The Northern Daily Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1856-03-25 00:00:00

EVENING EDITION

ar .An Evening Edition of the NORTHERN DAILY
Timms is now Published every Afternoon, at Three o'clock,
containing the Markets, together with all the News of the
Day, up to the hour of going to Press.

THI ANNUAL BusaclurrioN TO THE NORTHERN
DAILY TIMES ts TWO GUINEAS PER ANNUM.

TUESDAY, MARCH 25, 1856

IT 18 almost impossible to ascertain the cost of
crime to this country. The Civil Service estimates
only give us those charges for which the Govern-
ment are made liable. They show us the law
charges, and cost of maintaining the Constabulary
of England and of Ireland, but then they do not go
beyond the expense of the London police. They
leave the municipal and rural forces of England
wholly out of sight. The cost of penal colonies
ransportation, government prisons, convict estab-
lishments at home, and the victualling of prisons
—other minor matters are, however, given, and
may be set down in round numbers at 2,408,0001.,
to which we may fairly add 2,000,0001. more as the
cost of local police courts, prisons, police, and all
the other items attending the criminal expenditure
of England alone. This may be something above
or below the actual amount paid annually
for the detection and punishment of crime.
Still we find that we pay over 20,000,0001.
every five years, or 100,000,000/. every quar-
ter of a century for these painful and truly
lamentable purposes—to root out of the land and
destfoy that which the neglects of parents and
the State have produced. It is bad enough to
be obliged to look into such returns ; but to put
them to political uses, and draw invidious com-
parisons from them, for the avowed object of
keeping up party or inter-state feuds, is most
unpardonable• Crime, in the aggregate, dates
from two sources—poverty and ignorance. This
is proved, beyond all question, by the fact that
the great bulk of the criminals convicted in
these realms are wretchedly poor, and appallingly
ignorant.

Now, we are inyno way disposed to use this
argument for any sinister purpose, or to exalt
one people at the expense of another, as the
Freeman's Journal and other Irish papers are
We admit the sinfulness of the crimes
committed in these days, and seek to remedy it
by exposing it in its blackest colours to the full
light of day. We have no palliative whatever
The vice of one country cannot be atoned for
because crime is rife in another. Where extreme
poverty exists in the presence of redundant

wont

wealth, there must be a stronger incentive to
robbery to overcome ; and where the ignorant
are congregated together in hundreds of thousands
in large towns, the scourges dating from the want of
education and enlightment must be much greater
than in the rural and thinly peopled districts of
other parts of the realm ; and it is rather a danger-
ous thing to go into statistics to
.show that the
crimes of England Tare :numerically greater than
those of Ireland ? If in Ireland only one in eighty
of the population, and in England, one in twenty
are paupers, who are " unmercifully punished for
" mendicancy," while in Ireland they enjoy and can
exercise the " unpunishable liberty of begging," it
is quite clear that crimes dating from poverty
ought to be as one to four less in the Sister Isle than
in England. Add to this the absence of inordi-
nate wealth always staring famishing thousands in
the face, the isolation in which the great bulk of
her people exist, the incessant attention paid to
their spiritual instruction, and the wonder is,
that there should be any lvice at tall among the
Irish !

The only essential difference which does appear
to exist between tha two countries is, that here
men have perfect liberty to bring themselves to
beggary, and to rear up their children in utter
ignorance and disregard ofithe laws of both God
and man. In Ireland it is far different. There
they have the Crucifix in the hand of the
pastor on one side, and the bayonet—not
the staff—of the policeman on the other ;
and yet, notwithstanding that pauperism
is three hundred !per cent—the temptation of
want in the presence of wealth so many thousand
fold less, and the people so spread over the face
of the country, that contamination is almost
impossible—in Ireland crime is only a fraction
less than it 'is _on this side the channel. We do
not say this:to make England appear better than
she is, but that Irishmen may see the amount of
suffering 'their country must endure from the
commission of crime, and may be forewarned, and
take steps to arrest its further growth and onward
Recounting the vices of a neighbour, will
not make our sins the less intolerable. Let us
" lump" together the criminals convicted in the
three kingdoms annually, and reflect for a moment
on the truth, ;that there are upwards of 30,000
souls sent to the gallows, the hulks, penal colonies,
into penal servitude, prisons, dungeons, hard
labour, to be flogged, and to feel every species of
privation human ingenuity can devise. This is
the terrible truth with which churchmen, patriots,
and philanthropists, have to busy themselves•
Give us more work and less recrimination. There
is an abundance of room for the entire 27,000,000
of British subjects toj putj their !shoulders to the
wheel.

career

If we appealed to the Judge, who sits in the
Liverpool Assize Court, to hear the revolting
tales of the crimes enacted all around us day by
day, what a tale that learned man would
tell us of the guilt which drunkenness, poverty,
and ignorance have incurred within a few short
months. As an addition to this take into account
the hundreds within the county of Lancashire and
borough of Liverpool who have been summarily
convicted, within the same time and behold the
frightful total the figures present. The man who
would really wish us to think him ;patriotic and
wise would do well to tell us what is to be done to
heal such terrific social ulcers. There is certainly
no want of detection or convictions. The law is
fully enforced against offenders. But this does
not touch the cause or causes
.of crime. It only
seems to open the door to fresh delinquents, and
novel abominations. Surely religion, education,
and human refinement in its most circumscribed
sense, can never have reached this mass of vice and
suffering. There must be some other way ofconvert-
ing human hearts and heads, and leading them
to the temples of Christianity besides through the
bridewell, the dark cell, and prison courtyard.
The innate wickedness of man must be as feeble
and helpless iin its infancy as the limps of the
oldest criminal when about to expiate his guilt at
the scaffold. The question for all men then is to
consider the true source of crime, and having found
it to speak out and give it to the world, even if
it should only be as a humble Easter offering.
We hold that education, and the inculcation of
sober habits by working men, among the working
classes would relieve themselves and their country
of three-fourths of the misery which follows prodi
gality, drunkenness, and the neglect of the self-
instruction, which is, after all, indispensible to the
completement of all that parents, or others can
do for them.