TWO HUNDRED RIDES IN THE QUEEN’S VAN.

At the Guildhall Police Office a woman was brought up, who, it was represented, had been locked up no less than two hundred times. We have heard of the “Hero of a Hundred Fights;” the existence of the “Author of a Hundred Pieces” is also not unfamiliar to us; but the revelation of this new “Heroine of Two Hundred Lock-ups” strikes us perfectly prostrate with astonishment. Her whole life, framed on the model of a beehive, must have consisted of nothing nut a series of cells, although the proportion of whacks must have preponderated largely over that of honey, forming a moral contrast between the rewards that are generally attendant upon a career spent in idleness or industry. Better to have kept her a perpetual inmate in prison, we think, than to liberate her two hundred times merely to lock her up again two hundred times. In prison she would have been out of harm’s way, whereas as soon as she was set free, she returned once more to her old practices of smashing windows and assaulting the police.

The life of this unfortunate creature is but a sorry comment on the efficacy of our prison discipline; or was her nature so hardened that no reformatory could possibly make an impression upon it? In the present instance, this “Heroine of Two Hundred Assaults” was condemned to twenty-one days’ imprisonment with hard labour. The same treatment having failed two hundred times previously, is there much chance of its succeeding of the two-hundredth-and-first time? Common sense would dictate the trial of some other remedy, or else it would be only charitable, until such time as she has learnt to distinguish right from wrong, to confine her in some place of security, where she could not inflict injury either upon herself or others.

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