistrates had written to him that the effect of that was, that admission to these schools was already sought as an object of honourable competition. The right hon. Gentleman further wished to diminish the penal character of these schools, which was already too slight; to make a still larger invasion on the public purse; and that still more encouragement should be given to the poor to neglect their children. He (Mr. Melly), however, contended that their legislation should have objects directly opposite to these; and upon that ground alone, he should be anxious that the Resolutions should be negatived. If the schools were to be penal institutions, then, of necessity, they should be in the hands of the representative of public justice; and upon that ground, he contended that the Home Office should have the control of them; but if those schools were placed under the Education Department they must be put into the hands of the school boards; and, if so, their education must be carried on in the manner pointed out by the Education Act of 1870. Now, no man had been more anxious than himself that the education imparted under that Act should be unsectarian; but as the State stood in loco parentis with reference to the children in question, and had the entire control of, and responsibility for, them for the five or six most important years of their lives, it would be absolutely necessary to give them religious as well as secular instruction, and in that case the religious difficulty would again crop up, because dogmatic religious teaching would be paid for out of local rates. In fact, that difficulty had already been experienced in Liverpool, and there was no doubt many of the large towns would follow her example, and, after an acrimonious contest, elect men pledged to refuse to support such schools. He, therefore, hoped that the children would be left in the hands of those Christian people who had established the schools; but he should be glad to see a stricter system of inspection established, and that the attention of the magistrates should be again called by the Home Secretary to the indiscriminate and extravagant way in which they had, in some instances, exercised their powers.

MR. GATHORNE HARDY

said, he must oppose the proposition of his right hon. Friend. It might have been supposed from the speech of his right hon. Friend that he was attacking institutions that had not done the duty assigned to them, yet he showed that where he himself was in charge of a school they had almost exhausted the bad materials with which they began, and were getting a better class; and that was because the school system had worked so well under the discipline established under the Home Office, that there was really nothing to be desired in that respect. His right hon. Friend had said that the schools had answered so admirably that they had got rid of the very bad material that had previously existed in Birmingham; and then he said that when you put a child into the institution it was ruined for life. The two things seemed to him (Mr. G. Hardy) to be inconsistent. It was not, however, only because the schools were under the Home Office instead of the Education Department that objection arose to the Resolutions. Conceive the injury which would be done by them with respect to the education of the poor. A great number of children were destitute in consequence of the destitution of their parents, or because they had been deserted by their parents; and, unfortunately, some of these children were educated in workhouses. Now, it would obviously be inconvenient for the Education Department to interfere in the management of workhouses, which at present were most admirably inspected, even with regard to education, by Inspectors connected with the Poor Law Board. For instance, everyone who had perused Mr. Tuffnell's Reports was aware that that gentleman had conducted such examinations in a most efficient manner. His right hon. Friend had said it was absurd to have different classes of Inspectors as under the Factory Acts; but it should be borne in mind that the whole system of inspection was under one Department. Children employed in factories were educated under the half-time system; but surely it would be absurd to impose on the Education Department the duty of inspecting the whole treatment of such children. Institutions like industrial and reformatory schools, in which a penal discipline was enforced, must necessarily be under the control of the Home Office, and the accessory must follow the principal, and so the intellectual and moral instruction, as well as the general discipline, came under the Rev. Sydney Turner, and in that way were achieved those results which had been alluded to in terms of approval by his right hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Stoke (Mr. Melly). Children came into these institutions, because the religious bodies outside had failed to arrest them in their career. Therefore, they must be treated like criminals, lunatics, and others, and be placed under chaplains or religious teachers who would undertake to train them. Indeed, he believed that no attempts had been made to establish reformatories without such definite religious training. Some of them had been established by Roman Catholics, some by members of the Church of England, and some, he believed, by members of other religious bodies. In all cases, however, where children were shut up and kept away from the operation of the voluntary energies of the different religious bodies, they must be placed under the care of those who would undertake their whole religious instruction; but if these institutions were connected with the Education Department, which acted upon different principles, a conflict would ensue which it was most desirable to avoid. His right hon. Friend (Sir Charles Adderley) was aware that this was not a new subject to him, for when he was Under Secretary of State for the Home Department his right hon. Friend had addressed a Memorandum to the Home Office, and he (Mr. G. Hardy) had investigated the subject, and placed on record the convictions which he still entertained. Where the jurisdiction was criminal, beginning with, and continuing under penal discipline, the Home Office was the proper authority to deal with the liberty of the subject, which was involved in the question. The object, then, was so to educate and discipline the minds of the children, that when they left the reformatories they should be fit to enter the merchant service or to be bound to some trade, and so to pass through the intermediate discipline, after which they were readily admitted into the Army or Navy. The Home Office, as had been admitted by his right hon. Friend, had admirably done its duty in regard to these schools; but if that duty was neglected, the proper course would be to censure the Office, rather than to place the schools under another Department which had already quite enough to do; and however ambitious the Vice President of the Council might be to have the entire education of the country in his own hands, he did not suppose the right hon. Gentleman would wish to take these criminal classes from that discipline and authority which had been exercised with so much advantage to them and to the country.

MR. CANDLISH

said, a great part of the life of the right hon. Gentleman who had brought forward the subject had been devoted to the great work intended to be accomplished by reformatory and industrial schools, and he, therefore, regretted that he was unable to accept the right hon. Gentleman's proposal. Not only was it the case that the conductors of industrial and reformatory schools were tolerably unanimous in their opposition to it, but the right hon. Gentleman himself even had given the strongest testimony as to the efficiency of these schools at the present time. If the children in such institutions rebelled against the law, for instance, what authority was so well fitted as the police to restore them to subjection? The right hon. Gentleman urged that the whole of the money devoted to educational purposes ought to appear under one head; but, surely, anyone interested in the subject could easily ascertain the sum total with perfect accuracy. It was further admitted on all hands that these schools were extremely well managed, not under the operation of the law, but by means of voluntary efforts in a spirit of earnest Christianity and love; and he thought, therefore, that any legislative interference with them might weaken the interest of those who maintained the schools, and so diminish the usefulness of the schools. While he admitted that the discussion which had taken place would have a very wholesome effect, he was glad, for the reasons he had stated, that the right hon. Gentleman did not intend to ask the opinion of the House upon his proposal.

SIR JOHN PAKINGTON

said, he should support the Motion, believing that the view of his right hon. Friend was sound and just—namely, that the various schools throughout the country which were supported by public funds ought to be under different management. The hon. Member for Sunderland had alluded to the degree of Christianity and love in which these schools were conducted; but he did not suppose the hon. Gentleman proposed to draw an invidious comparison between the Christianity and love likely to be shown by his right hon. Friends the Home Secretary and the Vice President of the Council, either of whom might with equal safety and advantage be trusted with the management of the schools. As far as his personal opinion was concerned, he did not think the educational affairs of the country, which had grown immensely of late years, would ever be properly conducted until they were entrusted to a responsible Minister of Education.

MR. KINNAIRD

said, that he was glad the subject had been introduced, because the country was beginning to forget the enormous amount of good that reformatory and industrial schools had done, and to look, he was inclined to add, in a rather less generous spirit than formerly upon these institutions. He was, however, opposed to the change proposed by the right hon. Gentleman; the mere suggestion of which, tending as it would to still more restricted grants, had already produced quite a panic in Scotland.

MR. STEPHEN CAVE

said, that as be had long taken a great interest in the question, perhaps he might be allowed to say a few words, especially as he had the misfortune to disagree with the conclusions of his right hon. Friend (Sir Charles Adderley), which he did with great diffidence, there being few persons more entitled to speak with authority on such matters than he was. At the same time, he thought his right hon. Friend had done good service by raising the question; because, since the changes made by the Education Act, public opinion was looking for some guidance on the point, and it might be that the time had arrived for a fresh and closer definition, and even for a new and more complete classification of these schools. He should be sorry, however, to see any sweeping change in their management; for the simple reason that these institutions, especially reformatories, were doing excellent service, and, after many years of very uphill work, the managers and the country were beginning to reap the fruit of their labour and expenditure, as evidenced by the fact that, notwithstanding the increase of population, there had been a great diminution of juvenile crime. The commitment of boys had fallen from, in round numbers, 12,000 in 1856 to 8,000 in 1871; those of girls from 2,000 to 1,000; and yet there had been no increase in the number of reformatories for the last five or six years. On the contrary, there was some difficulty in filling existing institutions with the proper class of inmates, the supply having been cut off by industrial schools, owing to which reformatories had lately been taking in children who ought properly to be in industrial schools. Under these circumstances a statesman would, he thought, pause before disturbing arrangements which worked so satisfactorily. What was the origin of the reformatory and industrial schools? The former were intended to give a better classification than could be effected in prisons; the latter were instituted afterwards still further to extend the classification, for the language of his right hon. Friend's Resolution—"children of tender age convicted of minor offences"—could not apply to the hardened criminals committed sometimes to reformatory schools. Therefore, the original idea of both classes of institutions was quasi-penal, and it might perhaps he broadly said that children were sent to reformatory schools for their own faults, and to industrial schools for the faults of their parents—it being necessary for the protection of society to visit the sins of the parents on the children. But he quite admitted that that definition was not entirely accurate, because the qualifying clauses in the Industrial Schools Act were too wide; and, consequently, many children were sent to industrial schools, not for their own faults or for the faults of their parents, but on account of the poverty of the parents. Hence arose a confusion of ideas in the minds of those who discussed this subject. One person would be thinking of children committed for their own faults or the faults of their parents, and would regard consequently the school as a quasi-penal establishment; the other would have in his mind the victims of poverty only, and would resent the idea that this should be punished as a crime. But what did that point to? Not to altering the character of true reformatory institutions, but to a fresh classification, from which they could eliminate altogether the penal element; and to a new kind of industrial schools for the very poor with no taint of criminality either in children or parents. Such schools would be purely educational, and might be properly placed under the control of the Education Department; but he felt sure that for the present institutions the Home Office was more appropriate. The inmates, if properly selected, had committed crime, or they were on the road to crime; the magistrate committed them, they were under forcible detention. The training was religious, moral, and physical, rather than intellectual. The police captured them when they escaped, and looked after the parents, who were under order to contribute to their maintenance. Again, the managers of the institutions themselves were almost unanimous against the change. They did their work in a rough, homely way which would excite the horror of the Education Department with its over trained masters and overdressed mistresses. The Home Office judged by general results, and did not trouble itself about the architecture of buildings, or shapes of desks and benches, which had imposed such an enormous, and in many cases such an unnecessary, expense upon the country since the passing of the Education Act. For instance, there was a wretched hulk in Cardiff doing excellent service among a depraved population, which would not be allowed to exist for an hour under the Privy Council. That strong feeling against a change could not be ignored in a case where the ways and means were so largely supplied by voluntary contributions; and this brought him to the point of the source, other than subscriptions, from which these institutions were supported, mentioned in his right hon. Friend's original Motion. Like many other systems in this country which worked very well, it was neither logical nor symmetrical, and at first sight it certainly seemed strange that any institution should receive money from three wholly independent sources. Yet on examination they would find that the arrangement was defensible— A mighty maze, yet not without a plan. The voluntary subscription presupposed local and individual interest in the management of these institutions. The contribution out of local rates insured local supervision, and the Treasury grant authorized central inspection, which they knew had been most efficient. The Education Act had merely substituted the school board for the town council in boroughs without altering the principle of the arrangement; but he would admit there was some omission with respect to counties. A very important question, however, especially to ratepayers, arose out of the present system. It was this—how far were they to carry the relief of parents from the obligation to support their children, and the transfer of that obligation to the rest of the community? Formerly, they confined such support to two classes only—criminals and paupers. They had recently extended it to the inmates of reformatory and industrial schools, whom he would call, for argument's sake, quasi-criminals. They now proposed to extend it to the poor other than paupers. The London School Board had been debating lately whether it should feed the children of improvident people; but if it was difficult to draw the line at which free education was to be afforded, how much more difficult to decide upon the point at which free subsistence was to be given? He quite admitted that they did this not so much for the good of the individual as for the protection of society, and that it might be lawful and advisable in such cases— To do a great good do a little ill. But, at the same time, they ought not to overlook the effect they might produce on the honest poor, who struggled to bring up their families without assistance, if they placed in so much better a position the children of the improvident, and that without any stigma, real or imaginary, such as that which might attach to institutions under the Poor Law or Home Office; for in this way they might be embarking on a very dangerous course. The boarding-out system recently introduced had already been the cause of much heart-burning among the poor in the country. He had heard of a man saying—"Here am I trying to keep myself and my family off the parish, and in the next cottage they have taken in a child at 5s. a-week, whose father drank himself to death after killing his wife by ill-treatment, and whose child has more than twice as much spent on him as I can spend on one of mine." He did not say that this was conclusive against the system, and he knew that in the case of industrial and reformatory schools they had a certain safeguard in the power of obliging parents to pay, which ought, perhaps, to be more rigidly exercised, though it was full of difficulty; but he did say, that if they not only educated but supported the children of improvident parents at the expense of the community, without attaching the stigma of crime or pauperism to that support, they ran the risk of giving a premium to improvidence, and of very soon making the rates, which were paid, be it remembered, not only by the rich, but by the provident poor, wholly intolerable.

MR. HENLEY

said, that the question before the House was, perhaps, one of the most difficult which could be brought under the consideration of Parliament. Children who, either through the neglect of their parents or their own fault, got into the hands of the authorities were from that moment placed in a position infinitely better in every respect, material or otherwise, than in all human probability they would have been if they had remained in the hands of their parents. If they simply looked to the welfare of the poor children, so far as they were concerned, they ought to be, and no doubt were, subjects of great interest and great care; but the House must be careful not to lead persons who were struggling under difficulties to get on to suppose that the children of the improvident were in a better position than their own, and from the wording of the Resolutions it was difficult to say to what extent they might go in that direction. The Resolutions were, in fact, much too general in their terms, and whether the children were under the management of one office or another was not of any great importance; but whichever it might be, the industrial training should be of the humblest kind; they should be taught to dig and cultivate land, and it was a serious question for consideration whether they should be taught trades, and thereby have an advantage over others. The authorities properly tried to recover the expenses from the parents; but in many cases it could not be done, and when it was obtained it was recovered at a great expense. The question, then, was surrounded with great difficulty and danger, and he was heartily glad the obligation to settle it rested upon his right hon. Friends the Home Secretary and the Vice President rather than upon himself.

MR. BRUCE

said, the debate had been conducted so ably that but for his official position he would be content to leave the matter as it stood. The right hon. Gentleman (Sir Charles Adderley) had done good service in bringing forward the question; and no one was better entitled, both from his long official experience and from the great attention he had paid to the question of prison discipline, to state his conclusions in Parliament. His main proposition was that the control of industrial and reformatory schools should be transferred from the Home Office to the Education Department; but the opinion both of that House and of the country generally seemed to be that the Reformatory Department had been well administered, and he was surprised to hear from the Conservative lips of his right hon. Friend a denunciation of the dogma "Let well alone." While he himself was content to be very much guided in the matter by the opinions of those excellent persons who for the last 20 or 30 years had attended to the subject, yet, at the same time, he was well aware that his right hon. Friend did not desire change for the sake of official symmetry any more than he would deprecate change which would be beneficial, and that his main object was to relieve these children from the stigma which he held would attach to them during the remainder of their life through their being educated in a criminal school. That, no doubt, was a laudable object; but if there were any grounds for the belief that that stigma did attach to them in after life, surely those who would first hear of it would be those benevolent and experienced persons who managed these institutions. But the desire of these persons was that these institutions should remain under the control of the Home Office. And in dealing with this point he desired to defend the action taken by the Rev. Sydney Turner, for whom his right hon. Friend, in common with all who had anything to do with these institutions, had sincere respect. Mr. Turner, desirous of ascertaining the opinion of those in authority over these schools upon the question raised by the Motion, had made application to them in terms of the utmost impartiality for their opinion, and without giving any indication of the opinion entertained by himself. By an ambiguous use of the term "schools," these institutions were made to appear to have a character different from that which really belonged to them; but the fact was that they were not schools in the ordinary sense of the term; and the ground of distinction between these and ordinary schools was that they were not places of intellectual training, but of correction and of special industrial training suitable to their class. The inmates of the reformatory schools had committed offences, and it might be fairly assumed that a child convicted of one felony had committed several; and, although children for whom great sympathy would be felt, they were still a criminal class, and should be subjected to a special corrective discipline, under a set of rules different altogether from the ordinary rules of the Education Department for the control of ordinary schools. The children in ordinary schools entered at four or five, and remained until they were 12 or 13; the inmates of reformatory schools, on the contrary, were nearly all above 10, for in 1871, out of 1,575, as many as 1,547 were above 10 and four-fifths above 12 years of age; and 760, or about one-half, were above 14 years of age. The case was not quite so strong in the industrial schools, where there was a different class of children, both with regard to age and ignorance. Out of 2,784 children admitted last year, 1,969, or two-thirds, were above 10 years of age; and 873, or nearly one-third, were above 12 years of age. It appeared, therefore, that in both classes of schools the children were rather advanced in life, and having been brought up in habits of total disregard for all the decencies of life, they required treatment very different from that which would suffice in the case of ordinary children; and powers of compulsion must be possessed by the superintendents far beyond those possessed by ordinary schoolmasters. The schools, indeed, were juvenile houses of correction, modified, by considerations of humanity and good policy, to meet the case of these unfortunate children, and so brought as nearly as possible to the condition of schools. The children were committed to them by warrant; the Home Secretary could remove them from one place to another by warrant; and he had power to remit any portion of their sentence, on being satisfied such remission would be for the good of the child; and, indeed, that power was often exercised in the case of children who had respectable parents. The Home Secretary, in fact, had the same power of control over these children as over ordinary prisoners. The system, however, was in many respects capable of improvement, and he should be very glad to see the Bill his right hon. Friend had promised; indeed, so strongly was he impressed with the necessity of some improvement, especially with regard to the desirability of distinguishing between the criminal and the merely outcast classes in industrial schools, that he had been desirous of introducing a Bill upon the subject that year. The right hon. Member for Oxfordshire (Mr. Henley) bad not exaggerated the danger, inherent in all these cases, of giving a better training to the criminal classes than was offered to the children of the honest poor; but, in truth, every prisoner sent to gaol was better clothed, fed, and housed than many members of the industrial classes, and a discharged prisoner often had abetter chance of finding employment than the honest artizan. That injustice, however, was inseparable from the system, and the question for consideration was, whether the injustice would be removed or diminished if these criminal children were placed under the Education Department. His right hon. Friend (Sir Charles Adderley), however, did not pretend the institutions would be better administered if they were under the Privy Council Office; and it was questionable whether the stigma the right hon. Gentleman desired to remove from them in after life really attached to them. On the contrary, from information received from all parts of the country, he (Mr. Bruce) gathered that there was a positive competition among employers for these children upon their discharge, and that as agricultural labourers, colliers, artizans, and sailors, they had no difficulty in getting employment. There were, however, so many attractions to those schools—and especially the industrial schools—in the fact that the children in them were not only educated and specially trained for the battle of life, but were fed and lodged at the public expense and afterwards started in their careers, that it was essential there should be some distinction drawn between those schools and other schools so as to make them less inviting; and there he thought the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Oxfordshire had hit the nail on the head, as he did in so many other matters. There ought to be some sort of stigma put on those schools, in order that the parent should feel the disgrace of having his child sent there, and that the well-disposed poor man might feel an honest pride in giving his child an education which, if not quite so good, was at least given at his own expense; and if that proper distinction could be maintained without injury to anyone, then he thought that the argument of his right hon. Friend (Sir Charles Adderley), on which he based his Motion, entirely fell to the ground. In conclusion, he could assure his right hon. Friend who had called forth that discussion, that he should be glad to welcome any measure that he might bring forward for improving institutions which had done so much to reduce crime.

MR. J. G. TALBOT

said, that as his Bill for giving prison authorities in England and Wales power to originate those schools had been pointedly referred to, he wished to say a few words. They had long desired in Kent to establish the industrial school system; the Home Office had kindly supported him in his attempt to enlarge the powers given to local authorities, and his Bill had passed through the House at those hours when private Members' Bills only could pass. He thought it was no discredit to himself to have sat up for that purpose as late as he had done, because the Bill was one of a beneficent character; and if it had been as bad a measure as his right hon. Friend (Sir Charles Adderley) said it was, it was the duty of his right hon. Friend to have sat up also and resisted it. The Memorial to the Home Secretary from the manager of the Redhill Reformatory—one of the best known and most successful of those institutions in the country—stated— Your Memorialists desire to urge very strongly that the inmates of reformatory schools are very dissimilar to the attendants at an ordinary elementary school—e.g., the boys in this institution are as a rule:—1. Older: in the last three years 260 boys have been admitted, and of this number 138 were over 14 years of age. 2. They are more ignorant: of the above 260 admissions, 99 were totally unable to read, write, or cipher, and of the 138 over 14 years old, 46 (or one-third) did not know the alphabet. 3. They are criminal in character: as a rule no boys are admitted on first conviction, while many have been previously convicted four, five, six times, &c. In the case of 'children of tender age' (under 12 years old), who are exceptionally admitted here, it is found that their criminal character is so developed that ordinary school instruction would be altogether insufficient. 4. They are detained by sentence of law, and therefore require strict and expensive discipline, as well as ordinary educational appliances. That showed that the inmates were of a class entirely dissimilar from the children with which the Education Department attempted to deal, and that they must be treated as incipient, if not indeed as advanced, criminals, which many of them were. So much for the reformatories. Then, as to the industrial schools, he had a letter from Miss Greenwood, the lady manager of the Industrial School for Girls at Halstead, in Essex, in which she said— This school has, through the police, recovered £10 during the last quarter (for ten children) from men who would not otherwise have made any contribution in relief of the Treasury charges.… A man came down here a short time since and demanded his children, and my power would have been vain without the Bench order of detention. They would have been taken back to a thoroughly criminal home. What compensation of power would a town without a school board have? Therefore, although he thought the right hon. Baronet had done good service by bringing forward the subject, he was unable to come to the conclusion to which he wished to lead them. On the contrary, he (Mr. J. G. Talbot) thought that was one of the most satisfactory parts of their legislation; and, instead of being afraid that they were making those children too comfortable, they ought rather to encourage the police to bring up more children, that they might be placed in industrial schools. If the House desired to put a stop to juvenile crime they must go to the fountain head—that was, they should visit the worst parts of the large towns, where might be found thousands of children not simply without education, but with an actual training in crime as a profession; and what the Home Office had best do was to exert the power of the law in order to counteract that evil, and make good citizens of these juvenile criminals, whose after offences cost so much to the country.

Question put, and agreed to.

Question again proposed, "That Mr. Speaker do now leave the Chair."