The Express.
London, England, 1847-08-27 00:00:00

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LONDON, FRIDAY, AUG. 27.
THE committee appointed by the House of Lore
last session, to inquire into the receipts and charges al
the Post-office, elicited from Colonel NIADERLY that
the gross revenue of the Post-office for the year ending
sth January, 1847, was 2,004,0071., end the net
revenue 825,1121. But all the inquisitorial skill of
their lordships failed to extort from the gallant colonel
any satisfactory account of the distribution of receipts
and charges between the inland and the transmartne
Poet-office services. In the most cool and pick-
tooth manner imaginable he persevered in as-
serting that the accounts of the establishment
under his care were too complicated and im-
perfect to admit of the proportions being ascertained,
and that any reform in the system of account-
keeping likely to throw more light on the matter was
quite out of the question. The pooh-poohing system,
which enables the Post-office management so effec-
tually to obstruct the progress of reform in their de-
partment, was most skilfully brought into play ti
baffle the inconvenient curiosity of the House of Lords.
Mr. ROWLAND HILL, however, contrived to furnish
the committee with, at least, an approximate esti-
mate of the kind they wanted. It is extracted from
parliamentary and other returns, and framed upon
principles most satisfactorily explained and de.
monstrated by Mr. HILL in the course of
his evidence, though too long to be repeated
here. From thin estimate it appears that
the gross revenue of the Post-office in 1846, after de-
ducting returns for letters refused, Bc., and adding
the stamp duty on newspapers, was 2,302,7171. The
total expenses amounted to 1,410,8641.; and cense-
fluently the tot revenue to 891,8531. The gross
inland revenue, estimated in the same way, was
1,753,590/. ; the total expenses incurred for the trans-
mission of inland letters, 915,3911.; the net inland re-
venue, 838,199/. The gross transmarine revenue
amounted to 514,8991; the total expenses incurred
in forwarding transmarine letters, 430,973/. ; the net
transmarine revenue, 83,9261. For the sake of com-
pleteness, we may add that the gross revenue de-
rived from money-orders during the year was
34,2281.; and the total expense of managing that
branch of the Post-office business, 64,5001., being a
loss of 30,2721.
Our object in re-producing these calculations is to
direct attention to a fact which Colonel MAI:HILT and
other oppenents or obstructors of the penny post
system seek carefully to keep out of view. The fact
to which we allude is the triumphant success of the
penny-post system, worked though it be in a great
measure by unwilling hands, in our inland postal ar-
rangements. But for the draw-backs of the barely
remunerative transmarine Post-office service, and the
actually losing money-order office, that success would
now be placed above ell doubt.
Another object we have in view is to direct atten-
tion to the urgent necessity of improving the arrange-
ments of our'transmarine postal service. We should.
be quite satisfied for oar parts if this branch of the
Post-office service were made to pay its own expenses.
The continuous impetus necessarily imparted to our
manufactures and commerce by the immensely
greater facilities given of late years to foreign and
colonial correspondence, and the preservation of
entirely English sentiments among our countrymen
resident in the colonies and foreign lands to which
they contribute, are well worth all the money
they bring in. But it must be kept in
view that the large expenditure on this
branch of the service is mainly occasioned
by the comparatively new arrangements for forward-
ing letters and papers to the East Indies and China,
the West Indies and Mexico. The transmission of
letters along these two lines alone is said to entail
upon the country annually a preponderance of expen-
diture over receipt of not less than 240,0001. per an-.
num. It is proposed to extend the advantages of
regular letter conveyance, by steam-packets, to the
Australian colonies, and it is most desirable that this
should be effected without loss of time. But if it is
to be done at the same rate of expenditure, the slen-
der net revenue derived from our transmarine
letter-carriage may soon be transformed into
a positive deficit. There is this consideration
also to be taken into account : the great
expense incurred for the transmission of the East and
West India mails is made a pretext for keeping up
the rate of foreign postage in general. Merchants
and others, having correspondents all over Europe
and the nearer parts of Asia, are made to contribute
to the payment for carrying letters to the East and
West Indies. This is not merely unfair: it checks the
correspondence with Europe and the Russian and
Turkish dominions in Asia.
And there is not the slightest doubt that the
charges on our transmarinc postage may be greatly
diminished. A considerable portion of them
is, indeed, most unfairly ascribed to the Post-
office. The contracts with the steam-packet com-
panies which convey the East and West India
mails were concluded by the Treasury, at the
instigation of the Admiralty, without consulting the
Post-office. The large sums demanded by those com-
panies were rendered neceasary by the Admiralty's
insisting that their steamers should be constructed on
such a model and scale as would render them avail-
able in cane of need as war steam-ships. This con-
dition has increased on the one hand the expenses of
construction and navigation, and on the ether canned
the steamers to be worse adapted for carrying goods,
mails, and passengers. If government is anxious to
have a fleet of war-steamers, let them be charged as
they ought to be, to the account of our war navy.
If government wish to economise, and earn a little
to set off against its outlay by employing its war-
steamers in time of pence is carrying letters, goods,
and passengers, let it charge all parties no more
than the value of the accommodation they receive,
and let the Post-office be debited for no more than
what it fairly owes for the conveyance of its letters.
This honest way of stating accounts would materi-
ally alter the comparative entries of charge and dis-
charge in our transmarine post-office accounts.
But the truth is, that these hybrids between war
and merchant steamers will not answer. In the
event of a war they would be found utterly worth-
lees, and they arc the source of much unneces-
sary risk and expense while used as carrier
vessels. They cost more for coaling than
vessels built for. carrying alone would cost.
They would require a man-of-war's crew to navi-
gate them safely : more than half the accidents
experienced by the vessels of the Royal Mail Com-
pany have been owing to their unwieldiness. The
Admiralty ought at once to build war-steamers of its
own, and leave the packet companies free to construct
their vessels with a view solely to the conveyance of
passengers and carrying of goods. This would
enable them to abate materially the charges of their
present contracts for carrying the Mails. They will
be enabled to make further abatements, in consequence
of the morei= and practical views th!y entertain of
what they Vtually
are tO ptlifOrM. MUCh unneces-
sary outlay for example, and the loos of at least one
gallant vessel, was incurred at the outset by the
fantastic, dream-like circumbendibussesin their routes
and complexities of their intermediate stations. That
has been &melded, to the great diminution of their
expenditure. Finally, a material saving will be sure
to be obtained, if, at the expiry of the contracts, the 1
transmarine post-office service is thrown open to ge-
acral compettLain. The first experiment of regular
periodical ocean steam-packets was wisely left to com-
panies, who were encouraged to make it by liberal
remuneration for the services theyrendered to govern-
ment. Private enterprise is now adequate to cover
the seas with ocean steam-ships. The organisation of
the mail routes onzht henceforth to be the business of
government= and for each station or branch they may
take the vessels of the individuals or companies who
WAX the best sea-boats on the most reasonable terms.

•

SINCE we last entered on the important question of '
parochial settlement a patch has been placed on one
of the numerous holes in the notorious Poor Removal
Act of 1846. The hasty and sweeping rule by which
all poor persons who had resided for five years eon- '
tinuously in any parish were made irremovable had
the effect of saddling many parishes with
who not only did not belong to them, but 4=
been allowed to reside withintheir limits solely become
they could not, as it was supposed, ever pretend to,
belong to them. By the law of settlement, although
relief given to a pauper by the pariah in which he
resides is no evidence that he has a settlement there,
relief given to a non-resident pauper is conclusive
evidence of the liability of the parish which gives it.
Ratepayers are bound to relieve the pressing wants
even of the strangers withiutheir gates ; if they relieve
an absentee it can only be because he has by hie settle-
ment a legal claim upon them. Consequently, in many
parts of the country a large proportion of paupers
lived out of the limits of their respective parishes. It
was found that the poor were often satisfied with a
smaller allowance paid in the place where they re-
sided
by choice ; and those among whom they lived
regarded them without jealousy or suspicion, from
the oertainty that they could at once be removed if
they became locally chargeable.
The act of 1846 roughly, and no doubt uninten-
tionally, transferred the burden of this class of paupers
to the parishes in which they had resided for five
years. The immediate effect varied in different
parishes. Some, calculating that the intruders
among them were more numerous than the non-
residents from whose claims they were relieved,
generously proclaimed their intention of continuing
their allowances to their own absentees, en
condition that other parishes met them in an equally
liberal spirit. Sometimes their superior diplomacy
succeeded ; hue vestries are bodies prone to suspicion,
and parochial officers are not models of chivalric con-
scientiousness. It generally appeared that those
parishes who would benefit by the new law adhered
to its letter, while those who suffered by it were left
alone to enjoy their conservative predilection for the
past. Parish A, with 20 intruding paupers, with-
drew its allowances from its own 30, who lived in
parish 11; and palish B, having 30 new poor to main-
tain, necessarily, though unwillingly, deserted its out-
lying 20. Generally, the country parishes profited,
and the towns suffered, by the change.
The act of the present year endeavours to diminish
the injustice thus inflicted, by throwing on the union
at large the burden of suppoiting those paupers, who,
though they are rendered by the former act irre-
movable, had previously received relief from parishes
in which they did not reside. The poor themselves
are not affected by the change, as they are still irre-
movable, and the objection which justly applies to all
shifting. of taxation from one class of persons to
another is diminished in force by the plan which re-
lieves oppressed parishes, by distributing the weight
which they alone supported over the broad shoulders
of the union. The effects of the new act have been
very considerable, and show the extent of the
grievance which it was intended to remedy. In one
union, which, however, may possibly be ander
exceptional circumstances, wo hear that one
half of the poor who were made irremovable,
and therefore chargeable to their place of
residence, by the act of 1846, will be handed over
to the funds of the union by the act of 1817, involv-
ing a shifting of liability in a district neither rich nor
populous to the amount of 1,0001. a year. As a spe-
cimen of rough justice, we are disposed to approve of
this amendment of the worst constructed even of
modern acts of parliament, a statute "by merit
raised to that bad eminence." The step taken in it is
more like ly to be imitated than retraced. The ten-
dency of modern legislation is certainly to widen the
area both of poor-law settlement and of poor-law
taxation.
We have, on former occasions, entered with consi-
derable minuteness into the various modifications of
parochial and local rating and settlement, as well as
into the various reasons of economy and humanity
which may be used to enforce different views
of the question. There seem, however, to
be so many indications that one, at least, of
the knots will soon be cut by the entire abolition of
settlement, that it may be more profitable to consider
the probable results of such a change than to suggest
alternative plans. There is no chance that the subject
will be brought before a more competent or influential
tribunal than the committee of last session; and the
opinions of the principal members of that body seem
to be almost unanimous in disapproving of settlement
altogether. The convictions of the chairman, Mr.
CHARLES BULLER to this effect are entitled to greater
weight from his statement that he entered upon the
inquiry with strong prejudices in favour of the exist-
ing principle ; but that the evidence which had been
brought before the committee, and maturer considera-
tion, bad satisfied him that the entire abolition of the
system was indispensably necessary.
Assuming, then, for the purpose of argument, that
the poor will shortly be made in all cases irremovable,
it is important to consider both the future apportion-
ment of taxation for their maintenance, and the sub-
stitutes which will offer themselves for the checks on
pauperism hitherto imposed by parochial supervision,
sharpened as it has been by the direct and tangible
interest of the rate-pavers. We cannot doubt
that parliament will be unwilling to provide for the
support of the poor out of the national taxation.
The jobbing and unfairness, as well as the enormous
official expenses which would unavoidably arise in
the distribution of so vast a fund for purposes which
require the nicest discrimination, would furnish abun-
dant, if not conclusive, arguments against a system
which, nevertheless, has already many partisans, and
which will constantly obtain fresh support as the
burden of the poor-rates presses with unusual weight
on particular districts.- The occupiers, moreover, of
land and houses, and the owners of tithes, tolls, and
coalpits, who at prevent support the poor to the ex-
emption of every other class of property, would, of
course, rejoice to transfer a portion of their burden to
their neighbours by a resort to the national revenue to
which all classes are supposed to contribute propor-
tionally. We have, however, little doubt that the
reasons which have been adduced in favour of local
taxation and administration will prevail.
On the other hand, the abolition of the law of re-
moval and of settlement in general, would make the
parish far too limited an area for poor-law taxation.
At present, notwithstanding innumerable exceptions
and irregularities, the poor of a parish generally bear
some relation to its resources, or at least to its past
administration. The rate-payers have not only the
power of sending strangers, who become chargeable,
back to their places of settlement ; but they also, in
their private capacities as landowners and employers,
have the opportunity of discouraging those from set-
tling among them who are likely at a future time to
involve the parish in expense. If the parish is rich
and busy, it will both produce a numerous population
and be comparatively able to support the pauper por-
tion of it. At least it will be found that the misfor-
tunes of pauperised
.parishes have come upon
them gradually, and in pursuance of assignable
causes. But on the abolition of settlement, and the
consequent claim to relief which the poor will derive
from relief, there will be no security to a parish in its
good management or its past good fortune. The spe-
culation of any builder who may run up a row of
cottages within the boundaries may bring a flight of
poor, who, without warning, may eat the rate-payers
bare in a month. The poor themselves will not be
certain of even finding sufficient funds to maintain
them except by trying a fresh migration, or by
causing the authorities to resort to the rarely used
expedient of a rate in aid levied on an adjoining
pariah.
For these and other reasons there can be little
doubt that the abolition of settlement will lead to
the substitution of the union for the parish as the
area of poor-law taxation. Some of the benefits of
local administration will be retained, while extreme
local pressure will be distributed over a wider space.
The distribution of relief has already vested in the
governing body of the union; but in many in-
stances the guardians consider themselves rather
ae an assembly of parish authorities, each
acting for the affairs of his own constituent!,
than as a representative body for the general
administration of the affairs of the poor. The
imposition of the rate on the union would put an
end to their separate interests, and in various ways
simplify their function!. There are, however, many
serious questions to be solved before this step is
adopted. The very principle on which the burden is
to be transferred is yet to be determined upon ; and
when the prelimiasry anungements are made, it will
be necessary, as we have already suggested, ti find
some means of replacing the check on pauperism
which local interest has hitherto supplied.

THE EXPRESS, FRIDAY EVENING, AUGUST 27, 1847.

GREAT fatal Una the improvement in the system
of criminal treatment during the last ten years, much
remains to be done before the polite-office and the
gaol fulfil their tree functions us the best way at-
tainable with our present insight into crime, its
causes, consequences, and remedies.
The appointment of prison inspectors was a great
step in the right direction. Their reports furnish the
most authentic and valuable, data for the legislature
in criminal reforms
The fourth section of the twelfth report, including
Scotland, Northumberland, and Durham, is now be-
fore us, and suggests many observations on the pre-
sent state of our prisons in these districts, which are
capable, however, of a much wider application.
Without entering on the much-discussed question
of the true theory of criminal discipline, without at-
tempting to settle, dogmatically, how much of it
should be directed to reforming and how much to
punishing the criminal, there is one evil apparent
from this report, which theorists of all shades of dif-
ference must agree in admitting, and should unite in
endeavouring to remove. This is, the practice of short
Imprisonments for petty offences. This class of
offences is chiefly in the hands of the young ; upon
their heads the effect of it falls with crushing weight,
to recoil with proportionable force upon society.
Prisoners committed for short periods, varying
from two days to a month, but seldom visit the prison
once and for ever. Their first punishment is, in the
majority of cases, nothing more or less than an ini-
tiation into a life of crime. They leave the gaol to
return to it after short intervals spent in alternations
of misery and profligacy. Their offences gradually
increase in atrocity, as the fruits of their gaol expe-
rience come to maturity. After this matriculation
and pupillage in crime, they graduate in the hulks,
or take their doctorate in Norfolk Island, while the
few attain the crowning distinction of the scaffold.
By our present system of petty punishments for
petty offences we are as surely training up a criminal
population as by the more indirect process of neglected
schools and imperfect education.
The reports from the larger Scotch prisons, which
do very great credit to their respective governors, are
unanimous in pointing out this evil.
In the first place, many offences are punished by
short imprisonment which should not be punished by
imprisonment at all. The report of the Edinburgh
prison contains the case of two young women,
respectable servant girls, committed for beating car-
pets in the street at a wrong hour ! There is another
case, of a little boy, 12 years of age, committed to the
lock-op (which legally forms part of Edinburgh pri-
son) for " playing at a game called marbles, to the
annoyance of the public." lie was, we are bound in
fltirness to state, liberated next day, by order of the
sheriff. The following entry in the Edinburgh
inspection book deserves to be extracted :
August 21, MR.—Visited the prison this day, and looked
into every cell. Found the whole clean and in good order.
It is melancholy to see the number of boys from nine years
old sad upwards; and I cannot help questioning the pro-
priety of sending many of them to prison for petty offences,
as, for instance, D. S., a boy of eleven years of age. impel-
toned for the first time for beating another boy, and taking'
from him an ounce of gingerbread; and another boy for
stealing a pair of rabbits. But if the statement of the boys
J. H. end W. C., about ten or twelve Years of age, he true,
and I have no reason to doubt it, I think the punishment in-
flicted on them is moat disproportionate, for pulling some
beans at the top of a field near Newhaven—an offence of
which, when I was a boy, I was more than once guilty ; and
if the same judgment had been meted out to me, I might
have been ruined for life.—(Signed) ADAM BLACK, Lord
Provost —The governor said that the statement referred to
in the foregoing entry eras correct.
Mr. Hill, the inspector, comments upon such cases
in these very proper terms:
Besides the hardship and danger of permanent injury to
those immediately concerned, such rigorous and unwise
courses of proceeding tend to destroy public sympathy with
the law, and to cause that which ought always to be ro•
garded with respect and veneration to be looked at with
aversion and contempt. It must be well known, too, that
such a system of " justice " is not measured out to the chil-
dren of the rich ; and hence suspicions arc likely to arise of
a general partiality in the administration of the law. If
such acts as those which have been mentioned were in all
cases visited with equal severity, the halls of many of our
great public schools would, probably, soon be thinned.
The governor of the Glasgow prison has prepared
careful tabular documents, which show that, for the
year ending 30th June, 1816, out of 1,412 males and
921 females committed, 274 males (or close upon a
fifth) and 380 females (or mono than a third) were
recommittals. Of these, there were of old offenders
recommitted more than once, 147 persons, of 21 years
of ago and under; and 87 under 17. The aggregate
number of imprisonments of 287 persons who had
been in confinement previously, amounted to 1,704,
giving an average for each of between five and six
committals. Adding to this the recommitments of
the year itself; it is found that these 287 persons had
been in confinement 2,198 times. Taking the average
duration of their terms of imprisonment at GO days,
the aggregate expense to the country of the prison
maintenance of these 287 persons amounts to 5,0111.
And this be it remembered, does not include any of
the still heavier expense of prosecution, police, and
plunder !
For the whole number of prisons inspected, the re-
commitments included 40 per cent. of the whole num-
ber of prisoners. In Edinburgh, where the influx
and efflux of prisoners is unusually great, this pro-
portion for last year reaches as high as 70 per cent.
The governor of Edinburgh prison, who seems to
have a large and benevolent conception of his duties,
has set forth very strikingly in his report the evils of
short and frequent imprisonments. The passage is
long, but will well repay perusal :
In searching for and combining the originating in
fluencee of juvenile delinquency, it has gradually dawned
upon those engaged in the benevolent warfare, that an
influence, neither the weakest nor the least hostile to
moral improvement, is bound up with the very administra-
tion and practice of the correctional measure to which the
young offender is subjected ; that, apart altogether from the
blighting example or the equally blighting desertion of the
parent, apart also from the contamination of associates, and
subsequent to the first detection acid exposure, there is in
the decisions of the bench, and within the very walls of the
prison, an undetected something which forms a powerful and
insidious auxiliary to the moral degradation of the criminal.
That this hostile influence is neither limited in its operation,
nor weak in Os effects, clearly nppean from the annexed re-
turn. And the fact established by the tabular statements,
that the number of imprisonments increases progressively as
the periods of imprisonment diminish, leaves no doubt as to
the inutility of these punishments. Short periods of im-
prisonment completely do away with that wholesome fear
of the prison which is felt before having had experience of
it; and, while the subjects of these imprisonments have
no time to become less noxious, or to acquire new
and better habits and principles, they are inured,
hardened, and gradually trained to bear confinement, with-
out considering it almost any punishment. They, there-
fore, return again and again, and at each successive com-
mittal the hardening process makes a progressive advance.
'vent; again they see liberated, and again they plunge into
the vortex of dissipation and crime, each successive plunge
paving the way for deeper and more irretrievable ruin. In
order to realise the peculiarly vitiating effect of short end
frequent imprisonments on the juvenile, we must remember
the total absence of any opportunities of reformation during
his intervals of liberty. Were there a vestige of such oppo-
tunities in what may be called his act-door experience—
did these experiences comprehend anything less compulsory,
in their many and great influences for evil ; or were there
a season for deliberation and choice—some debateable
ground, as it were, between the restrictions of the prison
and the seductions of society—his reiterated periods of re-
straint might wear a greater aspect of expediency than
they do. But hitherto no such extenuation presents itself ;
nothing, absolutely nothing, intervenes between the
liberation of the prisoner and his second, or it may be his
tenth, immersion in the atmosphere of moral pestil ace in
which his seeds of vice base been previously fostered and
nourished. The transition is abrupt and immediate; and
as if to shut more effectually any avenue of reformation, in
many cases the criminal is waylaid on the day of his libera-
tion by his former associates in vice, and forcibly drawn
back to his old haunts, and to new and repeated violations
of the law. Every light, indeed, thrown by the annexed
return, or by other statistics of crime, upon the subject of
recommitments—come from what quarter, or fall in what
direction, it may—goes to prove the terrible facility and
aptitude which a course of short and repeated imprison-
ments harmonises with and aggravates a continued course
of crime. In the prison, there is experienced by the
young offender the agitation and expectancy of approach-
mg liberation, and renewed opportunities 01 vicious unto'.
genes. Out of the prison, there are the confirmation and
encouragement of associates—renewed temptations, fresh-
ened and flavoured with the zest of novelty, of conceal-
ment, and a wider distance and a *Verger exclusion from
all that is honest, creditable, and good. There is an influ-
ence, too, which seems to have been overlooked, from the
natural but erroneous tendency to regard the crimes of young
offenders in the tame point of view as those of adults, and
which enhances the force and demoralising effects of the
reaction alluded to. It may exist and operate in a degree
which defies observation, and resists the strongest or most
repeated correction. It is that combination of doge( d hosti-
lity, perverted pride, and misdirected love of adventure
and exp'oit, which harshness and neglect unfailingly
awaken in the minds of a great majority of youths ; such,
thrown upon their own resources, at a time when the very
novelty of the passions, apart from their native strength,
suggests the greatest inducements to error—stamped with
an early, sad it may be an unexpected, stigma of disgrace— '
rigidly excluded from every opportunity of reputable exer-
son, and received with open arms by a band of juvenile
ms)efecters, what remains for them but a progress from lees
to a greater degree of wickedness ; and under what feelings