Reformation. The religious revolution of the 16th century, known as the Reformation, is the greatest event in the history of civilisation since Paganism gave place to Christianity as the faith of the leading nations of the world. It marks the supreme importance of this revolution that the age which preceded and the age which followed it belong to two different phases of the human spirit. With the Reformation begins what is distinctively known as Modern Europe, while the epoch that preceded it bears the equally distinctive designation of the Middle Ages. As a revolution in which all the countries of western Europe were more or less directly involved, the subject of the Reformation has necessarily been treated in the different accounts of these countries. In the articles on Luther, Charles V., Henry VIII., Calvin, Knox, and others further details will be found regarding the aims and methods of the revolution in the various countries where it declared itself. Here, therefore, it will be sufficient to indicate briefly the general causes which produced it, the special course and character it took among the different peoples, and its chief results for the human spirit at large.
The central fact of the Reformation was the detachment from papal Christianity of the nations distinguished by the general name of Protestant. By this severance an order of things came to an end under which Christian Europe had been content to exist from the close of the 8th century. From the year 800, when, by a mutual understanding of their respective functions, Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III., western Europe had come to regard the papacy as the essential condition of individual and corporate life, as prime a necessity in human affairs as the sun in the course of nature. Thus conceived, the power of the church underlay all human relations. It was the consecration of the church that constituted the family; the church defined the relations of rulers and their subjects, and the church was the final court of appeal on the ultimate questions of human life and destiny. In the nature of things such a power could never be realised as it was ideally conceived. Yet during the 11th and 12th centuries, the period when the power of the popes was most adequate to their claims, they undoubtedly went far to make the idea a reality. But the energies of the human spirit were bound sooner or later to issue in developments with which mediæval conceptions were fundamentally irreconcilable. By the 13th century, along every line of man's activity, there were already protests, conscious and unconscious, against the system typified in the pope at Rome.
The most remarkable of these protests was the order of ideas associated with the name of Joachim of Flora in Calabria (died 1202). Under the name of the 'Eternal Gospel' (used for the first time in 1254) these ideas ran a course which for a time seriously threatened the existence of the mediæval church. The new teaching struck at the very root of the papal system, for its essence was that the hour had come when a new dispensation, that of the Holy Spirit, should supersede the provisional gospel delivered by Christ. During the second half of the 13th and the first half of the 14th century the influence of these ideas is traceable in every country of Christendom, and it was only the unflinching action of the church that postponed its disintegration for other three centuries. The numerous sects which either sprang from or were quickened by this movement speak clearly to the revolutionary fever that had seized on men's spirits and was impelling them to other ideals than the traditions of Rome. Mainly the offspring of the third order of St Francis, these sects swarmed throughout every Christian country under the names of Beguins, Beghards, Fratricelli, Flagellants, Lollards, Apostolic Brethren, &c., and everywhere spread discontent with the existing church. Even John Knox (in answer to a letter by James Tyrie, a Scottish Jesuit) claims Joachim of Flora as an ally in the work which it was the labour of his own life to achieve—the ruin of the papacy, and the promotion of what he deemed a purer gospel.
Simultaneously with this manifestation of revolutionary feeling there were tendencies in the sphere of pure thought in essential antagonism to the teaching of the church. The labour of the thinkers of the middle ages was to reconcile faith, as inculcated by religious authority, with human reason as they found it embodied in the accessible writings of Aristotle. In the 13th century, however, the Arabic texts of Aristotle, and notably that of the great commentator Averrhoes, made their way into the Christian schools, and thenceforward a leaven of scepticism was a present element in all the universities of Europe. As the result of the teaching of Averrhoes, a name of the most sinister import to every true son of the church, materialism and pantheism became common creeds among thinkers, and the notion spread even among intelligent laymen that Christianity was not the absolute thing the church had taught them to believe. In Dante's (died 1321) fierce exclamation that the knife is the one reply to him who denies the immortality of the soul we have the outburst of a passionate faith in presence of a widespread libertinism of thought.
But the most serious menace against the integrity of the papal system lay in the political development of Europe during the last three centuries of the middle ages. As the countries of western Europe became more and more individualised, their peoples grew every year into a fuller consciousness of distinct national interests and national ideals. While this was the tendency of the various nations, the pope during these centuries gradually lost his position as the disinterested umpire of Europe, and sank into an Italian prince, with a temporal policy of his own which led him to seek allies among other potentates as they fell in with his own special ends of the moment. But such alliances naturally gave offence to the princes excluded from them, and led to a suspicious discontent with the Roman see, which, as was afterwards proved in the case of England, needed only the requisite occasion to flame into outright rebellion. The saying of Philip Augustus (died 1223)—‘Happy Saladdin, who has no pope!’—expressed the feeling, which every century grew stronger, that the pope would become an impossible factor in European politics. To this feeling should be added the fact that, as the middle classes grew in intelligence and well-being, they looked with envy on the immense wealth of the clergy, and grumbled at the large sums that annually went to the coffers of Rome.
During the 14th and 15th centuries mediævalism gave every sign of an exhausted phase of human development. By the so-called Babylonish Captivity, when the papal residence was fixed for seventy years at Avignon (1305–76), and by the Great Schism (1378–1417), during which the spectacle was seen of first two and afterwards three popes claiming to be the vicars of God on earth, the papacy suffered a loss of prestige in the eyes of all Europe which it never afterwards fully recovered. It was the further misfortune of the church during this eclipse of its ancient glory that all spiritual life seemed to have gone out of every rank of its clergy. Testimonies from every country prove beyond question that by the end of the 15th century the clergy had become grossly unfit to be the spiritual guides of the people. The sources of intellectual life had equally failed wherever the old philosophy authorised by the church continued to be the subject of teaching and study. In the later half of the 15th century scholasticism had become the veriest trifling which ever engaged the mind of man. In all the interests of man's well-being, therefore, a renaissance was needed to evoke new motives and supply new ideals which should lift humanity to a higher plane of endeavour. Such a renaissance came, and fortunately the church did not prove equal to suppressing this second burst of life as it had suppressed that of the 12th and 13th centuries.
It was again in Italy that the new life first declared itself. While north of the Alps scholasticism reigned in all the schools, the movement known as the Renaissance (q.v.) had in Italy been in full course for above a century. In itself the Renaissance was as far as possible from leading men to higher ideals in religion; yet in two of its results it gave a direct impetus to the Reformation. Inspired by the life of antiquity, the humanism of the Renaissance paganised the church and quickened that moral disintegration which was the prime cause of the religious revolution. On the other hand, through its opening of men's minds by new studies and new measures of things, the Renaissance lightened the load of tradition, and made a new departure in the life of Christendom a less formidable conception. In Erasmus (1467–1536), who has always been regarded as a true nursing father of the Reformation, we clearly discern these two results of the revival of the ancient literatures. In so many words he states his grave fears lest the church should be wholly paganised by the universal imitation of classical modes of thought and speech; while his own unsparing criticism of the church and its traditions proves how much he owed to the so-called ‘new learning.’
The very zeal with which the revival of antiquity was pursued in Italy was itself a countercheck to religious reform in the country that of all others needed it the most. All contemporary literature proves that during the later part of the 15th and the opening of the 16th century the court of Rome was as profoundly immoral as that of any of the heathen emperors had been in the same city. The spiritual claims of the papacy were the jest of ecclesiastics themselves. ‘This fable of Christ,’ a certain dignitary of the church is reported to have said in the Vatican, ‘has been to us a source of great gain.’ Among the Italian people, however, there was never the slightest indication of a national movement towards any serious breach with the papacy. The religious melodrama enacted by Savonarola at Florence (1489–98) never struck at the central ideas of papal Christianity; and Savonarola, besides, never like Luther or Knox woke a deep response in the national consciousness. While in Italy, therefore, there was no widespread religious quickening as in other countries of Christendom, there was no political reason such as elsewhere produced a breach with the papacy. For the Italian people the pope was not a foreign prince with temporal interests of his own conflicting with those of the nation at large. The different republics which partitioned the country might at times regard the pope as an enemy to their individual ambitions; but the nation as a whole was fully conscious of the honour of having the vicar of God in their midst, and as in the past they had stood by him against the emperors, so in the great religious revolution of the 16th century they also remained faithful to him throughout the gradual dismemberment of his spiritual dominion.
Of the countries north of the Alps Germany was the first to be widely influenced by that revival of learning which had its origin in Italy. In Germany, however, the new spirit wrought under fundamentally different conditions, and lighted the way to vastly different issues. There was every reason why Germany should lead the way in the schism from Rome. Outside Italy Germany was the country where every abuse of the mediæval church was seen in its grossest form. The ignorance and sensuality of the clergy, the scandalous sale of livings, the disproportionate papal exactions—all these evils came to be vividly realised by the quickened consciousness of the nation. Between Rome and Germany, moreover, an antagonism existed in the very conditions from which mediævalism had sprung. It was in virtue of the mutual understanding between pope and emperor that the church came to fill the place it did in western Europe. But almost from the first the interests of Rome and the empire had been in collision, so that pope and emperor came to be mere rivals for the first place among the western powers. It was natural, therefore, that in Germany Rome should be regarded with a jealousy and suspicion which might easily grow into irreconcilable hostility.
These workings of the national mind found intensified expression in the acts and writings of Martin Luther, who, with a genius and audacity which have given him a place among the moulders of man's destinies, proclaimed the need of a new departure in the religious life of humanity. In rejecting the traditional claims of the papacy Luther at the same time supplied a new principle by which, as he contended, a higher and truer life of the soul might be lived. By his doctrine of Justification by Faith Luther threw each individual on his own responsibility for the reason and life which is entrusted to him. Hitherto the deepest concerns of men had been inextricably bound up with pope and priest, and in this had lain the essential principle of mediæval Christianity. By the new principle Luther made the pope no longer an indispensable factor in individual or corporate life, and thus initiated a new phase in the development of society. As was to be expected, this principle, so organic in its working, cleft the German nation in twain, and gave rise to a struggle which did not close till more than a century after the death of Luther himself. Luther's attack on the sale of indulgences (1517), the burning of the papal bull (1520), Luther's condemnation by the Emperor Charles V. at the diet of Worms (1521), his temporary triumph at the first diet of Spires in 1526 (the beginning of modern Germany, according to Ranke), the confession of the Protestant faith at Augsburg (1530), are the outstanding events in the contest closed by the peace of Augsburg in 1555, nine years after Luther's own death, but again renewed in the disastrous Thirty Years' War (1619-48), and finally settled by the peace of Westphalia (1648).
The religious revolt of Germany left no country of Christendom unmoved. Before the 16th century had closed the bulk of the Teutonic peoples had followed her example and broken with the papacy. Under one aspect, indeed, the Reformation may almost be regarded as a Teutonic revolt against the domination of the Latin races. Between 1525 and 1560 Denmark and Sweden, taking the occasion of a political revolution, both declared for Protestantism; and in 1581 the United Provinces definitively threw off their double allegiance to Spain and the pope. But it is more important to trace the course of the revolution in the great powers of the West.
In Spain heresy of all kinds had no chance of finding a home. In its terrible Inquisition, reorganised in 1478, it had an institution ready made for effectually dealing with all attempts at reform or revolution. Luther found followers in Spain as in other countries; but they were literally extinguished before their voices could be heard, and of all the great powers Spain profited least by the quickening spirit of the Reformation.
Much more interesting and important is the history of religious reform in France. Between 1520 and 1530, the period of Luther's greatest activity, both renaissance and reform found a firm footing in France, and so many circumstances seemed to favour the future of both that for a time it was doubtful with which side the victory would eventually lie. On the one side was the university of Paris, which throughout the middle ages had claimed for itself the right—denied to the pope himself—of sovereign decree on the truth or falsity of all religious doctrine. As its decrees had in every case the strenuous support of the parliament of Paris, the university was a formidable force to be reckoned with by every innovator in studies or religion. In 1519 Luther's dispute with Eck had been referred to the doctors of Paris for decision, and their judgment, delayed for two years, had been the unqualified censure of Luther's position. Thenceforward every advocate of the new religion, and they daily grew in numbers, especially among the middle class, both in Paris and in the provinces, was pursued by the unrelenting hate of the parliament and the university. On the other hand, the king (Francis I.), eagerly encouraged by his famous sister, Margaret of Navarre, who herself had strong Protestant leanings, was at first disposed to use the new religious movement as a weapon to his hand in his dealings with the court of Rome. In the end Francis saw that separation from Rome meant the disruption of the French nation, and after 1534 he resolutely set himself to the extermination of every heretic in his dominions. His son and successor, Henry II. (1547-59), carried out this policy with even greater rigour, but in spite of all efforts to suppress them the French Protestants grew into a body formidable alike by their position, wealth, and intelligence. The Huguenot wars, the Massacre of St Bartholomew (1572), and the Edict of Nantes (1598) are the outstanding events in this long struggle, which, involving political as well as religious questions of the first importance, threatened the very existence of France by suggesting to Philip II. the possibility of annexing the divided country as a province of Spain. By the Edict of Nantes the French Protestants attained a certain measure of religious freedom; by its revocation in 1685 Protestantism was stamped out of the country, and France thus deprived of the noblest elements in its society.
The religious revolution in Switzerland is second only to that of Germany in its direct influence on the subsequent fortunes of the European nations. In Switzerland we have the case of a double revolt from Rome springing from the same conditions, yet each having a character and an animating soul of its own. At Zurich, as early as 1519, and independently of Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, who, according to Ranke, combined in himself the best elements of renaissance and reform, gave rise to a movement which split the Swiss cantons into two hostile sections, and issued in the peace of Cappel (1531), which permitted to each canton the choice of its own form of faith. More important than the movement of Zwingli at Zurich is that associated with Calvin and Geneva. As in almost every other case of revolt, political considerations wrought with religious zeal in the breach of Geneva with Rome. Before 1530 the town had received the new religion from French refugees, who thus gave its peculiar character to the creed eventually associated with Calvin and Geneva. But it was in the successful effort of the town in throwing off the yoke of the Catholic Dukes of Savoy (1534) that it found itself forced to join the great Protestant schism, and to fashion a civil and religious polity compatible with an independent corporate life. It was in the accomplishment of this task that Calvin proved himself the great consolidator of the tendencies that underlay the Protestant movement. Inspired by Calvin, it was the pre-eminent destiny of Geneva at once to produce a reasoned civil and religious creed and a type of Christian believer that offered a solid front against the vast powers still at the command of the Roman see, and assured to Protestantism its own independent course in the history of mankind.
In 1532 the schism of England from Rome also became an accomplished fact. In this result had issued the negotiations of Henry VIII. with Pope Clement VII. for his divorce from Catharine of Aragon. But the view summed up in Gray's line, 'And gospel light first dawned from Bullen's eyes,' implies a totally inadequate recognition of the many forces that went to produce the English Reformation. The king's divorce was the mere occasion of what must sooner or later have been the only solution of England's relations with the popedom. In England all the forces, in greater or less degree, were at work which had produced the religious revolution in Germany. As in Germany, the church alike in its teaching and practice no longer represented the highest consciousness of the nation. It has of late been shown that its degradation was far from being so general or so complete as the official reports of Henry had seemed to prove; yet the state to which it had come was clearly such as to lend some countenance to the most drastic measures against it. By the end of the 15th century, also, the Renaissance, which was everywhere the solvent of tradition, had found its representatives in England. Linacre, Grocyn, Colet, and Sir Thomas More were all men more or less emancipated from mediævalism, though none of them broke communion with Rome. Both More and Colet spoke their minds freely on the unworthy lives of the clergy; and the latter by his foundation of St Paul's School in 1510, and by his placing it under lay supervision, took a step of the highest importance in the direction of the new order. But it is in the political development of England that we find the adequate explanation of her final breach with Rome. For centuries the pope had come to be more and more regarded as a foreign prince, whose powers, as he claimed the right to exercise them over Englishmen and English property, were incompatible with English interests and English liberty. Moreover, by the date of Henry's accession the pope was a mere Italian prince, whose own interests led him to seek the support of the strongest arm. When Clement VII., therefore, declared against the divorce from Catharine, Henry regarded the decision not as the oracle of Christendom, but as the counsel of an earthly prince whose own interests left him no other alternative.
The breach with Rome was thus inevitable; but it still remained to be settled whether the old or the new religion should finally gain the English people. Henry himself to the close of his life professed to have broken with the old only in the one point of the headship of the church. In the reign of Edward VI. a clear departure was made from the doctrinal system of the ancient church; but the temporary reaction under Mary showed how strong a hold that system still possessed on the hearts of the people. When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 it was only her prudent policy that saved the country from the internecine divisions of France and Germany. Three parties were equally bent on realising their own conceptions of a religious settlement. The adherents of the old religion, who still probably made a half of the people, had not lost hope of a return to the old spiritual allegiance. Those who had renounced the papacy themselves made two distinct parties, each bent on ends so conflicting, that it was evident from the first that they could never work in common. The governing principle of the one party, from which eventually sprang the Church of England, was to minimise the differences between the old faith and the new, and as far as possible to maintain the continuity of the religious tradition in the country. The other, which drew its inspiration from Calvin and Geneva, and was afterwards known as the Puritan party, aimed at a root and branch rejection of papal Christianity as at once in the interest of what they thought a purer creed, and as the only safeguard against a return to the old constitution. It was owing to her politic handling of these conflicting parties that at Elizabeth's death England was of one mind regarding the question of the papal supremacy, and that the severance from Rome became a definitive fact in the development of the country. By happy turns of events, such as her excommunication by Pius V. in 1570, and by the extraordinary issue of the Spanish Armada in 1588, not only was the number of Catholics reduced, but such as still clung to the ancient faith thenceforward put their allegiance to their native prince before any claim of the Roman see. It was this final triumph of the Protestant revolution in England that saved the movement in all the other countries of Europe.
The triumph of the Protestant movement in Scotland is likewise a fact of the first importance in European history. In Scotland, from the very beginning of Luther's revolt, we find the presence of the same elements which elsewhere led to revolution. As in other countries, the Scottish clergy had lost the respect of the country. As early as 1525 Lutheran books were so widely read that an act of parliament was passed forbidding their importation. The very efforts of the church to stamp out the new heresy, as in the burning of Patrick Hamilton in 1528, and of George Wishart in 1546, served only to hasten the turn of affairs which it had dreaded. Jealousy of the wealth and political influence of the clergy disposed the nobility to throw in their lot with the party of revolution. When in 1559 Knox returned from his long sojourn abroad, his unflinching zeal and personal force supplied the momentum that was needed to complete a revolution already in full course; and in the following year Protestantism was formally established as the religion of the country. The consequences of this revolution extended far beyond Scotland. Had Mary on her return in 1561 found Scotland united in the Catholic faith, she would have commanded the destinies of England. Elizabeth could never have effected a religious settlement, and, with England paralysed, Protestantism could not have held its own against the united forces of Catholicism.
Thus, by the middle of the 16th century, it seemed as if the revolution must sweep all before it, and the papal system be as completely effaced by Protestantism as Paganism had been effaced by Christianity. At the beginning of the revolt the authorities of the ancient church did not fully realise that the forces arrayed against them menaced their very existence. When the true extent of the danger was realised the church displayed all the resources of an institution whose roots were in the very heart of Christendom, and which, alike by its traditions and by its special adaptations to the wants of the human spirit, appealed to the deepest instincts of a large section of all the peoples of western Europe. The Society of Jesus, founded in 1540, supplied an army of enthusiasts, whose policy and devotion saved Rome from dissolution. By the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545-63), inspired by the spirit and aims of the Jesuits, the church reaffirmed its traditional teaching, conceding nothing either to renaissance or reform; and a succession of popes during the later half of the 16th century carried out with a zeal worthy of the better ages of the papacy the policy marked out for them by the Jesuits. Through the disunion of the Protestants and the strenuous efforts of the papacy, the middle of the 16th century saw the tide of revolution checked; and in certain countries, more especially in Germany, the Jesuits even gained ground which had been lost. By the close of the same century Europe was portioned between the two religions almost by the same dividing lines as exist at the present day.
It has been said that the central fact of the religious revolution of the 16th century was the severance of the Protestant nations from the Roman see; but the great schism inevitably led to issues of which the Protestant reformers never dreamed, and which they would have denounced in as unqualified terms as any theologian of the mediæval church. The reform of religion preached by Luther or Calvin implied no real change in the modes of thought that distinguished mediævalism. Their theology was but another form of scholasticism; their attitude to the classical tradition or to any departure from their own conception of the scheme of things was precisely that of the Schoolmen trained on the Decretals and Aristotle. For an infallible church they substituted the Bible as the unerring expression of God's relation to man; the interpretation of the Bible they left to the indi- vidual consciousness. This freedom was of necessity only nominal, since the members of any Protestant church were members only on condition of their accepting the church's interpretation of the contents of the Bible, and since each different church deemed itself the special depository of the only true conception of the perfect will of God. Nevertheless, it was from this attitude of the Protestant reformers to the Bible that the developments of modern thought sprang. A reformer like John Knox would have stamped out every form of thought hostile to his own synthesis of things divine and human; but it was not in the power of the Protestant system to do what had been so effectually done by the church of the middle ages. In the mediæval conception church and state made one organism; what menaced the life of the one menaced the life of the other. Hence the state was at the church's bidding whenever its arm was needed to deal with any suggestion of heresy. But having no great central head, such an organic union was impossible for any Protestant church, and religious error could not be regarded as a crime against the existing government. So complete was the revolution wrought by this changed relation of church and state that toleration of different creeds, and not an iron uniformity, was in time seen to be the indispensable condition of civil society. But in this lies the fundamental distinction between mediævalism and the modern spirit. Mediævalism rested on the belief that society was threatened if any of its members questioned the body of truth of which the church was the custodian; it is the distinctive principle of the modern spirit that truth shall be followed wherever facts are believed to lead.
For authorities on the Reformation, see the articles in this work on the chief reformers, and those on RENAISSANCE, CHURCH HISTORY, ENGLAND (CHURCH OF), POPE, ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. Here we simply enumerate certain important books along the lines of the foregoing article, and following its order of treatment. Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire; Renan, Joachim de Flor et l'Évangile Éternel ('Nouvelles Études d'Histoire Religieuse'); Avenroës et l'Averroïsme; J. A. Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy; Bishop Creighton, A History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation; Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation; Gieseler, Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte (vols. iv. and v. in trans. published by T. and T. Clark, under the title of A Compendium of Ecclesiastical History); Beard, Life of Luther; Köstlin, Life of Luther (a trans. of the abridged life is published by Longmans); Döllinger, Die Reformation, ihre innere Entwicklung und ihre Wirkungen (the most powerful statement from the Catholic point of view); Zeller, Histoire d'Alcmaigne, tome vii. (1891); M'Crie, Reformation in Spain; Michelet, Histoire de France (vols. ix.-xii.); Baird, Rise of the Huguenots; Bungener, Calvin, sa Vie, son Œuvre, et ses Écrits (1863); Kampschulte, Johann Calvin (vol. i. 1869); Burnet, History of the Reformation (in England); Strype, Memorials of the Reformation; Froude, History of England (first four vols.); Brewer, Reign of Henry VIII.; Dixon, History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction; Worsley, The Dawn of the Reformation: Its Friends and its Foes; Aubrey Moore, Lectures on the History of the Reformation; Lee, Lectures on the History of the Church of Scotland; Cunningham, History of the Church of Scotland; Grub, Ecclesiastical History of Scotland; Bellesheim, History of the Catholic Church of Scotland (vol. ii.—Hunter Blair's trans.). Seebohm's Era of the Protestant Revolution, though somewhat one-sided, is an excellent little handbook for the whole period.
Reformatories and Industrial Schools.
When the time arrived that statesmen and reformers combined to study the causes of crime with the view to systematic efforts for its repression, it soon became evident that the most effective method would be to check the first development of it in the young. Close observers agreed in the fact that by far the larger number of habitual criminals commenced their malpractices before they were twenty years old, and nearly 60 per cent. when under fifteen. Hanging and imprisoning did not check the growth of the class of juvenile criminals. In the early part of the 19th century there were said to be in London two hundred flash houses frequented by 6000 boys and girls, who had no means of livelihood but thieving. Something had even at that time been done to provide a better mode of dealing with these young people. The Marine Society, for taking charge of friendless children and sending them to sea, dates from 1756. The Philanthropic Society's Farm School at Redhill was founded about 1788, and some other schools were no doubt established not long after this; but the first official attempt to solve the difficulty was the foundation of Parkhurst Reformatory, under an act of parliament passed in 1838. Previously to this it appears to have been the practice to grant pardons to young offenders on condition of their being placed under the care of some charitable reformatory institution, and the preamble of the act above named refers to this practice as having proved so beneficial that it was considered expedient to carry it more fully into effect. It made escape from these institutions or breach of their rules punishable, and converted the buildings at Parkhurst, lately used as a military hospital, &c., into a reformatory prison for young offenders sentenced to transportation or imprisonment. Parkhurst Reformatory was in fact a prison, though conducted according to a special system designed more with a view to reform than to punish.
In 1854 an advance was made by enabling courts to pass on a prisoner under sixteen years old a direct sentence of detention in a reformatory for not less than two or more than five years, in addition to imprisonment in gaol for not less than fourteen days. The reformatory was subject to inspection by an officer appointed by the Secretary of State, and the certificate of the Secretary of State was necessary to make it a legal place of detention. Treasury contributions towards the maintenance of the reformatory were authorised, and a compulsory contribution by the parent in relief of the Treasury charges. In 1857 another step was taken by enabling quarter sessions and borough councils to contribute to the establishment of a reformatory, providing that the plans were approved by the Secretary of State. These local authorities were also empowered to contract with other reformatories for the reception of juvenile prisoners from their jurisdictions. The authorities were by this act allowed to grant licenses on probation to the inmates of reformatories after at least half their sentence had expired. The effect of the Act of 1854 had been gradually to supersede Parkhurst, so that whereas in 1849 it had about 700 inmates, and in 1854 about 536, on the 31st December 1864 there were only 68; and it was therefore closed in that year. In the year 1866 the consolidated and amended act now in force was passed. It retained all the foregoing provisions.
A sentence to reformatory is restricted to those offenders who are under sixteen and not below ten years old, with the exceptions mentioned below. The sentence must be not less than two nor more than five years, but they must also be sentenced to ten days' previous imprisonment or more. A child under ten years may be sent to a reformatory only if he has been previously charged with an offence or sentenced by a judge or court of general quarter sessions. The reformatory to which a young person is to be committed is selected by the court which passes the sentence, but it must if possible be conducted according to the religious persuasion to which the child belongs, and there are securities for its being removed to such school if not originally committed to it. The Reformatory Schools Act, 1899, amends the Act of 1893 in so far it gives magistrates power to send youthful offenders direct to a reformatory instead of in the first instance committing them to a term of imprisonment.
A reformatory may be established wholly by private individuals, or by quarter sessions in counties, or by town-councils in quarter sessions boroughs, or by private individuals with contributions from these local authorities, but the state provides no reformatories, and the local authorities are not obliged to do so. Plans of any buildings proposed to be used as a reformatory must be submitted to and approved by the Secretary of State. The rules of reformatories are made by the managers, but must be submitted to and approved by the Secretary of State. The expenses of maintaining the reformatory are met partly by private contributions, partly from local rates, partly from funds provided by the Treasury, and partly by payments exacted from the parents or guardians. By the report for 1890 of the inspector it appears that there were fifty-five reformatory schools in Great Britain, including three ships. Of these ten were in Scotland. There were seven in Ireland.
The growth of the reformatory system in Great Britain is shown by the following figures. In 1854 twenty-nine children were committed to reformatory schools in England; in 1857, 1304; in 1877, the largest number recorded—viz. 1896; and in 1890, 1299. The total population of the reformatory schools in Great Britain seems to have risen gradually until 1881, when it attained its maximum—viz. 6738; since which it has fallen gradually, and on 31st December 1890 there were under detention 5031 males and 823 females, or together 5854, of whom 4164 males and 737 females were actually in the schools, the remainder being mostly on license, but 52 had absconded or were in prison. The cost of these schools in the latter year was £119,336, of which £78,862 was provided by the Treasury, £5488 by the parents, £24,055 by local rates, £2793 by subscriptions and legacies, £799 by voluntary associations, and £2619 interest on investments and sundries. This leaves a balance of expenditure over receipts of £5519; and, as the inspector's report shows that there was a profit on industrial operations of over £13,416, it is presumed that the deficiency was supplied from that source. The net cost per head in 1890 after deducting profits of labour may be put at about £19 per annum, for both boys and girls in England. In Scotland the boys cost about £17 and the girls over £22. Testing the result of the reformatories and industrial schools by the committals of juvenile offenders to prison, it appears that, taking for comparison the number so committed in 1856—viz. 11,808—there were up till 1873 or 1874 more years in which the number was above 8000 than below it. Since the latter year it has fallen, until in 1890 there were only 3456 boys committed to prison in England and Wales. The young persons who commit crimes needing the punishment of detention in a reformatory are therefore evidently largely diminishing, a result which corresponds with the diminution in adult crime, with which it is so closely connected.
The industrial schools may be said to have grown out of the reformatory schools—the first act relating to and recognising them having been passed in 1854, since which their history much resembles that of the reformatories, the consolidating act which now regulates them having with that for reformatories been passed in 1866. Subsequent acts have much extended their scope, especially those which followed the establishment of compulsory educa- tion, and encouraged or enjoined school boards to establish and make use of them. Industrial schools are intended for children who have not been convicted of crime, and this is their distinctive note as compared with reformatories. A child must be under fourteen, and cannot be detained above the age of sixteen. The circumstances which justify a magistrate committing a child to an industrial school are—if he has been found begging, wandering without settled abode or proper guardianship and visible means of subsistence; who is destitute, an orphan, or having a surviving parent in prison; whose mother has been twice convicted of crime; who frequents the company of thieves, &c. If a child under twelve is charged with a punishable offence, but has not previously been convicted of felony, he may be sent to an industrial school; so also may a refractory child on the application of its parent or guardian; a refractory pauper child, or one either of whose parents has been convicted, may also be sent to an industrial school. The Education Act, 1876, requires the school authority to take steps to send all children to industrial schools who are liable to be sent for the above reasons, unless it is in any case inexpedient, and further requires it to apply to justices for orders compelling the attendance at school of children over five and under fourteen whose education is habitually neglected by their parents, and authorises the committal of such children to an industrial school.
Day industrial schools, in which, as their name implies, children can be trained and fed, but not lodged, were authorised by the same act. The mode in which an industrial school may be established is substantially the same as has been described for reformatories, but in addition the school authority has the same power as the prison authority. The provisions to ensure proper buildings and suitable rules, and as to inspection, are also similar in the two cases, and a child may be licensed from an industrial school as from a reformatory. So also are the provisions for meeting the expenses of these schools. The report for 1890 of the inspector of reformatory and industrial schools shows that there are now in Great Britain 141 industrial schools, including 8 ships, 10 truant schools for school board cases, and 19 day industrial schools. Of these 7 are established by county authorities, 1 by the corporation of Birmingham, and school boards manage 8, besides the truant schools and day industrial schools.
The development of these schools is shown by the number under detention in each year to be in the direction of steady increase. In 1864, 1668 children were under detention; in 1890 this had risen to 22,735. These figures include the truant schools, but do not include the day industrial schools, which commenced in 1879 with 287 scholars, and in 1890 had 3698. The number of admissions corresponds in steadiness of increase with the foregoing figures. In 1861, 608 boys and 400 girls were admitted; in 1862, 422 boys and 169 girls; in 1866, the year of the consolidated act, the numbers rose to 1444 boys and 539 girls; and in 1890 there were 3483 boys and 849 girls, besides 1510 to truant schools, and 2517 to day industrial schools. (A small deduction should apparently be made from these figures for transfers.) The foregoing figures giving the number under detention in various years are apparently to be taken to mean that these numbers were all under order of detention at the same time.
The cost of ordinary industrial schools in 1860 was £58,701. The year of highest cost was 1885, when it rose to £386,400. In 1890 it was £360,947. This includes truant schools. Of this latter the Treasury contributed £194,403; the rates, £42,198; school boards, £67,936; the parents paid £16,656, and subscriptions provided £34,489. The cost of day industrial schools rose from £3272 in 1879 to £25,558 in 1890. Of this latter sum the Treasury found £6891; rates, £1071; school boards, £11,260; and parents, £3382. The total ordinary cost of a child in an industrial school ranges from £14 to nearly £18 per annum.
The statutes in force for regulating reformatory and industrial schools in Ireland differ somewhat from those in Great Britain, and in Ireland far more children in proportion to population are sent to industrial schools than in Great Britain, so that the Royal Commission in 1884 reported: 'It is certain that the certified industrial schools in Ireland are regarded as institutions for poor and deserted children rather than for those of a semi-criminal class, and the result of this feeling is that the managers of many of these institutions refuse to take children who have been found to have committed a criminal offence, and who might legally be convicted of that offence and sent to a reformatory. All taint of criminality having been removed from the schools, numbers of children are sent to them who do not always come under the provision of the act, and who are sent merely on the ground of destitution. There can be no doubt that many children are sent to the industrial schools in Ireland who would not be so sent in England; whilst in consequence of it it is to be apprehended that numbers of children who are proper subjects for these institutions are left on the streets as waifs and strays.' There were in Ireland, at the end of 1890, 816 children on the lists of the reformatory schools (a decrease as compared with the previous year), of whom 744 were actually in school. There were 8609 children on the rolls of the industrial schools (an increase on the previous year), of whom 7767 were actually in school—the remainder mostly on license. The reformatory schools in Ireland cost £17,190 in 1890, of which imperial taxes bore £11,890, local taxes £5518; and the industrial schools, £158,274, of which imperial taxes bore £95,842, local taxes £37,262, a decrease of cost compared with the previous year for reformatory schools, but an increase for industrial schools.
The most famous of the continental reformatories is that at Mettray, about 5 miles from Tours. The 'Colony,' as it is called, was established in 1839 by M. Demetz, a French magistrate and philanthropist, in conjunction with the Vicomte Bretignères de Courteilles. Its inmates, numbering 800—either orphans, foundlings, or delinquents—are taught and employed in agricultural and various industrial labours. The relapses into crime of those who have left the colony have amounted only to about 4 per cent. In the United States there are nearly fifty reformatories for juvenile offenders under the control of a state or city, with an average number of inmates exceeding 12,000; and the reformatory results attained are excellent. The New York House of Refuge, which dates from the year 1824, is the oldest in the country, and indeed was the first reformatory for juveniles in the world which was established by law and placed under legislative control. Destitute, abandoned, or neglected children, as well as delinquents, may be sent to the House of Refuge, and 'there be dealt with according to law'—i.e. detained, as a rule, until reformed or come of age. In American reformatories the inmates spend at least half their time in productive labour, but the whole course of treatment is distinctly educational. At Rochester, New York, the House of Refuge was in 1884 turned into a state industrial school, which proved so successful that it was gradually enlarged, and is now in effect a school of technology, where various trades are taught. The increased cost for each inmate is about $30 per annum.