Polytechnic School in 1844, and that his connection with that institution was completely severed seven years later.

Thus deprived of his principal means of support, he made an effort to supplement the deficiency by returning to the employment of private instruction. Failing in this, he appealed for assistance to his friends, who came to the rescue with subscription which was intended at first to be temporary, but in the end became perpetual. Besides the French contributors, he mentions English and American friends among his benefactors.

During this period occurred that singularly romantic episode in the life of M. Comte, in the form of a strange liaison, which he contracted with a lady much younger than himself, whom he calls his incomparable angel, his everlasting friend, with other like terms of admiration and endearment. According to the statements of the author, the Politique Positive might never have been undertaken but for the inspiration which his wearied powers derived from his relations with this lady.

After speaking in the preface to the first volume of the Politique Positive of the completion of the Positive Philosophy, and of a period of leisure which followed, he goes on to say: "Thus provided with the time necessary for my second career, I lacked especially the strong and permanent impulse which alone could utilize worthily the brain-power at my disposal. My mind, wearied by its immense objective course, was inadequate to regenerate subjectively my systematic force, whose principal destination had then become, as at the outset, rather social than intellectual. This indispensible regeneration, which was destined to emanate from the heart, was procured for me six years ago by the incomparable angel whom the concurrent destinies of humanity commissioned to transmit to me worthily the gradual perfection of our nature." The author goes into a somewhat extended statement of the influence of this lady, Madame Clotilde de Vaux, in stimulating his purpose to go on with his work, and in giving shape to his thinking by the influence of her character, by personal suggestion, and above all by the light which his acquaintance with her cast on the position and influence of woman in the great social and political regeneration which he hoped to accomplish by the publication of the Système de Politique Positive.

It is pertinent to remark in this connection that an amiable servant girl comes in for a large share of commendation, as having shed the light of a simple, pure, and devoted life on the great questions of social regeneration. Perhaps it ought to be said here that the writer is not aware of any evidence that there was anything criminal in the relations between M. Comte and Madame de Vaux. He seems ever to have regarded her as a sister; and as for his devoted maid-servant, he affirms that nothing but legal obstacles prevented him from adopting her as his daughter.

Following this preface is a long dedication of the volume to Madame de Vaux, who had died a year before, in which we perceive that death and the lapse of time had not dissolved the strange fascination with which her living presence had swayed his entire being. Indeed, to thoughts of her, living and dead, he ascribes the inspiration which gave impulse to his activities through all his subsequent career. He characterizes the influence of Madame de Vaux over him as a "moral regeneration," and he speaks of the years which followed his acquaintance with her as his "second life."

It does not accord with the plan of this paper to go into an estimate of the Politique Positive, at this point, farther than to say, that the reader will find in it no indication of the new intellectual strength and grasp which M. Comte imagines himself to have derived from the inspiration of Madame de Vaux. On the contrary, his "second life," as represented by his writings, will seem on a much lower intellectual level than his first. There is, in the published volumes of this work, so much that is extravagant, wild, and fantastic, as to give plausibility to the theory that with the author's acquaintance with Madame de Vaux commenced a mild monomania, which went with him through life. There is something in the quiet complacency with which he speaks of himself as the high priest of humanity, and of the corresponding obligations of the human race to him, which reminds one of the kings and princes and grand moguls often met with in the hospitals of the insane.

Whatever may be said with regard to the author's soundness of mind in the later years of his life, the weakness of his last literary effort is admitted by the warmest admirers of the Posi

tive Philosophy. Mr. Lewes, one of the ablest of the English admirers of M. Comte, after bestowing the highest praise on the Positive Philosophy, says, in speaking of the Politique Positive, "Over his subsequent efforts to found a social doctrine, and to become the founder of a new religion, let us draw the veil. They are unfortunate attempts, which remind us of Bacon's scientific investigations; and, in the minds of many, these unfortunate attempts will create a prejudice against what is truly grand in his philosophical career." He goes on to say, "In the Cours de Philosophie Positive we have the grandest * system which philosophy has yet produced."

**

The passages quoted above may be taken as expressing the general estimate of the writings of M. Comte by the most intelligent disciples of positivism. They glory in the Philosophie Positive, but would cast the veil of forbearing charity over the Politique Positive. Indeed M. Littié, a firm disciple of positivisin and editor of the second edition of the Philosophie Positive, in his "Préface d'un Disciple," carries his charity so far as completely to ignore the existence of the Politique Positive. The reader would not imagine, from anything in this preface, that M. Comte had ever undertaken any serious literary labor after the publication of the last volume of the Positive Philosophy in 1842. The strange episode of his intimacy with Madame de Vaux is also passed over in silence.

It is not necessary, for the object in view, to extend this notice further. It may be presumed that the foregoing sketch has so far placed the reader en rapport with M. Comte and his surroundings as to enable him to follow intelligently the attempt, which will be made in a subsequent Article, to trace the genealogy of positivism, and to discover the law of evolution by which the system arose, in the mind of its founder, out of the social and political chaos which prevailed in large portions of Europe during the early part of the nineteenth century.

ARTICLE IV.-PRISON DISCIPLINE AS A SCIENCE.

EVERY reader of the Vicar of Wakefield (and who has not read that charming book?) remembers the story which good Dr. Primrose tells of his experience in prison, and his efforts to reform the unfortunate companions of his confinement. Goldsmith, with the happy inspiration of genius, seems to have touched the root of a matter which has wonderfully developed since his day. His own sympathy with distress of every kind revealed to him what appeared to be hidden from his contemporaries—the very bad condition of the imprisoned classes of society, and the cruel character of the criminal code of the time. We read his words as though they had been written for a later century. Indeed, is it not always the privilege of a true genius to look both before and after, and to speak as though with the gift of prophecy? "It were highly to be wished," says the worthy Doctor, "that legislative power would direct the law rather to reformation than severity; that it would seem convinced that the work of eradicating crimes is not by making punishments familiar, but formidable. Then, instead of our present prisons, which find or make men guilty, which enclose wretches for the commission of one crime, and return them, if returned alive, fitted for the perpetration of thousands, we should see, as in other parts of Europe, places of penitence and solitude, where the accused might be attended by such as could them give repentance if guilty, or new motives to virtue if innocent. * It were to be wished, then, that power, instead of contriving new laws to punish vice, instead of drawing hard the cords of society till a convulsion came to burst them, instead of cutting away wretches as useless before we have tried their utility, instead of converting correction into vengeance, it were to be wished that we tried the restrictive arts of government, and made the law the protector, but not the tyrant, of the people. We should then find that creatures, whose souls are held as dross, only wanted the hand of a refiner; we should then find that creatures now stuck up for long tortures, lest

* *

luxury should feel a momentary pang, might, if properly treated, serve to sinew the State in times of danger; that, as their faces are like ours, their hearts are so too; that few minds are so base as that perseverance cannot amend; that a man may see his last crime without dying for it; and that very little blood will serve to cement our security."*

Goldsmith's words were directed against the severity of the laws of England, which, at the time, decreed the penalty of death for no less than one hundred and ninety-six offences. But he, also, in the pregnant sentences which I have quoted, enforced the propositions, that the criminal was still a man with manhood's rights, and that the discipline of prison life should be employed for the reformation as well as the punishment of the offender-propositions which lie at the basis of this very interesting branch of social science. Yet Goldsmith wrote before Howard had begun his philanthropic labors for the prisoner, to which he at last fell a martyr, and before Elizabeth Fry had been born.† He anticipated, by at least half a century, the leading opinions of the best laborers in this long neglected field. His protest against the blood-thirsty character of English law was well deserved. Let the careful student read Walpole's Letters, or Boswell's Life of Johnson, or any of the books that treat of the familiar social life of England at the period in question, and he will find sufficient evidence of the need of calling public attention to the matter. Men and women were executed every week-" seventeen this morning," says Walpole in one of his letters. The case of one young woman, but nineteen years of age, with an infant at the breast, hung at Tyburn for taking a piece of coarse linen from the counter of a draper's shop, but not carrying it from the premises, was deemed of sufficient importance to be mentioned in Parliament, but it led to no immediate practical results. The country had grown to be "a shambles." and travelers were obliged, even at noon, and within sound of Bow Bells, to go

* Vicar of Wakefield, chap. xxvii.

The Vicar of Wakefield was published in 1766. Howard's attention was most strongly turned to the subject of prison improvement by an official inspection of Bedford jail in 1773. He died at Kherson in the autumn of 1789. Elizabeth Fry, the celebrated Quakeress, who labored in behalf of female prisoners for many years, was born May 21, 1780.