SOLITARY CONFINEMENT.
DIOGENES in his tub ! Well, it was his own choice. The Cynic's habitat was the analogue of the cynic's soul. But put a tiger in a tub, press it down on him, by artful manceuvre draw his tail through the bung-hole, twist that tail into a knot, and let tiger and tub go,—what effort ! what bounding! what eccentric evolu- tions! But change the species : put a human being in a tub—the man, above all others, who has appropriated God's free air to him- self and his pursuits ; put the criminal in his tub, press it down, let him know that he and he alone is in the tub—solitary confine- ment; reverse the order of the Divine government—tell him by your conduct towards him that he is not a social being—stuff him in his tub. Spite and malignity, or despair and its final resolve, one or the other are from that moment incarnate in his bosom. Then set him free, and he goes forth to worse deeds than that for which he was doomed to his tub,—or Nature ends his days for him ; her justification being this, that man was constituted as a social erect- ture, and that Diogenes was his own exception to her law.
We invite our readers' attention to the following case, recorded in the Registrar-General's return for the week ending January 10—
" On 1st January, a printer, aged twenty-one years, died of catalepsy.' Mr. Bowring states that 'deceased was brought in from the House of Cor- rection on 26th November last, on which day his term of fourteen days' soli- tary confinement expired. When received into the workhouse, his appear- ance was that of a statue.'"
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