The Sun.
London, England, 1862-12-16 00:00:00

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-THE SUN, LONDON, TUESDAY EVENIN-Z, DECEMBER 16, 1862.

CONVIC7 LIFE AND LIVING A 7 POB7-

, punishment should, after their spoil of liberty in the slums
of great cities, show such an unaccountable desire to return
to it again. To compare this high feeding with the mise-
rable dole which keeps life in our paupers would be absurd,
and equally so would be a comparison with the poor diet for
which the honest labourer toils so hard. Their case, as a
comparative one, is quite out of the question, but will tho
rations given cut to our soldiers and sailors show as varied
or as nutritive a diet as is hero given to our convicts at
Portland and elsewhere? It is of no use asking questions
of the directors of prisons as to this high feeding. All
inquiries are answered by its being part of the system.
This meets the objector everywhere, and is considered a
complete answer to everything. It is part of the system to
believe that the men really work hard, another part being
to feed them high lest they should lose muscle. Perhaps,
as the muscle among the convicts is pretty well concealed
by flesh, it may require looking after. But we have not
done with the routine of life at Portland. After dinner the
men who have put down their names to see the Governor
see him in turn. They mostly come to ask permission to
write special letters, a convict being supposed to write and
receive letters once in three months ; but the rule is
Purely nominal and not enforced, though they have to
ask permission for extra correspondence. Some come to
ask to be changed to the gardeners' class, some to the rig-
gers and platelayers', some to have their cells changed for
better, and others to be allowed to work in gangs where
their "cousins" are at work. All here and in other pri-
sons seem to think they are entitled to make any request
which will tend to their greater convenience; in which
they are right, for in 19 cases out of 20 their little whims
are granted, it being another and most important part of
"the system" to keep the men as comfortable as possible.
The men then parade in the courtyard at I, while the Go-
vernor hears complaints against the mild discipline of the
prison, such as fighting or not working. He then visits the
" separate cells," where the hardened or disorderly, who
have refused to come up to the lowest of low standards of
motion which pass on the works as " labour," are confined
on " 11b. of bread and a sufficiency of water" a day. These
inveterate idlers are seldom sentenced more than three or
four days of " separation," which they bear very well,
lying on their backs all day, though they dislike the diet to
an extent that makes even them not sorry when their time
for work is due. All confinement in separate cells takes off
from 14 to 28 days of the time at which they can claim
tickets of leave. The Governor has also the power of sen-
tencing to half diet for 10 days, or even the dark cell for a
short time if necessary, but it is not often done. At one
o'clock the men are again paraded and roughly examined to
see that they have not concealed their food to barter it for
tobacco, &c., with the free labourers, which in spite of all
search it is impossible to prevent their doing daily, and this
over they again march out to the quarries.
Here, in sight of the free labourers who have dined on
bread and cheese, and have perhaps done what would for
a convict be half a day's work while the latter were at
dinner or washing, the prisoners begin quarrying again,
neither ashamed nor encouraged by what they have seen
the others do and doing. It is almost a farce to call their
labour "hard labour." It seems little more than an excuse
for keeping the men out of doors for a certain time and
giving them just enough exercise to keep them in good
health, without which, with their good living, they would
be extemely liable to sicken. Almost the best proof of its
being no toil is that the men themselves like the "outing."
They work in gangs, talk, laugh, and jest, and arrange
among themselves their little "plants" for getting tobacco
and other little luxuries forbidden by the prison rule from
the free labourers, which, as we shall see, they are generally
successful. In this manner they while away the time
easily and lightly enough—in winter till four o'clock, in
summer till half-past five, when they are again marched
back to prison, and, having attended evening prayers in
chapel, go to supper in the cells. For supper one pint of
gruel and 9 oz. of bread to the recent corners, but those in the
third and fourth stage have the privilege of changing their
gruel for the same quantity of tea, "if preferred." These
latter have also the further indulgence of being allowed to
sit up and read in their cells till 9, the others going to bed
and having their lights out by eight o'clock. All the men
rise at five in summer, and half-past five in winter, and,
after washing and sweeping out their cells, get their break-
fasts served to them like their dinner. Their breakfast on
Sunday and three days a week is a pint of tea and 12 ounces
of bread; on the other three days, a pint of cocoa and the
same quantity of bread; and in this meal only is there no
difference made, men in all stages of their captivity
faring alike. After breakfast there is chapel, and at 7in
summer and half-past 7 in winter there is the usual muster
and walk to the quarries, when there is the usual hard
labour we have described till half-past ii, when they return
to wait for dinner as before. When we add that every pri •
Boner has half a day's schooling every week, and that on
this half day ho takes a bath and has his hair cut ; that on
Saturday afternoon all work ends at 4.30 ; that on Sundays
after service the prisoners may walk about the yard, or sit
in their cells and read, we have told all the terrors 'of penal
servitude and hard labour on the public works. When this
is the system what right have the public to be surprised at
its natural results in the indifference of ticket of leave men
to recommitment? It is said here, and on good authority,
though we cannot ourselves vouch for its truth, that men
let out on tickets of leave have been known, after a short
period of absence, to return to the prison and ask for re-
admission on their old comfortable footing. This, as we
have said, may or may not be true, but it is beyond all
question, and admitted on all sides, that the light work,
good feeding, and careful treatment of convicts under the
system of penal servitude, make short sentences almost the 1
reverse of a terror to criminals, and that the treatment of
these gentlemen workmen, as the free labourers call them,
has a most mischievous and demoralising effect on the po-
pulation in the neighbourhood of these prisons. It is im-
possible for the free labourer, working very hard for very
little, not to draw bitter contrasts between his own condi-
tion and the convict's, when he finds the latter can come 1
to him and barter meat for tobacco. As we have
said, the convicts somehow or other manage to
get money from their friends, and this in spite
of every check which the really admirable vigilance of the
Portland officials can devise to stop it. The money comes,
either in coins or notes or stamps, in covers of bibles, in the
backs of photographic miniatures, under the wax of appa-
rently clumsily sealed letters, and with shilling postage
stamps, under the common penny ones, which are carefully
fastened over them, so that the latter, which are of course
worth money, remain unobliterated. By these and ten
thousand other stratagems, which no acuteness can detect,
the convicts manage to receive money, and when once they
have got it all the vigilance in the world cannot prevent
their getting what they want in return for it. They arrange
with the free labourer with whom they have covertly made
friends to leave money, a note, or stamps under such a stone,
which he takes in due time, keeping
half the money or
what money the stamps may fetch for himself and returning
the rest in tobacco or writing materials. Once a means of
getting letters to and from the prison is arranged, there is
always a means of getting money, and when money comes
into the field the hard-worked warders have been found
neither more nor less immaculate than other men similarly
needy and similarly tempted. Their failures of duty have,
however, been few, and it is said, no doubt with truth, that
the free labourers, as risking nothing by detection, are
the main go-betweens of the convicts. It is difficult, how-
ever, for mere outsiders to understand the keen zest which
these contraband ventures give to prison life. What with
" plants" of letters and " plants" of tobacco, prison news of
who's in " separate" or who's suspected of " rounding"
on such a gang, there is no ennui or want of interesting
subjects to talk about while at "hard labour." When
Mr. Baron Bramwell was the other day sentencing the
garotters at the Central Criminal Court he said, "Yon may
find captivity irksome, and you will certainly be deprived of
tobacco and stimulants." Some who heard it were almost
inclined to smile at such a curious remark in a sentence of
penal servitude ; but there was a hidden bitterness in the
words which showed that the learned Baron knew well the
truth of what he was saying, and that his sentence meant
little more than compulsory residence in one place and ab-
stinence from spirits and tobacco. Can any one who sees
what the life of the convicts is at Portland honestly say
that if it does not mean more than this, the system is really
a determent to evil doers? Of all the officials engaged in
administering our convict discipline, not one, if proper in-
quiry is made, will be found to say it does—except, perhaps,
Sir Joshua Jebb. What its effects are upon the poor people
in the neighbourhood of the prisons we have already said.
They may dislike the crime, but they are candid enough in
envying the lot of the criminals ; and when they simply
state what their own hard work and poor fare is, who can
blame them ?—Times.

LAND.

PORTLAND, DEC. 13.

Transportation versus Ticket-of-leave, or, in plain terms,
What are we to do with our convicts ? is a question which
is almost as forcibly impressed upon the visitors to the stu-
pendous works at Portland as upon any of the suburban
dwellers in London who creep timidly home after dark for
fear of garotters. We are not now about to enter upon the
old and much-vexed question of the value of convict labour
as compared with free, though it is one which at Portland
is, and ala ays must be, acrimoniously debated by the parti-
sans on either side. Both, as generally happens in these
cases, are a little in the wrong. Sir Joshua Jebb, who
finds his intractable proteges kept out of mischief by the
nearest approach to hard work they can be got to do, na-
turally supports it and over-estimates its money value in
consideration of its use in can-) ing out his " system;" con-
tractors, on the other hand, who have erected a plant equal
to the consumption of double the materials the convicts can
be got to supply, and who find themselves entirely idle on
wet days when the carefully nursed convicts are not al-
lowed to work at all, are apt to ignore its value alto-
gether. The truth lies between the two extremes. The
whole dispute, however, is entirely beside the real question
at issue. It is not what is the kind of labour which con-
victs have to do, but how much real labour is exacted
from them. It is, has our present system of penal
servitude any real terrors for the lawless and despe-
rate ? Or, on the other hand, is it such in its care-
ful treatment, high feeding, and light work as
almost to induce ticket-of-leave men, like sailors
from a ship after a long cruise, to return with perfect
indifference to its discipline when they have had their run
of liberty ashore ? At no place in the kingdom can these
questions be better or more practically answered than by a
visit
,to Portland. From the lax discipline which it is
rumoured among prison authorities prevails in some of our
great convict establishments in this kingdom, it would not
be fair to take them as samples. At Portland, however,
the discipline is really perfect, compared with others ; there
is a large establishment of convicts, there are the public
works in which they are supposed to labour hard; and
whether the whole system is good or bad, there, at least it
is in its best working order.
There are always from 1,400 to 1,600 convicts at Port-
land, mostly working in gangs by themselves, but now and
then in close proximity to groups of free labourers. You
know at once when you are coming upon the ground mostly
worked by the former; on all the steep headlands and high
commanding bluffs which are being scarped into perpendi-
cular walls for the fort of this Channel Gibraltar stalk the
tall figures of the warders all around. There is nothing
of the listless routine of sentry duty about these men. They
carry their rifles ready, and seem all eyes and ears as they
scan the ground beneath them, like eager sportsmen look-
ing for a shot. Passing through two or three lines of such
vigilant "look-outs" is rather impressing, and prepares the
visitor to expect such scenes of labour and enforced toil
among the convicts as would induce them to run some risk
to escape. Nothing of the sort is, however, to be seen
as you turn into the Old St. Paul's quarries,
where some of the blocks rejected by Sir Christopher
Wren are still upon the ground. Here, amid a number
of old and rust 3 cranes, on the hills overlooking the sea, a
large body of the convicts are at work in gangs of 24 or 30,
each gang having its own warder, who, by the way, has 15
hours' work to the convicts' 9 or 10. The prisoners require
no pointing out, their dress, their closely shaven aspect,
their hard, firm, ruddy, healthy look, like pugilists in con-
dition for a fight, and, above all, their slow, lazy style of
working, or rather moving, which contrasts so strangely
with the busy energy and speed of the free workmen near at
hand, all show them at a glance to be "penal servitudes"
at "hard labour." Here are men of every grade of infamy
and crime, men who were once clerks, merchants, and even
commissioned officers, down to poachers, burglars, mur-
derers, and that worst and most inveterate of all ruffians,
who has been inured to every form of punishment known to
the law short of hanging—the true London criminal. Some
few are employed in platelaying, some in blacksmiths' shops,
some at masons' or bricklayers' work upon the great forti •
fications of the Verne, but the main bulk are kept in the
quarries. To nearly all, however, no matter how employed,
the same remark applies as to light and slothful labours,
and nearly all are alike in their vicious and forbidding as-
pects—their low, narrow, retreating foreheads, keen, rest-
less eyes, and vindictive animal features. This is not the
mere effect of prejudice en seeing them as convicts. The
type of the criminal head and face is well known in Portland
and its neighbourhood. They may be recognised as a negro
would be recognised in Boston. Of all the convicts in Port-
land now there are not 5 per cent. whom anyman judging by
their looks alone would ever think of trusting in a position
requiring the exertion of sense or the forbearance of honesty.
Some few among the number in these quarries work in
heavy chains, in most quaint dresses of gray and yellow,
and gray and black. The former are those who have tried
to break away, the latter are ruffians who have used, or
from their threats are known to intend, violence to the
warders. Both, however, clank about with a defiant swag-
ger, as if their chains were honourable distinctions of their
strength and courage, in which light there is but too much
reason to believe they are also regarded by many of their
fellow-prisoners. In these quarries the men work at
quarrying and dressing blocks of stone in winter about
eight and a half hours a day, in summer nine hours, and
sometimes a little over. The work, indeed, would be hard
labour if fairly done, and there are some few, but very few,
who really do work well and as if labour was a relief to
them. But the great majority take matters very easily
indeed, as may be judged when five convicts kept at their
work only quarry about as much stone in a day as two free
labourers working for their hire. It is not suggestive of
hard work to see a fellow put down a heavy hammer that
he ought to be wielding lustily and stop to swing his arms
and clap his hands to keep himself warm. When this is
the " hard labour" we can see at once why convicts do not
dread it. When we come to know how they are nurtured
and lodged in the prison in order that their strength may
be kept up to the required standard for this imaginary
hard labour which they are supposed to perform, we get a
real light thrown upon the indifference with which penal
servitude in this country is regarded, and gain a clue to
the reason why it is that so large a proportion of ticket-of-
leave men are, to say the least, not unwilling to return
to the so-called "penal servitude." Perhaps, while the
visitor is regarding this mockery of work it may
begin to rain; at once the mimic toil ceases and the con-
victs are marched off in gangs to sheds erected for the pur-
pose, where they are carefully sheltered from the weather
and can look out with complacency upon the free labourer,
who, having himself and his family to keep, must stay and
bear whatever weather Heaven sends, wet or dry, hot or
cold. The-contrast between the condition of the two, how-
ever, by no means ends here. The comforts that are denied
to misery, though proferred to crime, have been an old
theme of invective ever since the new convict " system "
came into operation. At no part of England, however, is
the superior condition of the convict, as compared with
that of the honest labourer, brought side by side into such
startling contrasts as at Portland. When 12 o'clock comes
in the works at the Verne, the free labourer, who has done
more quarrying than any two convicts that day, may be
seen sitting down to his meal of bread and cheese, some-
times with a bit of dried fish or a tin pot of coffee, the latter
generally unsweetened. The convict leaves' off work at
pas
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ample dinner. The prison is wide and lofty in all the
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chambers and avenues, well lighted and well ventilated,
yet kept comfortably warm, and, above all, so scrupulously
clean that it is a comfort to look at it. While the " hard-
labour " men are making their toilets their dinners are
carefully got ready, weighed out, and served smoking hot
in bright clean tins, and at 12 o'clock each man comes for-
ward with his gang, and receives every one his separate
allowance. Their dinner three days a week is as follows :
One pint of soup properly seasoned, thickened with
barley, rice, carrots, and onions, and equal in nutriment to
any ever placed on a gentleman's table ; 5f ounces of cooked
meat, free of bone; 11b. of potatoes, and 10 ounces of rich
suet pudding. On three days a week the pudding is re-
placed with 6 ounces of bread, and on Sundays the meat is
increased to 6 ounces. With this little dinner in his tin
every man retires to his comfortable cell, where he is allowed
an hour to consume it at his leisure,—not that the time is
always so spent; many have, or affect to have, suspicion as
to the weights or quantities they have got, and these fellows,
some of whom make a point of doing it for the sake of giving
trouble, have to be accompanied to the kitchen by the
warders, where according to the rules of the prison, they
are entitled to have everything reweighed and measured
before their eyes. All, however, do not dine in their cells—
some are portioned out in larger rooms in cosy little messes
of eight or ten. These are mostly men in the third or fourth
stage—that is, men who have completed two-thirds or
three-fourths of the time—not of the sentence—nobody
completes that—but the time at which they are entitled to
claim their ticket of leave. They have extra comforts and
privileges beyond dining in messes. In addition to the
dinner we have mentioned the men in the third stage re-
ceive on Sundays 2 oz. cheese, 3 oz. bread, and half a pint of
beer after it ; while the men in the fourth stage receive the
same as to bread and cheese and beer as the third, with the
addition of a treacle pudding after dinner on Thursdays,
baked mutton, in lieu of beef, on Thurs days and Fri-
days, and baked beef instead of boiled on Sun.
days and Mondays I Here, then, we begin by giving
our convicts a daily dinner such as for nutriment,
quality, and quantity few labouring men can afford on Sun-
days, and we gradually raise the scale of luxuries till they
dine at last oa RollP balwd beef, lereed and cheese and beer,
and pudding. Yet the public, who don't know these things,
wonder why penal servitude is not dreaded, and why, above
all others, ticket-of-leave men who have undergone this

Importing tea without colour on the leaf pre-
vents the Chinese passing off inferior leaves as in the usual
kinds. Horniman's Tea is uncoloured, therefore always
good alike. Sold in packets by 2,280 agents.
FEARRFUL OCCURRENCE AT A SUGAR REFINERY.
—Yesterday morning, a shocking and fatal accident oc-
curred to a man named Robt. Woodey, aged 54 years, a
blacksmith, who lost his life by falling into a cistern of
boiling liquor. It appears that the deceased was engaged
in making some repairs in the refinery of Messrs. Martineau
and Co., of Christian-terrace, St. George's-in-the-East, and
while walking along a plank, he slipped and fell into the
man named Slates, a fellow-workman, on hearing
boiling liquid. The screams of the poor fellow were fearful,
and
his cries, ran to his assistance, and dragged him out of the
wholeaecaccident
i e f
t ward of the London Hospital,
cistern, when it was ascertained that he was extensively
scaldedhtf
immediately called, but the injuries were of such a
thew by
deemedasodand limbs. A surgeon
necessary to remove
the gsuffererul
where he expired shortly after his admission. The deceased,
who has left a wife and family, resided a Lambeth,
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