The Express.
London, England, 1847-01-09 00:00:00

MAI LS.

The mails foe Vigo, Oporto. Lisbon, Madeira, Cadiz, and Gibraltar,
will he made up on the mornmg of the lath January.
The Wept. India mails, en Biding those Mr Mexico, Howlona and
the Havannah, will be made up on the morning of the lath January.
ml overland mails for Oihrultax, Malta,Oreree, the lonian IsLtnels,
VAden, Ceylon, India, thong-Kong, end China, sin Southampton,
11. made up on the evening of the morning of the 20th January.
The overland clonal milt rio Marseilles, to the Mediterranetn,
Egypt, Aden, Ceylon, India, Hong Kong, the., will be made up on the
evening of the 2'dh inmates..
The mails for New Sou'h Wales, Van Disanen'a land, and New
Zealand will be made up on the evening of the 91st January.
The mails for British North America, Bermuda, and the United
Wales, will be made up on the evening of the Ird February.
The omits for the Brazils, the River Nate, Mende Video, Pernam-
buco, Bahia, Madeira. and Buenos Ames, will be dispatched on the
ending of the 4th Yebru“ry.

TO CORRESPONDENTS.
Adrartiaententa Welded for Me Elprest, London evening paper,
mast be at tbo Moe 1,7 Two o'olock on the day of publication.

HIGH E %TER AT LONDON-BRIDGE.
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LONDON, SATURDAY, JAN. 9.
INFINITELY more than is in general contemplated
depends on the result of present and future experi-
ments on the subject of prison discipline. It is not
merely the best and fittest treatment for the convict
or the outcast, that will be ascertained in these re-
searches, but the best mode of dealing with that much
larger class, at present unequal to the task of self-
provision and self-conduct. If experiments are now
confined to those, whom their own crimes and failings
have thrown into the meshes of the law, it is that on
these alone we hive the power of experimenting. If
from the treatment of these, and upon its results, any-
thing like solid principle can be evolved, we shall
soon have the principle applied to workhouses and to
education: we shall see it inspire a multitude of legis-
Wive matters, and, like other political and economical
maxima, we shall find it in every one's mouth and
every one's thought, sincerely acted upon and pre-
scribed.
That we are far too dogmatical in the application
of such maxims might be easily proved. And it may
be asserted, without fear of contradiction, that in the
formation of these maxims, the present age, however
benevolent and charitably inclined, has still been
led, by a certain generalising tendency and habit, to
incline mor' to the severe and mechanical solution of
hum= difficulties, than to the mild and moral.
The extreme of physical severity we i.iaeed eschew.
The very thought of it grates upon sympathies
now so universal. To burn a heretic, or rack a mar-
darer, would in the present time throw the whole of
society into convulsions. The punishment of death,
wren to those convinced that it is a n pre-
serration to their own security, is too el:lio be
tolerated. Our sympathies will not permit of it. And
we may be certain that capital punishment will not
survive the discovery of an efficient substitute. Short
of this, the tendency has been to aggravate the
severity of the prison and the workhouse. And the
diminution of extreme pain has not, perhaps, been in
proportion to the increased infliction of privation,
of stern and starving discipline, upon numbers who,
ender the old system, would have been spared such
severity.
The immediate result of all our prison experiments
seems to be the adoption of the separate or cellular
system. And we by no means oppose it, especially
when accompanied by lenients, and limited in time.
It is, however, most important to consider well the
nature of the success and the results of it. The effect
of separate confinement is no doubt to break the
spirit of even the most hardened criminal, and to
incline him to contrition. Such an effect is most
valuable, and it is one that instantly converts all those
interested and employed in prison cares for religious
Pu to be partisans of the separate system.
TeeZare, however, two kinds of religious principle
and spirit, the active and the passive ; the latter isthe
resigned, the ascetic,the lazy, awakening and rendering
active the in powers and sympathetic faculties,
but scarcely stirring the moral ones. The active
religious principle is something of a very different
kind. It is one which deals with the world and with
society, and considers both ; which does not extinguish
nor supersede, but whick, on the contrary, excites and
calls forth the exercise of kindred moral principles.
It does not base itself on oaths, or vows, or tempo-
rary excitement, or mystic relations between man
and the spiritual world around him. It applies itself
to the duties and necessities, and ideas of our common
condition.
If a criminal be condemned to perpetual punish-
ment; if his crime has been such as to forbid his ever
mingling again with his fellows, or taking part in the
business and relations of life, then the application of
the ascetic, and passive, and imaginative system to
his mind may be the most humane, most consolatory,
raid refining. But if the criminal be destined to go
sees more forth upon the world, the motives which
are best calculated to preserve Aerie force and appli-
cability in that *WM dilistnot be extinguished. A

man, even a criminal, must be fitted for the future, at
least not unfitted for it. And if we work a man
up in solittele to a kind of ecstasy of Platonism and
I contemplation, and then turn him out to earn his
i bread am ingst the dregs of the people, untutored but
1 by pi ivation, envy, the most brutal of enjoyments, and
the meanest of passions, we have but garnished the
human temple for the more perfect and easy reception
' of the worldly devil.
The changes made of late years in our system of
secondary punishments have been, first of all to
abolish altogether the penalty of transportation or
condemnation for life. To the worst criminal has
been held out the hope of a term when his sentence
will expire. The words" for life" have been inter-
preted to mean a certain number of years, and only
half that computed number need be passed by the
contrite and obedient convict in the most irksome,
secluded, and probationary stages.
Then the system of discipline has been brought to
such perfection in certain prisons, that there is left no
room for a fault. In the reports and their appendices
respecting Pentonville Prison, we see that almost all
1 the prisoners gain the badges upon their sleeves that
I denote good conduct ; two or three frantic and refrac-
tory prisoners alone resist the crushing effeets of the
separate system. All put on alike the exterior of
complete reformation. But it is this very same-
ness, this commonlivoryof good conduct, which makes
one suspect that the reformation is but superficial
and that the semblance of virtue is produced by the
suspension of the moral motives and powers, not by
their being restored to healthful activity.
We are far, indeed, from wishing to condemn either
Pentonville or Parkhurst, because the prisoners sent
from them were unable to resist the demoralising
atmosphere of a convict colony like Van Diemen's
Lend. But we do still think that the degree of per-
fection reached in those establishments is more seem-
ing than real ; and that it would be moat desirable to
introduce, at least in the last twelvemonth of an
eighteen-month's confinement on the separate system,
such new motives of action, and such consequent
means of discrimination amongst the convicts, as Cap-
tain M.scosoceele recommends.
It is, however, at the same time, to be borne in
mind, thot there are inconveniences even in the sue-
cuss of these experiments. If all criminals can be
reclaimed, and humanised, and spared, and if the
disgust of the punishment of death gains ground,
which it no doubt will, terror ceases to exist as a
preventive to crime.
If the young outcast convict taken in street theft
can be instantly conveyed to an establishment where
he is taught good conduct, moral principle, religious
belief, is endowed with a good education, and the
knowledge of a trade—there will then be a temptation
for even respectable families to send their oiispring
through the moral education of a gaol. Nay, we do
not know to what length the perfection of discipline
and the deterioration of freedom might arrive, if
pauperism, ignorance, insecurity of employment, and
the hundred other causes operating on the poor of
this country, are allowed their full impulsion down-
ward, whilst a contrary and wholesome impulse is as
sedulously applied to the population under the sen-
tence of the law. If our efforts at regeneration and
education be confined to the gaol, and not extended
to the village, we shall arrive at a paradoxical state
of society, which, instead of calling forth the appro-
bation of the philosopher, might provoke the satirical
exposure of Swlrr.

A tcnt•rEß in the Q ,arterly Reri,to has itiolortaken
to terrify its agricultural readers with an account of
the subdivision of land in France, and its conse-
quences, which it represents to bo the aim of many
liberal statesmen of the present day to introduce into
this country under the guise of gardens fur the poor,
peasant proprietors, and similar heresies.
The writer proves, and unfortunately has no diffi-
culty in proving, that agriculture is very backward
in France, and that the land, whether divided between
small proprietors, or owned by large proprietors, and
cultivated on the half-produce or ,nftaycr system, is
little productive. Not a doubt of it. The improve-
ment of agriculture in England has been brought
about by the accumulation of capital in the hands of
the mercantile classes, and then by the application of
a portion of this capital to land by a body of men
akin to the mercantile classes, viz., the tenant-farmers.
In France the small accumulated capital of the middle
classes has been sunk in the purchase of land, not
spent in speculating, and with a view to profit, in the
cultivation of it. Land in France has, in fact, not yet
been mercantilised, and the marketable produce of its
farms has not increased.

The revolution, however, and its great consequence,
the opening of the land to the citizen and peasant,!hao
produced the great result of giving a sufficiency and a
security to the lower classes of the population. They
neither beg nor starve, nor arc interested in exciting
disorder. They are neither revolutionists, nor Chart-
ists, nor even Radicals. The bit of ground, or the
facility of obtaining it for him, who, in his trade or '
earning, can save from 20/. to SoL, acts as a premium,
which, though not attained by one-tenth of those who
desire it, still acts as a glittering prospect on which
the eyes of all are fixed ; and this forms the content,
the aim, and we might almost say with truth, the god,
of the French population.
Now, this us certainly not the best way to make
the country produce most wheat, or most cattle, to
make it prime in races, chevaline or bovine. It is
unfavourable to the privileges, and consequently to
the existence, of a landed gentry ; it is not compatible
with game laws, and requires a paid jape de pair
and a government authority, in lieu of the J.P. and
the grand jury. In short it is, and it requires, quite
another order of things from what exists in England.
Now, we are to a certain extent admirers of
the state of things in England. And we are not
blind to the defects of things in France, But legis-
lators have not always a choice. How could the French
legislative assembly or convention, in 1790, Lace
established an English organisation in France?
Where was the capital, where the agricultural
science, where the middle classes, the wisdom and
the wealth overflowing on the land, the equitable
law and rights to secure their just return? These
did not exist. The French revolution could only do
what it did, viz., distribute amongst the indigent and
unprovided classes, for purchase, those lands which
the owners did not know how to cultivate, or to use,
or to render profitable to the community.
Noris this picture altogether foreign to us. The state
of Ireland at the present moment is very like that of
France in the first year of the revolution—the owners
of the soil, ignorant, or incapable, of turning it to
their own account and to the employ of the poor ; '
many of them ignorant, many of them bankrupt, or
absent, or, if at home, idiotically wringing their hands
in helplessness, unable even to grasp the means of
safety held out to them by the state—in this, indeed,
the Irish landowners are most unlike the French
of 1790. _ _ _

In Ireland a revolution like that of France is
impossible, unless indeed Repeal could be realised ; and
that indeed would prove the signaL England must,
however, keep the peace of the sister country. But
government, in doing so, will be obliged to do at least
the beneficial part of the work of revolution. It has
but two alternatives. It must either raise Ireland to
the level of England, by sending away half her popu-
lation, substituting a middle class, with capital
and experience, amidst it, a new race of farmers, all
able and capable of employing, and raising, by fit
employ, the remaining portion of the lower class.
Government must either do this—and it cannot do
any such thing—or it must, from pure necessity, not
choice, lapse into the French mode of locating and
feeding the population which exists, by giving it
land.
Such writers as he of the Quarterly may lament
this latter alternative as derogatory to aristocratic
organisation, as not making the most of the land, as
quite unorthodox and contrary to the science of farm-
ing. All this may be very tree, bat it cannot be
helped. It is not in the power of any government to
pack off to Canada or Australia one-half of the peasant
population of Ireland.
It is not in the power of the most furious anti-
Celtic politician to stifle or to strangle them. There
they are. What will you du with them? Your
Poor-law could no more deal with them than it could
with the army of XERXES. They will not cluster
round your soup-pots within prison walls. And if
you give them alms, or public pay for parish labour,
they will only give a make-believe of work in return.
One thing alone can you give them, and that is
land—land in property ; land in lease; land on some
certain tenure, or in some way that will offer a surety
and reward to industry, and will procure the peasant
some rest and content for a mind, which for centuries
has been intolerant of the present, and rockle,, ~f the
future.