been a great propensity to startling antithesis and paradox. Success and advancing years have produced their usual result, and magnified the defect into a deformity. His writing now consists in a strain of screaming discords, both of form and matter. Black is laid upon white-great things are opposed to small-beauty to hideousness- excessive sanctity to excessive crime-pompous terms are applied to trivial things — and homely expressions to the most lofty ideas. Take for example the following specimen, which we shall not attempt to translate: 6 Ecraser les fanatismes et vénérer l'Infini, telle est la loi. Ne nous bornons pas à nous prosterner sous l'arbre Création, et à contempler ses immenses branchages pleins d'astres. Nous avons un devoir travailler à l'âme humaine, défendre le mystère contre le miracle, adorer l'incompréhensible et rejeter l'absurde, n'admettre en fait d'inexplicable que le nécessaire, assainir la croyance, ôter les superstitions de dessus la religion; ÉCHENILLER Dieu.' As some of our readers, mistrusting their own knowledge, will doubtless look out the word écheniller in a French dictionary, we may as well tell them at once that it means nothing more than the act of picking caterpillars off a tree. M. Hugo has no claim to indulgence. He is a poet, an orator, and a master of language in his way. No writer of the present day has a greater command of words; and yet he has taken with his native language-of all modern languages the least tolerant of disrespect-liberties which have never been equalled. Like the Emperor Sigismund, he seems to say, with royal indifference, that he is supra grammaticam. - We shall not, however, discuss any further M. Hugo's literary sins. Our severity has not been called forth by them. English critics are not bound to avenge his outrages on the French language. It is his influence as a social and political teacher it is the world-wide circulation of his pernicious book, translated, as far as such jargon is translateable, into all languages that have imposed on us the duty of judging him. We are tempted, in concluding, to paraphrase freely his preface to Les Misérables,' and to account for our review in very nearly the same words that he has used to account for his book. 'So long as there shall exist, by reason of certain political and literary laws, writers creating artificially in the midst of 'civilisation an imaginary social damnation, and complicating with evil passions and class hatred our destiny, which is divine, so long criticism such as ours may not be utterly ' useless.' 6 ART. VIII.-1. The Prison Chaplain: A Memoir of the Rev. John Clay, B.D., late Chaplain of Preston Gaol; with selections from his Reports and Correspondence, and a Sketch of Prison Discipline in England. By his Son, the Rev. WALTER LOWE CLAY, M.A. London: 1861. 2. Female Life in Prison. By a Prison Matron. Second Edition, in two vols. London: 1862. 3. Observations on the Treatment of Convicts in Ireland; with some Remarks on the same in England. By Four Visiting Justices of the West Riding Prison at Wakefield. London: 1862. 4. Report of Committees of both Houses of Parliament on Transportation and Penal Servitude. 1856. 5. Reports of the Directors of Convict Prisons, England. 1861. 6. Reports of the Directors of Convict Prisons, Ireland. 1861. TH HE country is in the midst of one of its occasional panics about its convicts, at present particularly active in the commission they seem to hold from the enemy of mankind to roam abroad, seeking whom they may devour. Once more, as so often before, we find the criminal class dominant, exces'sively formidable, and costly,' as one of the Reports before us described it some few years ago. Nobody disputes the fact, except a blind theorist here and there. As to the mischief, and the disgrace of it, there are no two opinions. Yet we can remember no occasion, within half a century, on which so much. ignorance has been exhibited, and so much nonsense has been talked, on a question which any sensible man may understand, and the facts of which are generally accessible. Ignorance and passion together make sad havoc of citizen-sense; and, between the popular weariness of the topic of Prison Discipline, which everybody has heard of ad nauseam, while few have studied it, and the wrath and terror with which we find our lives, limbs, and property at the mercy of the ruffianism of Saint Giles's, a confusion of ideas and counsels has been generated, almost as discreditable to English society as its mismanagement of its criminals. Some, who should know better, are crying-out for a revival of transportation. Some vituperate an imaginary enemy-the Humanitarians,'-who would feed our scoundrels on the fat of the land, and coax and humour them back to virtue. Some-perhaps the majority-imagine all discharged convicts to be ticket-of-leave men; and a multitude assume VOL. CXVII. NO. CCXXXIX. R that tickets-of-leave are bad things in themselves, because the 'system' which has been called after them is a failure. Some profess to be in a horribly vindictive state of mind towards our garotters and burglars, and others really are so-not only when walking the streets of London armed, and peering into every bit of shadow for a murderer, but in letters to the newspapers, at dinner-tables, and by their own firesides. Some abuse all gaol-chaplains, or all directors of prisons, or the Home Secretaries of many successive Ministries, or the police, or anybody who has to do with convicts, or anything to propose about them. There are but few who perceive, amidst the confusion, that the radical difficulty remains untouched and unapproached -what to do with the element of extreme wickedness-with the coarsest dregs of national crime,—which has never been successfully dealt with in any country since modern civilisation arose. It is not scolding which will enable us to deal with this great difficulty; and we are carried further away from any solution by every fit of chattering that ignorance indulges in, and by every outburst of passion. The evil is very pressing-there is not a day to lose in dealing with it; and we shall therefore try to do our part towards wise action on the question by presenting a clear and accurate account of the nature and conditions of the case. It may be said, in excuse for the ignorance which is creating so much confusion, that in no department of public affairs has the Government of England shown a more wretched and mischievous indecision and fickleness than in that of convict management. Whatever allowance may be fairly claimed for an uncertain and wavering policy in a matter so difficult and, in a sense, so new, it remains a fact that successive Administrations, and even the same Ministry and Parliament, have shifted from one ground to another, and changed their minds-not only from one period of experience to another, but while preparing one Report, or in the interval between completing the Report and presenting the Bill ostensibly founded upon it. Where the Legislature and Executive have been so fluctuating in their counsels, it is not very wonderful that society has become confused in its ideas. The time has arrived, however, when there must be an end of such weakness. Society must make out a clear aim for itself, and then see that Government carries it out. The aim is, as most people say who are qualified to speak on the subject at all, to reduce as much as possible the number of the criminal population, and to prevent the incorrigible part of it from doing mischief. Nothing that has ever been effected in 243 England entitles us to expect the fulfilment of this aim. Our The Judicial Statistics of 1861 (the latest procurable) show that in England and Wales the total number of criminals of all orders and both sexes is 148,972, or 1 in 134 of the whole population, London having only 1 in 231. includes receivers of stolen goods, suspected persons, children, This estimate prostitutes, and vagrants. Crimes of violence were 7,535, of which 2,473 were against the person without regard to property. The known adult thieves in the country in 1861 were 25,272, of whom 19,215 were men, and 6,057 were women. ber of suspected thieves was 29,588, of whom 24,226 were men, and 5,362 were women. The numthieves under the age of sixteen were between four and five The known and the suspected thousand of each class. Such is the criminal population that we have to deal with. The increase of commitments in 1861 was remarkable. It amounted to nearly 13,000-the whole number being 129,238. Dismissing here the cases of slight offences, and matters not pertinent to our present inquiry, we find that at the opening of the year there were in prison, undergoing their sentence, 7,794 convicts, of whom 6,474 were men, to whom were added in the course of the year 2,718 men, making at the end of the year 9,192 men and 1,684 women; in all, 10,876. As for what became of these criminals, 610 were sent to Western Australia. A few were sent to lunatic asylums, had their sentences commuted, or were pardoned; 76 died and 2 escaped. Passing over irrelevant particulars like these, we find that 1,149 men and 201 women fulfilled their sentences and went out; and 1,377 men and 268 women were discharged with tickets-of-leave. This left in prison at the beginning of 1862, 7,123 convicts undergoing their sentence, after 3,753 had been disposed of. The statements of the cost of these convicts do not enlighten us much as to what we pay for the crime of the country. The expense per head of the convicts is reported as so various that it is difficult to understand-the extremes being 201. and 871. The average is announced to be 34l. 9s. 9d. It is more to our purpose here to cite the estimate made some years ago, and still adhered to by competent reporters, that the crime of the country costs it ten millions a year, without reckoning some such items as the salaries of the judges, and the expenses of our convicts in the colonies. What a sum it is!—and to be spent without success in the object! The present attempt to raise a popular cry for a revival of transportation is worse than foolish-it is wicked; because any man who undertakes to write on the subject ought to knowwe should say, must know-that the thing is impossible. The time is almost beyond living memory when Romilly and Bentham took up their testimony against that mode of punishment; but some of their opinions are to be found in their works and their memoranda. Romilly's diary shows us his grounds of objection in regard to the effect on the criminals themselves; and it gives us the curious anecdote that some of the judges of that day (1812) made their sentences of transportation as long as the law allowed, and for life when it was possible, because it was certain that a man sentenced to such a term as seven years would not be transported at all, but kept on board the hulks. Three of the judges are named as declaring this to be their practice. There were grave defects, Romilly said, in the transportation system which made him desire, with Bentham, that it should be given up as soon as possible; and the expense, which it is convenient now to overlook, was severely felt at that time. That method of punishment had, a quarter of a century ago, cost us seven millions; it should now be remembered. We need not recall what the experience of the last generation proved to satiety,-the intolerable moral evils of the system. We could fill a volume with the indisputable grievances of the inhabitants of penal colonies, after it began to be seen what the results of the system were; but it is unnecessary. There is a Report in existence which answers that Memoirs of Romilly, vol. ii. p. 71–2. |