The Sun.
London, England, 1855-03-19 00:00:00

(IA t

LONDON, MONDAY, MARCH 19, 1865.

Although every other home question has been
effectually set aside by the War, there is one
which of necessity still commands the most earnest
and vigilant observation. The vast and important
question, that is, the paramount and dominant
difficulty, the bewildering and apparently inextri-
cable problem—relating to a comprehensive modi-
fication of the Criminal Code, with a view to the
repression of vice and the diminution of crime
through the reorganisation of our whole system of
secondary punishments. Whether we happen to
be in arms or at peace, the laws of the land are
liable, of course, to be perpetually violated, and
equally as a matter of course in every such
instance their outraged majesty
.must re-
quire some immediate and adequate vindi-
cation. How this may be most readily and suc-
cessfully accomplished, has during many years
past been the projected discovery of the more
philanthropic among the heads of the people,
whether in the Legislature or in the Administra-
tion —hitherto, unhappily, without their re-
searches arriving at any distinct or positive con-
clusion. Insomuch, indeed, have the endeavours
thus made to arrive at some definitive result of a
satisfactory character proved abortive, that actu-
ally at the present moment, in the latter half of
the nineteenth century, the whole scheme of cri.
minal jurisprudence may be described without
exaggeration as being in process of transforma-
tion, as undergoing the distracting and dis-
locating agony of a complete and radical
metamorphosis. Literally, at this present
juncture, the entire system of the Criminal Cade
is in a state of transition. Nay, it so happens, by
a singular coincidence, that the two foremost
Powers now in existence, that the two chief mem-
bers in the great family of civilisation, that France
and England are not only agitated simultaneously
by the progress of this extraordinary movement,
but that the transition state at which it has pre-
cisely at this instant arrived on either side of the
Channel, presents to the world a spectacle in
Which the issue, as far as it has gone, is dia-
metrically contrasted. Our neighbours have to a
eertabs extent abolished the bagnes, in other
Words, the galleys, and have almost entirely done
away with the system of Oa rauxforces, otherwise con-
vict hard lab() • labour, the dockyards and otherpublic
establishmen-ts----getting rid of the vicious masses
of the population by deporting them beyond the
seas to Cayenne and INT
usa-hiva. We ourselves,
on the contrary, have virtually broken up the
entire system of our penal settlements— we no
longer send the scum of Shorediteh, and the dregs
of Whitechapel, to the Cape or Good Rope
and
Van Diemen's Land ; instead of this We retain
the whole of our indigenous race of ruffians within
the boundaries of the United Kingdom : at our
owe expense—(the words have a twofold siguifi

cane}—at our own expense, saving our remote
colonies from the perils of wholesale demoralisa-
tion. Every one is, in consequence, completely
dissatisfied—both among ourselves and among our
neighbours. In France, the popular outcry hav-
ing been vociferously raised against the bagnes
and the forests evades, or escaped convicts,
and in favour of penal settlements, qfeel-
ing is now spreading, not perhaps favourable
to the restoration of the galleys and the tray aux

forces, but certainly to a considerable degree ini-
mical to the broader and ruder scheme of !trans-
portation. In England, on the other hand, where
the national judgment had long since recognised
the injustice of emptying the outscourings of our
jails promiscuously on the shores of our fruitful
and unoffending colonial possessions, the national
instinct is beginning to revolt from the notion of

avoiding one evil by the toleration of another
this other, in many respects, perhaps worse than its
predecessor, by reason of the home ticket-of-leave
system substituted for that hitherto in vogue in
our penal settlements. Frenchmen may have had
qualms formerly about the forNts evades, the
VAUTRINS and MACAIRES of the drama, born
of the galleys, and fostered into celebrity
by the genius of DE BALZAO and LE
MAITRE—but Englishmen begin now to wince
more shudderingly over the notion of select
bands of skilled rascality, and half-educated in-
famy, and partially-reclaimed ruffianism—what
the author of Firmilian designates,
"The rag and tag and bobtail of mankind,"
being set loose upon society at intervals from the
bagnes of Dartmoor and the galleys of Ports-
mouth. While our Allies are looking askanse,
with a modified sense of remorse, in the direction
of Cayenne and Nuka-hiva, we are beginning,
some at least amongst us are beginning, with very
different feelings, actually to revert to thoughts of
Botany Bay, and even of that lovely and horrible
Norfolk Island, which seemed during so many
dreadful years at once a Paradise and a Pande-

monium.
accomplished,c
jumblen e er t h
of
f-
a chaotic Already much has been
less, in spite of an apparently
theories, and experiments towards the amelioration
of the social state, so far as that can be at all
effected, through the better management of our
oriminal population. Advantageous results have
been arrived at, chiefly, however, it must be con-
fessed, through the medium of a rather costly
experience. Scarcely a project has been passed
over without its being subjected to trial by the
way—the working of each new scheme being
watched the while with a scrutiny as minute and
vigilant as we believe it to have been throughout
impartial and conscientious. It is thus that the
public has been enabled to attain something like a
correct estimate of the effects of the several
methods of treatment brought successively under
examination. Whatever benefits could possibly
be extracted from each have been effectually
searched out, whether those benefits were derivable
from the plan of the convict association, upon public
works, as at Portland, or from that of separate
confinement, as at Pentonville. Insomuch have
the authorities advanced steadily towards the solu-
tion of the problem thrust upon them by a for-
midable necessity for the chance at least of its
ultimate elucidation, that (even when they may
have appeared to the undiscerning to have become
in some measure bewildered, if they have not
seemed to have positively and enormously retro-
graded) they have so contrived matters that we
are by this time enabled to estimate precisely at
their true value the different means adopted for
the improvement of criminals both under the
separate system and under that of association.
So that we can nowadays, so to speak, place our
finger, at pleasure, upon any numeral in the
tabular statistics recording the results of Training
and Discipline, of Badges and Classification, of
offering gratuities to the well-conducted and
holding out incentives to the industrious.
Under the influence of these generous en-
deavours to extract good from evil, the Prisons
of England have risen to the dignity of being
nothing less than grand reformatary establish-
ments, instead of remaining, as they had done
previously, mere grim abodes of impenitent ex-
piation. They are somewhat of a contrast,
indeed, it will doubtless be admitted, to the foul
and pestilential dens of punishment in which the
guilty wretches of the last century were huddled
together in filth and darkness, when HOWARD
first directed his herculean benevolence to the
cleansing of those Augean pits of infamy, diseale,
despair, and all imaginable and unimaginable
kinds of suffering. Under any circumstances, the
graphic and luminous records penned by the
truthful hand of Mr. FIELD, or of Mr.
DrxoN—descriptions comprised in the met-
morials drawn up by those intelligent
biographers of the Life and Labours of
our Master-Philanthropist—read to us less
like the account of a reality than like the
dreamings of some distempered imagination. It
must especially appear so to those who may chance
to have examined for themselves the organisation
of the Hulk Establishments at Woolwich, or to
those, again, who may happen to have observantly
traversed the galleries and examined the whole of
the beautifully-systematised arrangement of the
Millbank Penitentiary.

We have all been repeating the observation that
Aristocracy is on its last trial, Lord PALMERSTON
being leading counsel for the culprit. If so, it
stands very jauntily in the dock, and gives no
sign of fearing an unfavourable verdict. It has
shown none in the construction of its Cabinet,
and no fear whatever of relying on its old pleas of
reserve and secrecy. It claims the right to con-
duct the business of the nation with as much pri-
vacy as if its past secret delinquencies wore veiled
rather than exposed by Mr. ROEBUCK'S Commit-
tee. With like nonchalance it gives the coup de
grace to each measure of honestly liberal charac-
ter which comes before the House of Commons.
It will maintain the reign of privilege to the last.
It will boldly assert that the Aristocracy,
which is answerable for Crimean manslaughter
on the wholesale scale, and for spending
seven millions of our money on work which might
have been better done for two, is the most pre-
cious gem in our constitution ; that it is beyond
all comparison the most costly one we admit.
Two illustrations of this truly aristocratic de-
meanour were furnished by the debates on Thurs-
day night. Mr. LOCKE KING brought forward
again his bill for the better settling of the real
estates of intestates. He proposes that when the
deceased has not by will indicated his wish that
the eldest son should absorb the portions of all the
other children, that the law should divide the
estate in the same manner which has long been
considered fair in the case of personal property.
The Chiefs of the Cabinet, as Mr. L. KING
complained, disdained to do battle with such a
reasonable proposition ; they put forward their
Solicitor-Generill as of quite adequate rank to
fight the battle for them against vulgar notions
of justice, and it must be owned he fulfilled the
duties of his lieutenantey in orthodox, aristocratic
style. Primogeniture was an established institu-
tion of the country ; to measures for destroying,
not amending the law, he could never consent ;
t" House bad refused the measure last session by
a majority of
we should three to one (a rather hopeful omen,
Lave thought, for Mr. KING, consider-
ing the treatment most popular measures have
always received for
some few years in the Honour-
able House); natural
justice, in matters of real
propert3vspecially, was
all a fallacy ; and the
whole
de political
up with
institutions of the country were
b
giving the eldest son all the real
property, and sending the other children forth to
get their living by their wits !

We have given an honest resume, not a me._
cature, of the Honourable Member's arguments.
Indeed with the latter ono he was—and even in
these days of Crimean delinquency—quite ena-
moured. He expatiated °lithe blessing to the coun-
try of flocks of aristocratic eaglets, whom the law
of primogeniture treats as the old eagle is said to