tions. Adams was active on behalf of the Company, now overhauling ships, now buying and selling, now serving as diplomatist, and in this last capacity sometimes displeasing Cocks by pro-Dutch proclivities. Thus in 1615 he bought a junk and, after refitting her, took command for a voyage to Siam. This was against the wish of Ieyasu, who wanted him to remain in Japan and offered him a larger estate if he would do so. But Adams stuck to the Company, seeing in that the chance of an ultimate return to England. The cruise of the SEA ADVENTURE, as the junk was called, was unsuccessful. After nearly foundering in a gale, she took refuge at the Loo Choo Islands, whence, owing to a mutiny of the crew, Adams had to put back to Japan.

In the following year (1616), on his return from another and more profitable voyage to Siam in the same junk, he found that Cocks had been awaiting him to go to court for the renewal of trading privileges, since Ieyasu had died and Hidetada now reigned alone. Procuring the new license was a long and tiresome business. For a month they lingered in Yedo, wasting their days in antechambers and trying to interest officials in their cause. It was a time of change, and Hidetada's dislike of aliens was notorious. When finally he got his charter, Cocks apparently examined it with no great care, for on his homeward journey he was prised to hear from Hirado of serious restrictions being put on trade by the authorities. Referring to his license, he found that the article formerly permitting the English to trade where they would, now confined them to Hirado and Nagasaki. The reason for these shrunken rights he took to be the Shogun's dislike of the Spanish missionaries, though he had explained,

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when asked whether the English were not also Christians, that all friars and Jesuits had been turned out of England before he was born, and related the story of the Gunpowder Plot. Renewed efforts for a full license had no success, the official answer being that nothing could be done that year.

At the end of 1616 Adams's engagement with the Company expired, and for the future he was engaged partly in private trading, partly in diplomatic missions. For his political efforts there was an opportunity on the arrival of another missive from King James, armed with which he set off with Cocks to seek concessions from Hidetada. The same weary process of waiting and bribing went on, and with the same lack of success. The English were now to be restricted to Hirado, and Adams was entrusted with the task of winding up the branch factories. Meanwhile the authorities had been exercising strict supervision over the Hirado establishment and hampering its sales. Since Ieyasu's death there had been. a change in their attitude to the English traders; the latter no longer dreamt of appealing to the native judges in any dispute. Nor was there trouble with the Japanese only; a serious incident led to a rupture with the Dutch, which had hitherto been avoided. There was plenty of trade-rivalry, but relations, if not cordial, had been courteous, Adams, hand in glove with both nationalities, being the go-between. The Dutch, moreover, who carried on a brisk piracy, had hitherto left English vessels unmolested. But a great humiliation had now to be endured, the ship ATTENDANCE being brought into Hirado harbour by a Dutch privateer with much firing of salutes. Cocks, indignant at this affront, sent a message to the Chinese trading colony at Nagasaki, asking it to join

in an appeal for justice to Yedo, and another to Adams, then at court with a Dutch embassy, begging him to withdraw from association with the enemies of his countrymen. He was not to be appeased by a call from the Dutch chief merchant, who came to express his regrets and hand over the ATTENDANCE, out of which, however, all that could be removed had been taken. "I answered," says Cocks, they might show themselves friends to the English if they liked, either now or hereafter, but for my part I did not care a halfpenny whether they did or no." To his disappoint ment Adams did not wish to intervene in this feud, and advised him against going to court with his grievance; but Cocks, determined to see it through, set out. After all Adams met him on the way and accompanied him, but the Shogun declined to meddle in the affair, saying he was only lord of Japan, not lord of the sea.

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Poor Cocks returned crestfallen to Hirado, and things went from bad to worse with the factory. No more ships arrived for it, though the Dutch again insulted it by bringing in two more English prizes; brawls between the English and and other nationalities were frequent, and the former had rank injustice if they appealed to law. To increase Cocks's worries, there were no profits to be made, and, owing to the illness of his subordinates, his books had got into a muddle. "God send us well out of Japan, for I doubt it will be every day worse than ever," is one of the gloomy entries in his diary.

It was during this time of British decadence in Japan that William Adams died. He had all along played for his own hand, but one

of his last recorded actions was assisting two Englishman to escape from Dutch captivity. The news of his death reached England in the following words of good Mr. Cocks, a forgiving soul, for the departed had sometimes been a thorn in his side.

Our good friend Captain William Adams, who was so long before us in Japan, departed out of this world the 16th of May last [i.e. in 1620] and made Mr. Wm. Eaton and myself his overseers, giving the one half of his estate to his wife and child in England, and the other half to a son and a daughter he hath in Japan. . . I cannot but be sorrowful for the loss of such a man as Captain William Adams was, he having been in such favour with two Emperors of Japan, as never was Christian in these parts of the world, and might freely have entered and had speech with the Emperors, when many Japan kings stood without and could not be permitted. And this Emperor hath confirmed the lordship to his son, which the other Emperor gave to his father.

The cause of Adams's death is unknown, as well as the age at which it took place. Probably he was from fifty-seven to sixty. Despite his traditional burial near Yedo, Professor Riess conjectures that he died at Hirado, as his inventory was drawn up in the English factory within six days of his death. That factory

was not destined to survive for long. After a period during which Dutch and English worked harmoniously in Japan, the massacre at the Spice Islands in 1623, for which Cromwell later exacted an indemnity, brought about a final rupture. Soon afterwards the English Company withdrew entirely from Japanese trade, having in ten years incurred a net loss of about £40,000.

WILLIAM G. HUTCHISON.

In England the study of crime, its causes and its cure, is the hobby of a few, but it should be, and is, the business of many outside the ranks of those officially engaged in the detection and punishment of criminals. Of this study the prison is an important department, though by no means so important as is generally imagined. Discipline is maintained in the State, no less than in the army and in schools, not so much by fear of punishment, as by educating the common-sense of the many to the knowledge that submission to authority is the best policy for the individual, as it is for the community. The forces arrayed against each other are, then, on the one hand the baser and more short-sighted instincts of human nature, which, in an environment of bodily and mental disease, poverty, drunkenness, insanitary dwellings and evil tradition, tend towards crime; on the other hand, medical science, religion, domestic ties, philanthropy, and all the machinery of local government. To these latter the prison,-that is to say, punishment-is but a humble ally.

In the mind of the casual observer, however, the position that the prison holds is something very different. For him an atmosphere of romance is created by the stories of Chillon, of Bruce and the spider, and of the prison-breaking exploits of Jack Sheppard. His curiosity is aroused by its apparent mystery, by the reticence of the officials, by its very form, and by the idea that it may be the temporary home of some crimi

nal notoriety; while, if of finer feeling, he may be moved to pity for the sufferings which he imagines are being borne by fellow-creatures within its walls. its walls. To satisfy the appetite of such a public, there has of recent years been a steady flow of books on prisons by ex-prisoners and others. Nearly thirty years ago FIVE YEARS' PENAL SERVITUDE had more than a temporary success, for it was one of the causes which gave birth to Lord Kimberley's Commission on the Penal Servitude Acts. Later came Mr. Michael Davitt's LEAVES FROM A PRISON DIARY, a book which gratified the taste for morbid things, and is, furthermore, full of curious studies of criminal types; while of another class is the series of SCENES FROM A SILENT WORLD, sketches depicting the prison and the prisoner as seen by an intelligent visitor, drawn with a delicate touch, and alive with sympathy for human suffering and human weakness. The vogue of this personal and descriptive class of reading shows the hold that the prison has on the popular imagination, and accounts for the multiplication of books of prison experiences during the last few years; by the appearance, for example, of PENAL SERVITUDE by an ex-convict, whose identity was hardly concealed under the initials W. B. N., of TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN SEVENTEEN PRISONS by a gaol-bird of wide experience, and by a series of articles in a popular magazine, the work of another ex-convict, which he entitled FIVE YEARS PENAL.

Everything depends upon the point of view, and later on I shall have

something to say about that taken by writers from the outside, men of letters and officials. For the moment, however, it is necessary, in order to assess the value of the descriptions and criticisms set forth in these three works, to examine the point of view of the ex-convict. Circumstances have given to me the opportunity of seeing something of a sufficient number of men who have served their time to gain a fair insight into the salient characteristics common to the members of the class,-a temperament, self-conscious, vain, credulous, and sanguine; and although, without a personal knowledge of the writers in question, it is impossible to describe their several characteristics, it is not unfair to assume that they possess those which are common to the exconvicts whom one has studied. And the assumption is justified by an examination of the books. Moreover the abnormal atmosphere of convict, as of monastic, life tends to produce a form of hysteria which, in the case of the monk, induces a state of spiritual exaltation, and in the case of the prisoner, who lacks the monkish ideals, shows itself in an exaggeration of his temperamental defects. So much for the psychology of the point of view. As to its material side, one need not be a criminal to sympathise with the prisoner, who, naturally, is not prejudiced in favour of the authority holding him in check; in fact, it is this sympathy which in weaker members of the community is liable to be perverted by the class of literature under review into that dangerous channel of humanitarianism which is cruel in its kindness. In reading these books by ex-convicts one is struck with the way in which trivial incidents are exaggerated, with the generalisations deduced from isolated facts, and with the narrowness and the distorted perspective of the outlook. But con

sidering the surroundings of the writers, the fact that they are cut off from communication with the world at large, these apparent peculiarities are not unnatural.

In a community of which everyone is a member against his will, in which everyone is suffering under a sense of gross injustice (for convicts, we read, have the gift of persuading themselves that either their conviction was unmerited or that the sentence was out of all proportion to the crime), where men have to be kept in hand by strict discipline, who are accustomed to act either on the impulse of passion or with calculation for their own interests, without any regard to the loss or suffering enjoined on others,-in such a community one should not be disappointed at finding the ethical and social standards set rather low down. For reading between the lines one discovers that there is a standard of public opinion in a convict prison, and that there are many who do not act up to its level. The anti-social instinct of some of these men is such that they are incapable of living even with their fellow-sinners without scheming for their own aggrandisement at a comrade's expense. In TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN SEVENTEEN PRISONS there is an account of a quarrel between two convicts, originating in one suspecting the other of having betrayed him to the authorities in the matter of some contraband article, which ended in the weaker man being thrown into a brick-kiln. W. B. N. recounts several incidents of a similar nature, as does the author of FIVE YEARS PENAL. The proverb which implies the existence of honour among thieves would seem to receive its quietus in prison, if we are to believe the stories told in these books; and, perhaps, it is as well for the authorities that it should be so, for it appears that a combination of any

importance among prisoners is always betrayed before the climax arrives.

Another feature of prison life seems to be its gossip and its credulity. One reads of an incident quickly becoming known all over the prison, and one wonders mildly why the rule of silence exists; but keeping in view the circumscribed outlook of the gossipers, one does not wonder at their abnormal credulity. An essential to the enjoyment of gossip, whether in the cathedral close or the wards of a prison, is the capacity for accepting it as truth, and the degeneration of the critical powers which makes this capacity is, in both places, a result of monotonous surroundings, and lack of interest in the doings of the world outside. But in the convict prison this lack of interest is caused by the enforced absence of news; it is not inherent. On the contrary, next to an illicit supply of tobacco, a page of a newspaper surreptitiously introduced would command the greatest price; and according to the writer of FIVE YEARS PENAL such luxuries are all too common, as, consequently, must be the venal warder. But the stories of this man, who, by the way, has also contributed prison experiences to weekly and daily papers, are so surprising that they must be taken with a grain of salt, more especially as he is at pains to record the statement that he has suffered from the morphia habit, a habit which does not, to say the least of it, exercise a restraining influence on the imagination of its victims.

I have hinted earlier at the vanity and self-consciousness of the criminal type, and they are well illustrated in prison literature. The fact that a man should find satisfaction in seeing his name on the title-page of a book as its author is in ordinary circumstances natural and by no means blameworthy; but to obtain such

gratification at the cost of reminding relatives and friends of his moral downfall shows a want of self-respect bordering on vain-gloriousness. The line taken by one of these writers who palliates his crime at the expense of the man whom he defrauded, of the judge who sentenced him, and of the Press which approved his sentence, is rather depressing, but is typical of the whole. In fact, the only real interest of these books lies. in the sidelights which they throw on the psychology of criminals, and, indirectly, on the effect which imprisonment has on the character and temperament of those who have been through it. When we come to search for suggestions as to improvements in the system, the field is found to be barren, for the prisoner's view is necessarily narrow. The detail which offends him fills his mental vision, whether it be a question of diet or of discipline; and these two features, in one form or another, would appear to obscure all others. From the praise bestowed on the medical department, and knowing the supremacy of the doctor on questions of food in all public institutions, it is difficult to believe that any prisoner suffers in consequence of the insufficiency of his rations, or from their poor quantity. One need not be a great administrator, or even an experienced housekeeper, to see that sufficiency without waste can only be attained if the members of the community mess together. Then an average of consumption can be arrived at and there will be no waste; but for disciplinary reasons we may take it that prisoners' messes would be impracticable. At all events they have to take their meals apart, each in his own cell, and a fixed ration must be issued to each man. This, we understand, can be supplemented by the doctor, so none can be said to go hungry. On the