in Volume I., when he adopted, if such an expression may be used, the business of Home Secretary, in order, as he put it, to learn how to deal with the concerns of the country internally, and to be brought in contact with his fellow-countrymen. He threw all his characteristic energy into the work of carrying through the measure for the establishment of a new system of secondary punishments. It was during the passing of the bill through the House of Lords that Lord Grey suggested the introduction of a modification of the ticket-of-leave system which was in practice in the colonies. The principle of the ticket-of-leave was that the convict should not be kept in custody during the whole period of his sentence, but that he should be allowed to pass through a period of conditional liberty before he obtained his full and unrestricted freedom. Lord Grey also urged that the sentences to penal servitude should correspond in length with sentences for transportation. The Government would not accept this latter suggestion, but they adopted the principle of the ticket-of-leave. The bill was introduced into the House of Lords by Lord Cranworth, the Lord Chancellor. When it came down to the House of Commons there was some objection made to the ticket-of-leave clauses, but the Government carried them through. The effect of the measure was to substitute penal servitude for transportation, in all cases except those where the sentence of transportation was for fourteen years and upward. Now there can be no doubt that the principle of the ticket-of-leave is excellent. But it proved on its first trial in this country the most utter delusion. It got no fair chance at all. It was understood by the whole English public that the object of the ticket-of-leave was to enable the authorities to give a conditional discharge from custody to a man who had in some way proved his fitness for such a relaxation of punishment, and that the eye of the police would be on him even during the period of his conditional release. This was, in fact, the construction put on the Act in Ireland, where, accordingly, the ticket-of-leave system was worked with the most complete success. Under the management of Sir Walter Crofton, chairman of the Board of Prison Directors, the principle was applied exactly as any one might have supposed it would be applied everywhere, and as, indeed, the very conditions

endorsed on the ticket-of-leave distinctly suggested. The convicts in Ireland were kept away from the general community in a little penal settlement near Dublin; they were put at first to hard, monotonous, and weary labor; they were then encouraged to believe that with energy and good conduct they could gradually obtain relaxation of punishment, and even some small rewards; they were subjected to a process of really reforming discipline; they got their conditional freedom as soon as they had satisfactorily proved that they deserved and were fit for it; but even then they had to report themselves periodically to the police, and they knew that if they were seen to be relapsing into old habits and old companionships, they were certain to be sent back to the penal settlement to begin the hard work over again. The result was substantial and lasting reform. It was easy for the men who were let out conditionally to obtain employment. A man who had Sir Walter Crofton's ticket-ofleave was known by that very fact to have given earnest of good purpose and steady character. The system in Ireland was therefore all that its authors could have wished it to be. But for some inscrutable reason the Act was interpreted in this country as simply giving every convict a right, after a certain period of detention, to claim a ticket-of-leave, provided he had not grossly violated any of the regulations of the prison, or misconducted himself in some outrageous manner. In 1856 Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, told the House of Commons that there never was a more fallacious idea than the supposition that a ticket-of-leave was a certificate of good character, and that a man only obtained such a ticket if he could prove that he had reformed. A ticket-of-leave, he went on to explain, was indeed withheld in the case of very bad conduct; but in any ordinary case the convicts," unless they have transgressed the prison rules, and acted in such a manner as to incur an unfavorable report from the prison authorities, are, after a stated period of imprisonment, entitled, as a matter of course, to a ticket-ofleave."

It would be superfluous to examine the working of such a system as that which Sir George Grey described. A number of scoundrels whom the judges had sentenced to be kept in durance for so many years were, without any conceivable

reason, turned loose upon society long before the expiration of their sentence. They were in England literally turned loose upon society, for it was held by the authorities here that it might possibly interfere with the chance of a jailbird's getting employment, if he were seen to be watched by the police. The police, therefore, were considerately ordered to refrain from looking after them. "I knew you

once," says the hero of a poem by Mr. Browning, "but in Paradise, should we meet, I will pass nor turn my face." The police were ordered to act thus discreetly if they saw Bill Sykes asking for employment in some wealthy and quiet household. They certainly knew him once, but now they were to pass nor turn their face. Nothing, surely, that we know of the internal arrangements of Timbuctoo, to adopt the words of Sydney Smith, warrants us in supposing that such a system would have been endured there for a year. Fifty per cent. of the ruffians released on ticket-of-leave were afterward brought up for new crimes, and convicted over again. Of those who, although not actually convicted, were believed to have relapsed into their old habits, from sixty to seventy per cent. relapsed within the first year of their liberation. Baron Bramwell stated from the bench that he had had instances of criminals coming before him who had three sentences overlapping each other. The convict was set free on ticket-of-leave, convicted of some new crime, and recommitted to prison; released again on ticket-of-leave, and convicted once again, before the period of his original sentence had expired. An alarm sprung up in England; and, like all alarms, it was supported both by exaggeration and misconception. The system pursued with the convicts. was bad enough; but the popular impression ascribed to the ticket-of-leave men every crime committed by any one who had been previously convicted and imprisoned. man who had worked out the whole of his sentence, and who, therefore, had to be discharged, committed some crime immediately after. Excited public opinion described it as a crime committed by a ticket-of-leave man. Two committees sat, as has already been said, in 1856. The result of the public alarm, and the Parliamentary reconsideration of the whole subject, was the bill brought in by Sir George Grey in 1857. This measure extended the provisions of the

Act of 1853 by substituting in all cases a sentence of penal servitude for one of transportation. It extended the limits of the penal servitude sentences by making them correspond with the terms of transportation to which men had previously been sentenced. It gave power also to pass sentences of penal servitude for shorter periods than was allowed by former legislation, allowing penal servitude for as short a period as three years. It attached to all sentences of penal servitude the liability to be removed from this country to places beyond-seas fitted for their reception; and it restricted the range of the remission of sentences. The Act, it will be seen, abolished the old-fashioned transportation system altogether, but it left the power to the authorities to have penal servitude carried out in any of the colonies where it might be thought expedient. The Government had still some idea of utilizing Western Australia for some of our offenders. But nothing came of this plan, or of the clause in the new Act which was passed to favor it; and as a matter of fact transportation was abolished. How the amended. legislation worked in other respects we shall have an oppor tunity of examining hereafter.

Transportation was not the only familiar institution which came to an end in this year. The Gretna Green marriages became illegal in 1857, their doom having been fixed for that time by an Act passed in the previous session. Thenceforward such marriages were unlawful, unless one of the parties had lived at least twenty-one days previously in Scotland. The hurried flight to the border, the post-chaise and the panting steeds, the excited lovers, the pursuing father, passed away into tradition. Lydia Languish had to reconcile herself to the license and the blessing, and even the writers of fiction might have given up without a sigh an incident which had grown wearisome in romance long before it ceased to be interesting in reality.

CHAPTER XXXII.

THE SEPOY.

On the 23d of June, 1857, the hundredth anniversary of the battle of Plassey was celebrated in London. One object of the celebration was to obtain the means of raising a monument to Clive in his native county. At such a meeting it was but natural that a good deal should be said about the existing condition of India, and the prospects of that great empire which the genius and the daring of Clive had gone so far to secure for the English Crown. It does not appear, however, as if any alarm was expressed with regard to the state of things in Bengal, or as if any of the noblemen and gentlemen present believed that at that very moment India was passing through a crisis more serious than Clive himself had had to encounter. Indeed, a month or so before, a Bombay journal had congratulated itself on the fact that India was quiet "throughout." Yet at the hour when the Plassey celebration was going on, the great Indian mutiny was already six weeks old, had already assumed full and distinctive proportions, was already known in India to be a convulsion destined to shake to its foundations the whole fabric of British rule in Hindostan. A few evenings after the celebration there was some cursory and casual discussion in Parliament about the doubtful news that had begun to arrive from India; but as yet no Englishman at home took serious thought of the matter. The news came at last with

a rush.

Never in our time, never probably at any time, came such news upon England as the first full story of the outbreak in India. It came with terrible, not unnatural exaggeration. England was horror-stricken by the stories of wholesale massacres of English women and children; of the most abominable tortures, the most degrading outrages inflicted upon English matrons and maidens. The newspapers ran