The Sun.
London, England, 1862-12-18 00:00:00

tyran:

That convict labour is a valuable commodity, we
cannot but recognise, even in the midst of all
our horror of garotting. The employment of the
brute force, and of the mechanical skill, and of
the previously misapplied intelligence of our cri-
minal population, upon public works who is
there amongst us that fails to recognise as a tho-
roughly common sense proceeding ? The principle
is obviously right in two directions—benefitting the
felon and the community. That is to say, it affords
the felon the most substantial of all opportunities
for the restoration of his own character. It ob-
tains from his thews and sinews, from his dex-
terity, from his brain and nerves, a visible and
material advantage to the public, whose
laws and habits, whose morality and integrity
he has outraged. Upon the European Continent
many of these wretched creatures forgata—not ac-
tually chained to the oar in those floating hells the
Galleys, of which our old and now happily obsolete
Hulks were until a very few years ago the lumbering
imitations—are employed, as we know, in the pub-
lic streets in gangs, manacled together, clearing
away the dung, and performing other filthy and
menial offices. It is the merit of the carefully
organized system of which Sir JOSHUA JEBB is the
Originator, or at any rate the Organizer, that
larger benefits are (through its application to the
treatment of Felony) derived in the shape of actual
advantages to the general community from the em-
ployment of Convict Labour upon Public Works.
Latterly it has become a sort of fashion to
clamour down this system as erroneous. The
accursed brutality of the Ticket-of Leave ruffians
—turned into Thugs in the twilit suburbs of our
metropolis—armed with brass knuckle-dusters and
knotted bludgeons—endangering the lives of her
MAJESTY'S lieges for the sake of the dirty
halfpence that may be found in their pockets when
reduced to a state of insensibility—these new
fangled atrocities of the Garotters have so clouded
the judgments of many in regard to the merits of
the system from whose exaggerated misappli-
cation the crimes of the Garotters have
emanated, that one might almost be led to imagine
that the whole panic-stricken community has and-
denly become oblivious of that sufficiently plain
and solid fact—the Portland Breakwater.

Sir JOSHUA JEBB may very probably, like most
innovators, have carried out his system to the ex-
treme. That he apparently has done so would seem
to be clearly demonstrated by the mere circum-
stance of the existence of these Garotters. Yet—
allowing that—it must be none the less obvious to
any dispassionate observer, that the general public
has, by way of retaliation, rushed in turn, in the
opposite direction, blindly into an extreme.
To Sir JOSHUA—until recent events perhaps
awakened his eyes to the magnitude, at the very
least, of a doubt as to the efficiency of his system—
that system of his would appear to have been re-
garded as all good. To the general community just
now it would seem that the system is deemed to be
exactly the reverse, that is to say, also in two words,
all bad. The truth—as invariably happens to be the
case among disputants who rush to opposite ex-
tremes—lying all the while as nearly as possible ex-
actly midway.
Without the elaborate and masterly organisation
described in a very able report copied by us into
our impression of Tuesday from that morn-
ing's issue of our leading contemporary, without
the elaborate and masterly organisation visible any
day in the year, to any ono who lists to go there
and see for himself, in the Great Convict Establish-
ment at Portland, we should probably have heard
nothing, have seen nothing, of perhaps the greatest
of all the Public Works of our age—the Portland
Breakwater. There, cheek by jowl, as it were,
with the Convict Prison, whose salubrity, and
cleanliness, and comfort are so loudly and insen-
sately inveighed against (as—like the whole sys-
tem itself, of the character of which that large
and splendid establishment is the most conspicuous
of examples—all bad!) there, within can-
non shot of the Portland Convict Prison, is
its palliative, its vindication, its justification, in
the Portland Breakwater. "The bane and anti-
dote" are, there, both of them, as visibly
before us as they were before CATO, is his dagger
and his scroll of the Platonic Philosophy ! Yonder
the Palace of Felonry ! Yonder shelving off into
the neighbouring sea the magnificent result pro-
duced by the wise application of Convict Labour—
the Breakwater. Remembering that one offshoot
of his elaborate system, Sir JOSHUA JEBB'S critics
would do well to pause before pronouncing
an unconditional sentence of reprobation
upon his certainly not all-perfect but also,
it should be admitted, his not all imperfect
scheme of Convict Discipline. For ourselves, we
cannot but recognise in Sir JOSHUA JEBB a very
able and gifted servant of the Crown and of the
Public, who having become impressed with a con-
viction
of the absolute excellence of a system of his
own construction, has eventually turned that sys-
tem into a Robby, and after long riding of his
without let or hindrance from any one, has
Hobby
yrnonbtbhe usual hazard of those so mounted—the im-
minent risk of riding
his Hobby to Death.

Mr. COBDEN, in his
ceinyteerryesnntinneghspeech at
Midhurst, undertook a sveervryi
needed—
the exposition to a rural audience, of what the great
Sprung from the
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Lancashirehbou r h communityoodin
whichreally
he
e
spoke, halting repur-