The Press.
London, England, 1855-12-29 00:00:00

SCHOOLS FOR CRIME.

REFORMATORY Institutions for juvenile crimi-
nals are rising, as we rejoice to perceive, in
almost every quarter. Within the last few
days a meeting, over which the Duke of RICH-
MOND presided, was held at Brighton, for the
purpose of founding an establishment wherein
the young feloLs of Sussex might be received
and reclaimed. Some valuable hints for the
management of such institutions have also
been contributed by Lord LEIGH, who has
published an able and graphic narrative of
his visit to the " model " schools, for this class
of pupils, at Mettray, in France. Yet the
question which lies at the bottom of all these
tentative experiments forms at once the
most momentous and most intractable problem
of the present day. Even the interests attached
to the war we are waging abroad—whatever
may be the dramatic pomp of its successive in-
cidents—must be subordinated in real impor-
tance to those arising from the growth and
swell of criminality among our home popula-
tion. The evil, as we are reminded by a
cloud of witnesses, has resisted every at-
tempt at its cure, and expanded in spite of
the most strenuous and most varied efforts for
its prevention. We exhaust our ingenuity,
and lavish all our means and appliances in
vain. " Those who make," said the eloquent
Recorder of Hull (in a late address to the

THE PRESS.

grand jury), " and those who administer

the laws aiiinst crime, are fairly at their wits'
end—it makes such fearful head against them.

The pendulum of punishment hag swung from
extreme point to extreme point between seve-
rity and lenity. Every kind of punishment
that can be borne in a free country has been
tried, in every variation and combination; but
we see that it will not do; both juvenile and

adult criminals are too much for us. The

cause is in the body politic ; it is spreading
and approaching the vital parts. We may shut
our eyes to it if we will, but there is the cancer
eating on !"
The facts that transportation to the colonies
has become almost impossible—that the home
prisons are overcrowded—that the ticket-of-
leave system is found subject to serious evils
—and that recent attempts at remodelling our
prison discipline, have proved very imperfectly
successful—may render the problem more
immediately urgent, but cannot affect the hard
duty which weighs alike upon the Legislature
and upon society in general for its solution.
It has long been a serious responsibility
upon us to devise some means whereby the
lava torrent of vice and crime may be stayed ;
the criminal reclaimed, if possible, or rendered
harmless if irreclaimable—above all, by which
the myriads of our juvenile fellow•subjects,
who are now hovering on the brink, may be
saved from following their predecessors into
the hideous abyss. To this onus of responsi-
bility the instinct of self-preservation may
now be added. Again and again have we re-
ceived solemn warnings, that if we cannot
crush the evil we shall be crushed by it. There
is no alternative. Crime grows upon us, with
a rapidity which we cannot conceal or deny.
Annually we see it striking deeper root, and
spreading wider in rank luxuriance—infecting
larger classes of the community, and at once
extending its contamination over a wider
area, and assuming a deeper character of
atrocity. If we go on as we have commenced,
able neither to arrest the enemy in his advan-
ces, nor to cutoff his supplies from without, the
worst evils will very speedily become inevit-
able. Yet a little longer, and we shall find the
moral character of the country degraded, our
social organisation diseased, and the springs
even of that national prosperity of which we
are so proud utterly paralysed.
All the ameliorating influences to which the
pLilosophical reformers once looked with so
much complacency have turned out utterly
futile. The " Progress of Society," as they
boastfully called it, has proved worse than a
delusion so far as crime is concerned. Vice
may have lost something of its brutality and
acquired a semblance of decency—though
even this improvement it would be rash to
predicate—but is just as rampant as ever. If
a felon has changed his name he has not
changed his nature. He does not go out
with pistols to rob on the highway, now that
rich men travel by railroad and carry a cheque-
book instead of a bag of guineas, but his
comrades are as numerous and his enterprises
as profitable as heretofore. Evon the compara
tive increase of educaticn, even the alleviation
of that frequent cause of crime—poverty—
seem to have little or no effect upon the
general result. Where schools most abound
criminals are not less abundant. In times
and places when employment is most easily
procured, and when destitution is impossible
to the ablebodied and industrious, the reduc-
tion in the assize calendars bears but a small
proportion to the anticipated consequences
from the improved physical condition of the
community.
Yet we cannot dispute the, conclusion
that ignorance and intemperance are the
" twin stems " from which the hideous growth
of crime incessantly springs. We are
driven, then, to the mortifying confession that
the agencies which we have employed in order
to eradicate these sources of evil are ineffi-
cient in degree or misdirected in their aim.
instruction
both the means provided for public
both charges are applicable. The latest
returns show that out of a juvenile population
of five millions, nearly one half, or, more pre-
cisely, 2,250,000, neither attend schools nor are
engaged in industrial employments. This
fearful proportion of the rising generation is
growing up completely shrouded nudeness and

1231

ignorance; that is, under conditions in which a

lapse into actual criminality becomes almost a
matter of course. But this is not all, nor

even the worst. The instruction afforded to

myriads of the youth who are returned as
" attending schools "is often most inefficacious

in quality and quantity, is imparted at rare in-
tervals, for only a brief period of their grow-
ing lives, and limited to the merely mechanical
acquisitions of reading and writing. At best
they obtain instruction which may expand the
intellect, but cannot regulate the heart or
awaken the conscience. Knowledge is power,
and the pupils come forth endowed with

higher poNireis for good or evil. But they have
imbibed no principles which can induce them
—nor even learnt the moral lessons that

would enable them—to " eschew the evil and
" choose the good."
Where, then, must we seek a remedy? The
opposition presented on different sides to the
bill brought forward by Sir J. PAXINGTON in
the late session sufficiently in licates the diffi-
culty, amounting almost to impossibility,
surrounding any attempt to frame an educa-
tional system in which religious teaching
should be an element. Legislative inter•
ference with so delicate a matter seems clearly
out of the question. Once alarm the con-
sciences, or even awake the suspicions, of
parents on the score of the doctrine to which
their children may be exposed, and the great
aim of the system will be at once utterly frus-
trated. On the other hand, the compromise
offered by the " Secularists," who propose the
creation of establishments where education of
merely secular nature shall be afforded, is
fraught with very serious objections. The
State would undergo a heavy responsibility if
it imparted knowledge to its subjects without
also teaching them how knowledge should be
employed—if it put a trenchant instrument
into their hands, and yet told them nothing as
to the means whereby it would be wielded
usefully or safely.
Hampered by such difficulties and restraints
in applying education to the general mass of
the community, there remains one direction in
which the Legislature may exert their powers
more freely and with a more immediate effect.
There are, unfortunately, large classes, in-
cluding considerable numbers who are still
comparatively young and tractable, that have
from different causes forfeited their right of
free action. The juvenile pauper, or thief,
has accepted subsistence or deserved punish
ment from the State ; and by so doing has
foregone, at least for a time, some of his privi-
leges as a free citizen. We do not wish to
equalise the two categories, or to confound
poverty with crime, for any other purpose
than a benevolent one. Still we apprehend
that the relationships between both and the
State are sufficient to justify the latter in
undertaking the functions of education in
their behalf. Both have so far surrendered
their independence as to have passed into a
state of pupilage, and given to the society on
whose funds they subsist, or whose laws they
have outraged, the right to prescribe whatever
means may be judged most effectual to save
them from again falling into pauperism or
crime.
It is by developing this right—in other
words, by providing education for the younger
inmates of our workhouses and prisons, that
the first effectual step can be taken to stop the
supplies of criminality. We rejoice, therefore,
to see the interest taken in so many quarters
for the establishment of reformatory institu-
tions, farm schools, and other contrivances by
which the youthful pauper and culprit can be
instructed in industry and reclaimed from his
course of idleness and vice. The question
how far the Government ought to interfere
either for the assistance or the regulation of
these establishments, when set on foot by local
benevolence, remains to be decided. In
France, where the centralising tendency is
for the moment paramount, the State seems
inclined to take the whole matter into its own
hands, insomuch that even institutions like
that at Mettray, which have worked long and
successfully, and on individual management,
will probably be either neglected or absorbed.
Among ourselves the interposition of J. cen-
tral authority is much more jealously watched,
and is at the same time much less necessary.