With a firm trust in God, with a constant sense of his presence, looking to him for guidance and support, nothing could move him from the path of duty. He stood in his place, and the billows broke at his feet. In the year 1860, having then nearly at tained the age of eighty, and completed thirty years of service on the, bench, being in full possession of his mental and bodily faculties, he tendered his resignation as chief-justice. It was received with a universal expression of respect and affection from the public; and the address of a committee of the bar of the whole State gave him the opportunity of making a farewell address, in which he feel ingly acknowledged the support which his
reliance on the good-will of his professional associates, the advocates at the bar, had fur nished him, and in which he left his testi mony to the value of our judicial system : "Above all, let us be careful how we disparage the wisdom of our fathers, in providing for the appointment to judicial office, in fixing the tenure of office, and making judges as free, impartial, and independent as the lot of humanity will admit. Let no plausible or delusive hope of obtaining a large liberty, let not the example of any other State, lead you in this matter to desert your own solid ground, until cautious reason or the welltried experiments of others shall have demonstrated the establishment of a judiciary wiser and more solid than our own."
A VISIT TO SOME ENGLISH PRISONS. By Clement K. Fay. IN the summer of 1887 I spent my vaca tion in England; and as I was then a Commissioner of Prisons for the State of Massachusetts, I took the opportunity to visit some of the English prisons for pur poses of inspection and comparison with our own. Soon after reaching London I called upon Hon. Sir Edmund F. Du Cane, the surveyor-general of prisons in England, in whom the whole prison system of that country may be said to centre, although the actual control is vested in the Home Office. I was armed with a letter of introduction from Mr. Phelps, our minister plenipotentiary. Sir Edmund received me very courteously at his house in South Kensington, and after an interesting conversation as to our American prisons, and especially the " indeterminate sentence " plan which exists at Concord, Mass., and in some other States, he gave me letters of introduction to the governors of the three famous prisons in London, — Millbank, Pentonville, and Wormwood Scrubs, — with instructions to those officials to show me every attention and give me any information
which I wanted; and I was treated by each and all of them with great politeness and consideration. I went first to Millbank, a large prison on the north .bank of the Thames, in West minster, which was built about the beginning of this century upon a design by Bentham. The plan is, so far as I know, unique, and is certainly interesting. Each prison in Millbank (for there are practically several in one) is built in the form of a pentagon, four sides of which are devoted to cells and the fifth to the officers' quarters, workshops, etc., which form a base. Six of these bases are brought together to form a centre of hexagonal shape, something like an ordinary table-caster with six cruets, or bottles, round the handle. The tiers or corridors are isolated from one another. There are three tiers of cells, each tier having fifteen, so that it is only possible for a warder to have, at most, thirty cells under his inspection by standing at the corner of the corridor where he can command a view in two directions. Under the more modern radiating plan, as at Charlestown or Concord,
