The Northern Daily Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1856-04-29 00:00:00

for the punishment and reformation of

criminals

present day. That
the wickedness of mankind can be wholly eradi-
cated, and society brought to infinite perfection, is

a consumation we have no right to expect. On
this head scripture couples hope with arbitrary
conditions, and man's material history is one
unbroken record of violations of the Divine com-
pact, on which depends the prostration of crime
and the world's regeneration. The earth brings
forth weeds despite the husbandman's care,
and society will have its thorns and tares up to
the last day. It is no solecism to say these are
great moral certainties. Much may be, and has
been done, to arrest the growth of crime. The
present year will bear a rigid comparison with the
first twelve months of the nineteenth century.
Pauperism and wealth, religion and drunkeness,
morality and ignorance, education and blind
infatuation, have all kept pace with the geometrical
ratio of increase which has taken place in popula.
tion. Crime alone appears to be the least
flourishing limb of the great tree of life. Separate
from the category of crime, the less abomin-
able offences which have been made
penal within our own recollection, such

for example as intemperance, pauperism,
vagrancy, suspicion, and a variety of other charges
on which people are now apprehended and con-
victed, and which have recently been brought in
under the head of crime, and the criminal statis-
tics of Great Britain, would excite the astonishment
of the world. We do not say this to throw the
public off their guard, or to make our social con-
dition appear better than it really is, but in order
to check the growth of that organised system of
magnifying crime for State purposes, and hurling
back upon England's defamers that worst of all
political:sins—national slander! We have already
admitted that their must be a certain amount of
crime to provide for in this and every other coun-
try. The apple that nature or cultivation favours
most is but too apt to be the first to fall. The
purest virtue borrows increased lustre from a
blazing antithesis, and for those who fall a secure
resting place must be found. England is not a
country in which a true philanthropist would see
a man convicted of crime restored to liberty.
The prejudices and fears of her people will
never admit of the ticket-of-leave man's

getting constant employment, and regaining
his former status in society. Panal servitude will
defeat itself by means of its costliness, unless
our prisons are converted into manufactories to
compete with free labour, ana so render the exist-
ence of sober industry more precarious than it is
at present. What the reformed convict wants is a
really fair field for his labour. This he can never
find in England, unless he keeps moving about
from one place to another to escape the discovery
of his former character. No length of time will
remove from him the brand of crime. Once con-
convicted, he will be a ticket-of-leave man to the
day of his death. There can be no greater cruelty,
therefore, towards the really reformed criminal,
than to throw him on the world afresh under such
circumstances, and the idea would never have
been seriously entertained if Parliament had not,
by some unaccountable means, been persuaded that
there was not an island or place on the habitable
globe to which convicts could be sent.

After some years of experience in the Colonial
Office and great geographical research, Lord
DERBY pointed to Lundy Island as a fit place for
a penal settlement ! Its limited superficies and
contiguity to the mother country were its
strongest recommendations. But we would

have penal colonies as far away from home
as possible. We would have one for persons
transported for life, from which they should never
return. Such a settlement should be established
on the distinct understanding that it should always
remain a penal colony. We would also have a
reformatory settlement for persons transported for
seven, fourteen, or twenty years, totally separate
from the first, established precisely on the
same understanding, but from which the reformed
convicts might be allowed to emigrate to any
country they pleased, except England. Those
who deny we have not suitable places for such
establishments, must forget the existence of the
New Zealand and Falkland Islands, and the many
others in the Northern and Southern Pacific Oceans,
which might be bought for one half the sum we
should be 'asked to pay for the fee-simple of
Lundy Island, with its many insurmountable
objections. We must have penal settlements at
a long distance from our shores, make them
purely r!rown colonies, and not allow free
people to settle in them, so that the reformed
convict might have the benefit of cultivating
the soil and carrying on trade, without being
exposed to all the disadvantages he must
necessarily labour under in a mixed community.
Holding out the hope of marriage, and a comfort-
able home to both male and female convicts, after
a certain probationary term, would also aid the
work of reformation ; and from this distant home-
stead of crime many of the brightest ornaments of
humanity might, in after years, date their
birth. Every statistic we examine proves that

there is more weakness than wickedness in human
nature, and while there is an abu idance of room
for the incorrigibly wicked in one place, and for
the reclaimable weak in another, it is to be hoped
that Parliament will again resort to the old system
of " transportation beyond the seas," where vice
may be made self-supporting without injury to
honest industry, and where criminals may have a
fair chance of living, if not a free, at all events, a
reformed life.