The Express.
London, England, 1853-05-02 00:00:00

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LONDON, MONDAY, MAY 2.

LORD ABERDEEN on Thursday night startled the
House of Lords by an announcement which really
amounted to this—that the Government have vir-
tually abolished transportation, and are now consi-
dering the subject of the release, before the expiration
of their sentences, of a first batch of 1,050 convicts.
It is really almost necessary to read more than once
the debate that followed this important admission of
the home Misisree before any one can realise to
himself the vital importance of this impending
change iu a system of punishment which has existed
AO lung. Because justice to our colonies forbad the
sending of any more convicts to Van Diemen 's Land,
the PRIME MINISTER talks all if transportation must
be abolished altogether. He seems to think that
England will stand idly by whilst lie empties the
gaols of those on whom sentence has been formally
pronounced of " transportation beyond the seas."
What are we to do with our convicts ? That is
the question we must ask ourselves very seriously.
Onething isoertain—we cannot,we dare not, keepthem
at home. Wo dare not, on the limited space of these
Wands, where the passport regulations of the Conti-
nent are rendered impossible by the habits of the
people, turn loose annually from every gaol as
their terms expire, recruiting parties of finished ruf-
fians, to form in every great town a disciplined army
of burglars. The people of Surrey know what
rapine can be effected unchecked, until wound up
by some crying outrage like the Frimley murder;
in Leeds, in Manchester, and even London, mortal
terrors have been inflicted on honest men by
the transplantation from France and India of
Tbuggism or garotte robbery ; in the parish of Cam-
berwell several policemen maimed for life are wit-
nesses of the impunity long accorded to the
brutality of CANNON. Whatever Utopians like
Mr. ADDERLEY may urge ; whatever credulous
and consistent philanthropists like that gond Quaker I
who refused to receive back his stolen watch from the
Birmingham pol ice because they carried arms, may say,
the common sense of the country, conservative of life
and property, will not take any course of prison edueep
tion us a security for the good behaviour of conviete,
and consent to the annual emancipation in London et
three or four thousand destitute and desperate rogue&
For what can convicts do in England but return to
professional plunder ? A boy who had taken kindly to
the reformatory course of a model prison, said on the
day before his discharge, " When I go out I shall
have breakfasted, but have no money to buy a
dinner or ploy for a bed. A handkerchief
issoon got—that's eighteenpence. And you know, air,
no one would give me work without a character."
That is the candid evidence of a mild, favourable,
specimen of our criminal population. Again : two
bays were overheard talking over their adventures
in a bark hut in Australia. " Bill," said the younger,
"do you know once I tried to work and be iouest?"
"No !" said the other, in a tone of incredulity."
" But I found it uncommon slow, so you see I got
lagged." But a lame proportion of the tenants of
the comfortable abodes provided for felons are not so
amiably disposed as to be content with a handkerchief
for a dinner. After deducting the per centage who
are made criminal by accident or by destitution, there
remains a numerous class in a population so dense as
oars who are educated to crime from their earliest years,
who take to stealing before well-fed children take to
their letters, and another who select felony for their
profession because they like luxury and they do not
like work. They are fond of liquor, and women, and
gambling, and tramping about the country; they are
to be found at all the fairs, races, prize fights, and other
scenes of outdoor excitement. They cannot bear
confinement except in cold weather, and they have
not been born to such fortunes as would enable
them to indulge their tastes without further intro-
duction to magistrates than 53. fines for drunken-
ness, or 3/. fines for assaults. They have been edu-
cated in such associations that they are no more
ashamed of a robbery or a burglary, than more re-
fined rogues are of a Stock Exchange swindle, or
racing " pot." These people when they reached a
certain point of crime have been sent utterly away.
Are we now to endure their villanies without any
hope of release ?
Our commonest interest and our highest duty
alike urge us to cut off the source of crime at
the fountain head, to lay hands upon the
rising generation and drag them from the normal
schools of iniquity which fester in our towns and
villages—to extirpate ignorance, to raze to the
ground those warrens of felony which disgrace our
great cities, and replace them by buildings where
space. air, water, cleanliness afford the first ele-
ments of decency. Thus we may save one section of
the rising generation by schools and with soap and
water, and we may snatch from destruction another
which has been already slightly inoculated with the
virus of crime by the sad of ragged schools and refor-
matory farms under the charge of men at once zealous
and intelligent like the Rev. SYDNEY TURNER, of
Redhill, and Mr. ELLIS, of Birmingham. We
may, we must, do all this, and not in a diteltarili
style but in earnest. But, having overcome the
selfish indifference of one part of the tax-paying com-
munity and the sectarian jealousy of the other;
having (let us imagine for argument's sake)
done an impossibility and extended the pro-
tecting influences of education, and a healthy
home or a reformatory school, over all the
"dangerous classes" under thirteen years of age,
we have still, until some substitute for transporta-
tion to Australia has been invented, to deal with an
enormous mass of ignorant and desperate adult crime,
which either will not or cannot work for wages.
Model Prisons, where the discipline consists of
solitary or semi solitary confinement, religions in-'
struction and sedentary trades, with such hard labour
tests as collating passages of Scripture, are a costly'
failure. They are not preventive, they are not re-
formatory, and they unfit their inmates for ucdertak.
ieg theonly sort of rough unskilled hard labour that men
without a character are likely to get in this country.
The aim of punishment should be the reformation
of the prisoner, and the protection of the honest
against the wicked. It is a notorious fact, which it
would be absurd hypocrisy to attempt to conceal,
that the proportion of actual felons reformed by, any
syatem of penal discipline as yet adopted in
this country is infinitesimal,—it is not ap-
preciable. We must not judge of the terrors
of imprisonment by its effect on our own
educated minds. To the professional thief, imprison-
ment is not more disagreeable than the monotony of
a long sea voyage is to us. It is a school in which he
gethers a few new professional ideas, and a
hospital in which he often recruits a frame generally
exhausted by dissipation and privation. If im-
prisonment loses its terrors and cannot cure a
hardened criminal, and as transportation to Van
Diemen 's Land has been most properly abolished,
the question arises with double force—What shall
we do with our Convicts ? Must we not find some
other spot in our vast Colonial Empire where
convict labour on the assignment system would be
acceptable ?
Admitting freely the serious defects of the assign-
ment system—admitting that fearful crimes were
perpetrated by prisoners and cruelties by masters,
historical facts which cannot be contravened show
that thousands were reformed and became demist
citizens, and the fathers of honest families in Aus-
tralia,—although they had been shipped without
classification, under the lof prisoner overseers,
and utterly neglected ciiliarttee matter of religious
and educational instruction for upwards of fifty
years. The statistics of population afford evidence
infinitely more strong than any of the evidence col-
lected, massed, and marshalled by the ingenuity of
Mr. Ginti?x WAKEFIELD iB 18313, for the purpose of
withdrawing white slave labour from competition
with the hired labour of South Australia.
Up to 1131 t's- %thole maps nf ;Ix opol.:tion of
Few South Welts consiqed i.f prisoners and
the descendant of prisoners. For fifty years now
applies of convicts were poured upon the shores at
sa average of 400 a year from nts)J to IN; laud,

an average of 1,600 a year from 1813 to 132"; ; while
during the whole of that period, with the exception of
a few score farmers and shoi,keep.ers,- the only dta-
tainted colonists were officals or descendant, of
officials, having charge of the convict population. In
lt/28 a stream of free emigration began to flow, but for
five years did not reach an average of 400 souls a year,
wW,le during the same period two thousand convicts
were annually imported. Thus the community
which between 1831 and 1840 had sufficient elements
of prOsperity to invite a vast influx of capital, la-
bour, and enterprise from the mother country was,
in fact, a convict community. A small free caste
who lived among a mass of convicts and the
descendants of convicts, accumulating property,
enjoying life in a colony, even in 1830 began to
claim to enjoy free institutions. Whatever crime
may. have prevailed (and considering that neither
discipline nor virtuous example, nor religious teach-
ing, nor common education, had been secured in any
adequate manner for the prisoner population, it
is net surprising that crime did prevail as well
as low tone of morals), it is self-evident that a
very large proportion of the transported convicts
must have taken to honest courses, and brought up
families in habits of virtue and decency, in order to
till the ground, to feed the flocks, to fill the
shops, to freight the ships, and carry on suc-
cessfully the vast mercantile transactions which at
length called the attention of English speculators
to the resources of Australia. It, as some would
have us believe, all the men were robbers or pick-
pockets, how could capital accumulate and credit
grow?—how could stockowners leave their flocks and
herds for months together under the charge of pri-
soners and the children of prisoners ?
The simple fact is that in New South Wales pri-
soners were removed to a country where it was less
troublesome and more profitable to work than to steal
—where there was very little property that would bear
rapid transfer; and as there is not innate hereditary
felony even in the hearts of all children of burglars,
they grow up in a new country in an honest frame
of mind in industrious usefulness, which would have
been impossible, had their parents remained in their
native British haunts. Are there no other spots
where the same beneficial process may be gone
through ?
When we sum up the horrible list of crimes that
appalled the Committee on Transportation in 1836,
we ought to consider the circumstances of the people,
and think whether there would have been such a
vast difference in the moral condition of the ill-paid
English and well-paid Australian labourers, if punish-
ment and classification had preceded transportation
—if the masters of assigned servants had been made
responsible, and subject to supervision—if moral and
religious education had been provided, and enforced
o all the children of the settlement—if a decent ex-

ample bad been set by the governing officials—and
if, above all, as was then possible, an equality of
sexes had been maintained? At any rate, it is quite
certain that since the abolition of the assignment
system we have been going from bad to worse in our
attempts at criminal reform. Road gangs, Norfolk
Island, exiled Parkhurst boys, Reading Gaol, Silent
Penitentiaries, have all been failures, more or less
costly—more or less disgusting and atrocious.
But although Australia is destined in the future
for something better than a convict gaol, we have
other remote fertile unpeopled territories which the
labour of convicts would render in a few years fit for
the foundation of great free colonies. And when we
begin to feel the influence of the annual crop of
ruffianism consumed at home, with which the Earl
of ABERDEEN now more than threatens us, we
shall be glad to reconsider transportation and to
insist upon its application to some hew settlement.