The Express.
London, England, 1864-12-03 00:00:00

THE EXVIESS, SATURDAY E

kept in prison at home until such time st they
were sent back to their old haunts to perfect
themselves for ultimate admission to t 1 pritilegsa
of a colonial career.

It is much easier, unfortunately, to point out
the faults which were committed than to say how
they could have been avoided. There are two
opposite difficulties attendant upon any scheme of
transportation which has the reformation of young
convicts for its object. If the banishment to •
new country is treated as part of the punishment,
the sentence will appear disproportionately severe,
and an apparent injustice will be committed. lf,
on the other hand, it be not treated as a part of
the punishment, and the convict, after he has left
prison, is simply sent out as an emigrant at the
Government expense, it will look like offering •
premium to crime. We cannot say that the proposi-
tion of the writer in the Curnhill Magazine is wholly
free from either of these objections. " Take," he
says, "in some country favourable for agriculture,
" • large tract of good land on a navigable river,
" map it out into allotments, and make arrange-
" manta as for founding a colony of poor emi-
" grants." To this spot he proposes to send the
convict as soon after conviction as possible ; giving
him an allotment with the means of cultivating it,
and support for the first year ; helping him, if he
is married, to bring over his wife and chil-
dren ; and letting him make • home for
himself. No doubt it is • tempting scheme, and
supposing such • tract of land to be found, which
could probably be done without difficulty in our
African or American colonies, it would have many
obvious advantages. How to deal with our con-
victs becomes every day a more unmanage►ble
question, and even the system which has worked
so well in Ireland may yet be found to fail in
England, from the much greater difficulty, in the
latter country, of finding employment for dis-
charged prisoners. But we fear that in its pre-
sent form the suggestion is not admissible. It is
practically • system of free emigration, for which
a conviction is the indispensable qualification ; and
though it may be true that it would not appear
in thus light to a class accustomed to liv-
ing in towns, it would still seem like
giving the town thief a preference over the
country labourer. And the very argument which
the writer uses to prove that it would not be
offering a premium to crime only throws us over to
the other horn of the dilemma. "To such men
" the threat of perpetual banishment to such a
" home is the most dreadful that could be held
" out." How, then, can it be just to attach such
a penalty as this to any but the worst offences f
Perhaps, before we can hope to discover any real
solution for these difficulties, it will be necessary
to arrive at some more philosophical classiication
of crimes and punishments. If our penal disci-
pline is confused and contradictory, our penal coif)
displays these pleasing characteristics in a far
higher degree ; and there is little probability of
the punishments we inflict being more effective
until we can obtain a clearer notion of why and for
what we are to inflict them.

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