The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1850-03-12 00:00:00

THE increase in juvenile crime in the large
towns,of the kingdom, and in Liverpool in pai-
ticular, has for some time engaged the serious
attention of thinking men of all classes. We have
growing up around us, herding in our back streets
and courts, a generation of human beings sunk in
the lowest depths of depravity and ignorance,
whose faculties, such as they are, are employed in
a constant war against property and order, and.
whose time is spent in a continual alternation
betwixt a felon's prison, and the commission of
crime on the first moment of their emerging thence
into the busy world out of doors. In vain the law
puts forth its powers to punish, or to deter from the
commission of petty thefts, these hardened young
criminals. The police court or the prison bas no
terrors for them ; and in their own homes and the
haunts which they frequent evil example and bad
advice too often await them. Temptations to
indulgence in precocious debauchery beset them on
every side. The low singing-room, or theatre;
the beerbouse, to which thieves habitually resort to
plan new scenes of plunder, or to boast of Fast
successful feats; the squalid lodging-house, and
the beggars' place bf riot and profanity, open their
doors in every crowded portion of the town to
corrupt and to confirm in vice.
We directed attention a few weeks ago to this
crying evil, as strongly evidenced in the history of
a family of three boys, two of whom were children
of eight and nine years old respectively, who had,
nevertheless, been continually in the hands of
justice for thefts and burglary, one of them (only
nine years old) having been seventeen times in all,
and the younger (only eight years old) eight,
since the commencement of his career of infamy.
It was impossible to omit observing the fact, that
the whole three were trained to crime, in order to
feed the debauchery and idleness of a vicious
father, and that on every successive occasion of
their discharge from prison, it was only to fall once
more into his hands, and to be forthwith urged on
to the commission of some new and perhaps, more
daring act of crime. On reference to our police
report of yesterday., it will be seen that another
case of this description was heard. In fact, we
may say that they are of daily occurrence. In the
course of the past week, the stipendiary magistrate,
Mr. Rushton, to whom the career of the first
family mentioned is familiar, has made it a sort of
text from which to address the Town Council and
the inhabitants of Liverpool a letter on the sub-
ject, suggesting remedial measures, which is too
important and too creditable to the writer, on
account of the motives by which it was dictated,
to be passed over without comment. Mr. Rushton
reminds us that in the year 1846 the magistrates
and the Council addressed a petition to the Legis-
lature " setting out the evils which arise from the
want of an institution, other than a prison, to
which juvenile offenders might be sent for refor-
mation rather than punishment." That petition,
he says, had been favourably received, and he had
indulged in hopes that the prayer of it would have
been acceded to by Government. From some
cause, however, the subject was dropped at the
time; and now, in the absence of any Government
aid, so urgent had the evil become, that he had
been induced to consider whether the town did not
possess the means within its own hands. We
have, he urges, in Liverpool, a parochial school
(the Industrial) which has already conferred vast
benefits upon the town. Although it might seem
to some peop!e that it was unreasonable, whilst
1,150 children were maintained within its walls, in
addition to 320 in the workhouse schools, to ask
the parish to burthen themselves additionally, yet
lie thought both the Council and the Vestry would
consent to do something out of the funds at their
disposal, if he could show them that, whilst
snatching children from ruin, they would, at the
same time, be saving their own pockets.
Mr. Rushton had traced the history of fourteen,
selected in 1842 out of the crowd of juvenile
criminals in the Borough Gaol, in order to ascer-
tain the result as compared with children in refor-
matory institutions ; and four years after, before
sending up his petition to London, he found the
following to have been the result :—" I found,"
he says, " that ten out of the fourteen had been
transported, one had died, one was a prostitute,
one was in custody, and of the remaining one
nothing was known." The expense in prosecuting
these offenders had been, up to 1842, £BB9 Is.;
the loss by their depredations he considered must
have cost Liverpool a similar sum—making in all
£1,778 2s. The cost of apprehensions, prosecu-
tions, support in prison, &c., up to 1846, would
have to be added to this, and borne by the people
of Liverpool; and the expense of their transporta-
tion would be a further expense, borne, however, by
the government. On these grounds he based his
proposition that the Select Vestry should set apart
a department in the Industrial Schools for the
reception of this class of prisoners ; and that the
Town Council should aid out of the funds in their
hands a work of mercy, which would ultimately
relieve both these bodies from a portion of the
expenditure on prosecutions, and relieve the
feelings of the magisterial bench by preventing
the painful duty of having to deal with those
prisoners, who must excite their compassion—
" Children having the vices and the crimes of
men."

It is impossible to withhold approval from a
proposition at once so benevolent and so wise in its
tendencies to promote the object which every good
man would desire to see carried out. We are
afraid, however, that anything which can be
effected by local means alone must be merely of a
tentative character, and qnite inadequate to the
vast extent of the evil to be remedied. The people
of Liverpool have already taxed themselves heavily
for the improvement of the social position of the
poor; and unfortunately it is not their own alone
whom they are called upon to relieve and succour,
by means of our hospitals, our dispensaries, our
sel ools, and other charitable institutions. We are
peculiarly situated as the recipients of a large
amount of the pauperism of the sister country.
Ireland sends us over yearly in greater abundance
her halt and her blind, her confirmed mendicants
and her dissolute classes. Of the offspring of these
it is that a great portion of our juvenile criminals
are found. We might be disposed to try the
experiment of the effects of such a reformatory
system as that which Mr. Rushton recommends;
but we much fear that by government alone means
can be supplied on a scale commensurate with the
extent of this evil.

We contend, moreover, that by the government,
or the country at large, it ought to be undertaken ;
for by the country a large portion of the benefit
would be derived. The cost of transportation,
which is borne by the country, would be materially
lessened by any reformatory measure which would
diminish the aggregate of crime; and it must be
borne in mind that criminals reared in any locality,
become, when in the adult state, migratory in their
habits. and transport themselves to places where
their persons are not so familiarly known to the
police. The urchin, no longer able to mingle un-
observed amongst a crowd to pick pockets, to creep
unseen behind a counter for the purpose of ab-
stracting the till, to pick up cotton on our docks,
or to help himself undetectea to the thousand odds
and ends, scattered about this busy mart of corn-

merce, when arrived at manhood must fly at higher
game, and find fresh scenes for his criminal adven-

Besides, it must be remembered that, as a com-
munity so peculiarly engaged, we have already an
extensive sphere of duties before us, the perform-
ance of which will tend to the same end as that
which it is now proposed to us to undertake. We
have a revolution still to make in the sanatory
condition of those parts of the town inhabited by

our poor, and in Nvhich the growth of vice is most
luxuriant. We _ must root out those dens of

iniquity in which the youthful offender finds the
accomplices and encouragers of his villainy. Above
all, we ought to extend to the poor amongst these
districts the means of hearing the Word of God
preached, and the blessings of schools, rather than
either reformatory schools or prisons, through
which the untainted amongst the children of those
poor may be snatched from contact with the pre-
maturely vile to be found in such numbers in our
streets.

The following paragraph, which :appears in the
Christian Times of Friday, giving an account of an
interview held last week with the postmaster-general
by a deputation from this county, on the subject
of postal labour on the Sabbath, will be perused
with interest by our readers :
" The deputation was ably supported by James Heald,
Esq., M.P., and the Marquis of Clanricarde received them
in the most cordial manner. The Rev. H. Stowell and
Mr. Heald urged upon the marquis the necessity and pro-
priety of at once putting an end to the business of the
Postoffice on Sunday, and more than an hour was spent