Volume 81 / Part 2 — TICKET-OF-LEAVE. A LETTER TO IRENÆUS.

Christmas Eve, 1856.

My dear Irenæus,—A merry Yule-tide, and may the young year use you as well as the old ones, and so you will do very well! So you did not ask me to eat my Christmas dinner with you; yours is strictly a family party. The Rector, and the Rose and rose-buds of Devon, and a spinster cousin of yours, a kind of benignant Banshee of your house, who comes to light not when any one is going to die, but whenever all the members of your family are going to live—particularly well: kissed under the mistletoe like the rest, and blushing like the evening when the Reverend Celsus unbends so far as to acknowledge that relic of heathendom, the wicked parasitical plant with which the fair god Balder was slain. Well, Irenæus, an old bachelor at Christmas is not much unlike the mistletoe; he cannot live by himself; has no roots of his own, and must find some family oak to fix himself upon. He cannot dine drearily in his rooms, or sulk at his club on Christmas day: he must turn parasite for the nonce; and then it is his duty like the mistletoe to promote the fun as much as possible. Irenæus, if no eyes but thine were destined to look at this page, I might tell thee where I ate my Christmas dinner, but my letter is peculiarly circumstanced. There is a grave old lady called Maga looking over my shoulder while I write, and I am obliged to be circumspect in consequence. But if I could have eaten two Christmas dinners, as young ladies in town go to two or even more balls of a night, I certainly should like to have eaten my second with you; or had I the power to divide myself, my wraith or double should have sat down with you, uninvited as Banquo’s ghost, but rather more cheerfully; that is, if a wraith or double possesses digestive organs, and organs capable of digesting a Christmas dinner. Howbeit I can picture in imagination the cheerfulness of your fireside; the delighted scream of the children at the blazing pudding, puzzled to know how they were to eat fire, especially with a grandpapa whose name implies that he is not a fire-eater himself, although I suspect him of being so in spite of his name;—the blind man’s buff and hunt-the-slipper with Irenæus obliged to pay forfeit and remove a taper from a basin of water with his mouth; the Christmas tree, that prettiest of all modern importations from Germany, like many other pretty things a little dangerous, liable to set people a-fire—hung round with the gifts which the little ones believe came from the Babe of Bethlehem; and when the little ones are gone to bed, the quiet rubber in the corner, which Irenæus has on principle, because the Puritans think cards wicked at all times, and especially on Christmas day; not that he cares much about it himself, for he only plays for postage stamps. I know that Christmas is a good time with you, Irenæus, not coming, but come; like that Christmas of the heathen Romans—

When round the lonely cottage

Roars loud the tempest’s din,

And the good logs of Algidus

Roar louder yet within.

When the oldest cask is opened,

And the largest lamp is lit;

When the chestnuts glow in the embers,

And the kid turns on the spit;

When young and old in circle

Around the fire-brands close;

When the girls are wearing baskets,

And the lads are shaping bows.

Might not Macaulay have said that the girls were also shaping beaux in their imaginations? Forgive me—but on such a subject and at such a time, the saturnalia of our year—even a pun is pardonable, however despicable in itself. How strange is the power of suggestion! I meant not when I sat down to write, to wish you more than the compliments of the season, but I see now that I am in for a long letter, and so are you. I do not mean to cross it, and thus you will have no excuse for not reading it through. “The good logs of Algidus” have suggested to me your wood-fire, the very poetry of fires, and your wood-fire has suggested your wood-cutter, and your wood-cutter has suggested a ticket-of-leave man; and as I have been thinking somewhat lately on this subject of tickets-of-leave, I by these presents take you by the button, and compel you to listen to the matter of my ruminations, even as that eternal gossip detained Horace, when he was walking in the sacred road “according to his wont.” I still think your experiment with regard to that man a dangerous one. Had you been a preserver of game, you would have done better to have made him a gamekeeper, on the principle of “set a thief to catch a thief,” as he got into trouble by poaching with aggravations. The most sensible proposition I have seen yet, with regard to ticket-of-leave men, was that of some speaker at a country public dinner, who proposed that they should be made policemen. No other scheme has appeared to me to hold water in the slightest degree. You get a parcel of jail-birds together, till their cage or “jug,” as it is affectionately called by the fraternity, is inconveniently full. In order to relieve its superabundance, you select the mildest specimens, or those who appear so to the chaplain, clip a feather of their wings and let them fly again about society at large, forgetting that a clipt feather will soon grow again. You give them a ticket-of-leave—to be at large, and they naturally give a large interpretation to the term, so that a ticket-of-leave has become like an indulgence in the worst times of Popery, the principal difference being that those who granted indulgences were wise enough to get paid for them beforehand, while those who grant tickets-of-leave are fools enough to do it for nothing, and earn into the bargain the maledictions of all timid old gentlemen, and the anathemas of all elderly ladies, if elderly ladies be ever sufficiently unguarded to utter anathemas, as the Council of Trent did. The other day poor Mrs Seacole, of Crimean memory,

“Spake a bitter jest”

in the court of bankruptcy, and asked for her ticket-of-leave, adding that she did not mean to garotte any one in consequence; it being generally understood that a ticket-of-leave would be interpreted by the public to be a license to garotte with impunity, giving a sacred or sacrosanct character to the bearer, like that of a Briton with a Foreign Office passport, an ancient Roman tribune or a modern Swiss idiot, the latter two classes of people licensed to make themselves disagreeable to others to any extent within or without reasonable bounds. We have all heard of Le spectre rouge, and how it has frightened the French people from their impropriety, bending their necks to the stern yoke of absolutism. The same honourable position appears to be occupied now in England by the spectre denominated Ticket-of-leave. Oh, for the brush of a limner that I might portray him, as he is portrayed to the imagination of Materfamilias Tomkins, whose husband is a worthy clerk in the City, and has to walk every evening to a white-washed cottage at Bow, running the gauntlet of all the white-washed blackguards of Whitechapel on the road to it! I claim no originality in wishing for a limner’s brush to eke out the weakness of my words, the conceit is as old as Anacreon. I naturally turn as a model to that ode in which the poet apostrophises his mistress—

Ἄγε Ζωγράφων ἄριστε

Γράφε Ζωγράφων ἄριστε

Τεχνοκοίρανε ῥόδειε

Ἀπεοῦσαν ὡς ἂν εἴπω

Γράφε τὴν ἐμὴν ἑταίραν,

with questionable compliment, calling upon the best animal painter, the Landseer of Samos, to paint her according to description in her absence. But I find as I read on, that the glorifications of feminine loveliness can scarcely be paraphrased so as to do for Bill Sykes. Here is one that will serve my purpose better, addressed to some graceless youth of the poet’s acquaintance, I mean the Ode to Bathyllus. I suppose a confederate speaking to the painter or photographer, though a case not likely to happen, in fact, unless he wished to turn Queen’s evidence.

Ἐἰς Βάθυλλον.

Γράφε μοι Βάθυλλον οὕτω

Τὸν ἑταῖρον ὡς διδάσκω

Λιπαρὰς κόμας ποίησον

Τὰ μὲν ἔνδοθεν μελαίνας,

Τὰ δ’ ες ἄκρον ἡλιωσας

Ἕλικας δ’ ἐλαυθέρους μοι

Πλοκάμων, ἀτακτα συνθεὶς,

Ἄφες, ὡς θέλωσι, κεῖσθαι

Απαλὸν δὲ καὶ δροσῶδες

Στεφέτω μέτωπον, ὀφρὺς

Κυανωτέρη δρακόντων.

Μέλας ὄμμα γοργὸν ἔστω,

Κεκερασμένον γαλήνῃ*

Τὸ μὲν ἐξ Ἄρηος ἕλκον

Το δε τῆς καλῆς Κυθήρης

Ἵνα τις τὸ μὲν φοβῆται

Τὸ δ’ ἀπ’ ἐλπίδος κρεμᾶται.

Ῥοδίνην δ’, ὁποια μῆλον

Χνοΐην ποίει παρειήυ*

Ερυθημά δ’ ὡς ἄν Αἰδοῦς

(Λύνασαι) πάλιν ποίησον.

Τὸ δὲ χεῖλος, οὐκ ἔτ’ οἶδα

Τίνι μοι τροπῳ ποιήσεις * *

Ἁπαλὸν, γέμοντε πειθοῦς ——

Τὸ δὲ πᾶν, ὁ κηρὸς αὐτὸς

Ἐχέτω λαλῶν σιωπῇ.

Μετὰ δὲ πρόσωπον ἔστω

Τὸν Ἀδώνιδος παρελθὼν,

Ἐλεφάντινος τράχηλος.

Μεταμάζιον δε ποίει

Δίδυμάς τε χεῖρας Ἑρμοῦ;

Πολυδεύκεος δε μηροὺς

Λιονυσίην δὲ νηδύν.

Φθονερηὺ ἔχεις δὲ τέχνηυ,

Ὅτι μὴ τὰ νῶτα δεῖξαι,

Δύνασαι* τὰ δ’ ἦν ἀμείνω.

Τί πόδας με δεῖ δί δάσκειν;

Λάβε μισθὸν, ὅσσον εἴπῃς.

Τὸν Ἐκηβόλον δὲ τοῦτον

Καθελὼν, ποίει Βάθυλλον.

Ὅτε δ’ ἐς Σαμου ποτ’ ἐλθης

Γράφε Φοῖβον ἐκ Βαθύλλον.

On Bill Sykes.

(After Anacreon.)

Paint me, Cruikshank, Doyle, or Leech,

Sykes, my pal, as now I teach.

Paint his hair, smut-black and sleek,

Methodistically meek,

Sheared as round a beechen bowl

On the temples; at the pole,

Topknot like a blacking-brush

Which no comb shall tear or crush;

So the porcupine his quill

Droops or upright sets at will.

Paint a clammy forehead now

Heavy, villanously low;

Eyebrows like a coat threadbare;

Eyelids innocent of hair,

Proof against the grease of bear.

Goggle eyes of sullen glare,

Overspread with oily calm

When he sings the prison-psalm;

Piglike in their want of passion;

Catlike in their hue and fashion;

Which to some suggest resistance,

And to some respectful distance.

With his cheek if art can grapple,

Paint it like a stale pine-apple,

Blotched, and mountainous and yellow,

Never blushing (trust the fellow)

Save when liquor spreads the rose

Sidewards from his blushing nose.

Deeply in your medium dip

When you paint the blubber lip,

Mute, yet eloquent of sin,

Blistered with sulphuric gin.

Paint a bloated figure-head,

As found drowned in Thames’ bed.

Let a flashy kerchief deck

Hippopotamus’s neck.

Paint a chest, the dread of Peelers,

Paint his vice-like, vicious feelers,

Paint his legs, short, bowed, and staunch;

Paint a bacchanalian paunch,

Pity that you cannot turn,

Paint at once both stem and stern;

With those pockets, which in doubt

Beaks and traps turn inside out,

Keeping snugly under hatches

Centrebits, and files and matches,

Crowbars, keys and all the things

Good for opening locks and springs.

Paint me last those high-low’d feet

Wary of policeman’s beat.

When you’ve finished my commission,

Take it to the Exhibition.

Surely their Hanging Committee

Must on William Sykes take pity,

Else you might break in by night

And unfix some city knight,

Some lock-jawed pre-Raphaelite,

Some interior, landscape, plan,

“Portrait of a gentleman.”

So may soar in pride of place

Our Bill Sykes’s gallows face,

Not transported, but in fine

Hung precisely on the line.

But, in sober earnest, I think the portrait of Ticket-of-leave, if it appeared on the walls of the Royal Academy, might produce unpleasant consequences to ladies in an interesting condition, as happened when Æschylus brusquely exhibited his Eumenides at Athens, so great a horror has been engendered in the public mind by the creature’s late misdoings. The word “ticket” was not in very good odour before, between pawnbrokers’ tickets and lottery tickets. But it was only disreputable; now it has become formidable. People will ask tremblingly for tickets of leave for admission to lectures, concerts, and the opera. They will fancy that every person travelling by railroad in possession of his ticket, bears also a ticket-of-leave; and should the omnibus companies adopt them, as in Paris, they will certainly prove fatal to their traffic. Joking apart, I am not sorry, for some reasons, for this panic and its causes. It serves to explode, with other things that have occurred of late, the bubbles of progress and human perfectibility. The other day we were almost argued into a belief in universal peace, and we have been disenchanted by a war as barbaric as any that has been waged before in pomp and circumstance. Now people are beginning to grow sick of the humanity-hobby, and to allow that after all there are some worse remedies for moral disease than honest hanging. Calcraft is likely to have his declining years consoled by an increasing reverence for his profession, and even to be looked upon in the end as a most indispensable member of society. The “London Scoundrel,” if his language was as unobjectionable as his real meaning, has a chance of finding an echo in the popular heart, for the sovereign people has as much objection as any other monarch to have its prerogatives invaded by having its gullet compressed, or its ten-pound house burglariously entered. Domitian fell when he began to be an object of terror to the cobblers, and so, it is to be hoped, will that modern Domitian, the ticket-of-leave man. He has at length succeeded in moving the masses, and the masses will come down on his head and crush him. Things were, indeed, come to a pretty pass. It required almost court interest to get hanged, and to get transported for life nearly as much as would suffice to get a subordinate clerkship in the Treasury. The judges seemed to have got universally bitten with the mania for lecturing, and a lecture from the bench was the panacea for all weaknesses which endangered or destroyed the lives and properties of peaceable subjects. Sent to jail, the prisoner was petted, and every encouragement given him to renew his visit. In the severest light, he was only looked upon as a patient, put upon the moral sick-list, and dieted with the same care and tenderness that patients are in the best regulated hospitals, so that there was often rather more trouble in getting him out than there was in getting him in. Not that matters are very much mended as yet. Notwithstanding the feeding and the petting, there are a class of detenus who, like spirited footmen, do not much like indoor work, or too much of it at one time. A craving for physical and intellectual exercise impels them to seek for means of release. Their trump cards in playing this trick are the chaplain and the doctor, or both, one after the other. The king and queen are played, and then to follow suit out comes the knave. Bill Sykes is contrite, avows that his late course of life is a warning to him, carefully stifles oaths unutterable, before uttered in conversation with the chaplain, the king of hearts. Chaplain pleads for his release, and half believes that he will go to the Antipodes, if he goes at all, only as a missionary. Doctor, an old woman, of course, and so of the feminine gender, the queen of hearts, feels his pulse, looks at his tongue, thinks prison-fare, confinement, and early hours are destroying his constitution and affecting his spirits. Doctor advises change of air and scene for the invalid, and so the patient leaves the hospital. A month afterwards back he comes again, being taken ill of a burglary, committed in delicate health at twelve o’clock on a night in January, and maliciously reported by the people in his own neighbourhood to be a dangerous character, albeit in official estimation a saintly valetudinarian.^[3]

In the days of our fathers the ends of justice were defeated by making the punishments for crime not so much too heavy as too indiscriminating. Now they are defeated not so much by being too light as also by being too indiscriminating. Yet given the proper amount of discrimination, and they would still carry a little extra weight with advantage. The great mistake is in regarding the offence and not the offender. The adage that one man may steal an ox, while another is hanged for looking over the hedge, is an illustration of our criminal code as applied in past and present times.

During the Great Exhibition, a gentleman of good family got into a passion with a policeman who attempted to stop his horses, most probably adding some of the insolence of office, and cut him over the face with his whip. His offence was grave, but without malice prepense. The magistrate sent him to prison, and treated him like a common felon; and the newspapers eulogised the bright example of equal justice to rich and poor, and adjudged the administrator of the law a place in history beside Judge Gascoyne, who committed the king’s son. But in their intercourse with the professional ruffian, the skins of “unboiled lobsters” are not rated at so high a figure. Then they do not appear in the light of inviolable tribunes of the people. Some time ago I recollect reading of a wretch called Cannon, who infested Southwark, and was the bugbear of the street in which he lived by a habit he had of butting the passers-by with his head like a bull, establishing, by the terror of his name, a Cannon Street of his own on the Surrey side of the water. This Minotaur, often convicted, nearly killed a policeman in the execution of his duty, and evidently intended to do it outright. He was neither hanged nor transported, and so trivial was his sentence that it is the only circumstance of the case which has faded from my memory.

There was a yet more flagrant case the other day. It is so choice a morceau to illustrate my position, that I have copied it circumstantially, if not verbatim, from the Times.

Middlesex Sessions. Before the Assistant-Judge at the Guildhall, Westminster.

Mary Horrigan, 17, and John Regan, 24 (lady first, gentleman afterwards), were indicted for unlawfully (!) assaulting and beating William Thorne, a constable of the Metropolitan force, whilst in the execution of his duty; and the prisoner Regan was further indicted for unlawfully assaulting and wounding George Anderson. The circumstances were these. Regan went to light his dudheen (he is an Emerald-Islander from his name) at the shop of Mr Bills, fishmonger, 27 Great Wild Street, Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields; Anderson (probably a Northerner), the fishmonger’s assistant, being engaged very properly in sweeping the shop. He went outside with the sawdust, and the Hibernian hit him on the mouth. Next day Regan, still unsatisfied, came again and brought a shillelah; Anderson dodged the shillelah; and then Regan hit him on the mouth again with his fist. Thorne, the policeman, who was on duty near, was called in; Regan came in without being called, and Anderson, being at home, naturally followed, Regan observing to him in strong language, “I’ll have your life before 12 o’clock to-night; you had better get the police to watch, for your life is in my hands.” Upon this Thorne, who knew the antecedents of the Regan, went to the station-house for more power, and returned to Wild Street with P. C. Williams, 133 F. They saw the Regan in Lincoln Street flourishing his sapling in one hand and a big knife in the other, apparently prepared for all emergencies. He was heard to exclaim that he would have the something’s life, and that he should like to see the policeman who would dare to take him. Thorne said that he would venture to attempt it, and caught hold of his shillelah-arm, when Regan made a pass at him with the knife, saying, “There, take a bit of cold steel.” The knife passed through his great-coat, but fortunately coming in contact with one of the metal buttons of the under coat, was bent. The Regan gave a fiendish howl, calling to some one to go and fetch Mike. Enter the Horrigan, a nymph doubtless inferior in reputation to the general run of her sisters of the sister isle, armed with a brindled bull-terrier, who answered to the abbreviation of the archangel’s name. She did not merely set him but threw him at P. C. Williams, who was helping Thorne to pacify the Regan. The dog seized Williams by the leg and forced him to let go the other brute, and Thorne was knocked down and kicked; the frail prisoner encouraging his male assailants to “give it him.” In the affray the prisoners were rescued by a large crowd of companions. The dog bit Thorne’s leg several times before he could get away. How these wild beasts were caught at last does not appear. The Saxon jury found Horrigan guilty of a common assault, and the Regan of all the counts.

What was the sentence? Did the Assistant-Judge put on the black cap and condemn Regan to hang by the neck till he was dead, and Horrigan to be whipped and put to bed? Not a bit of it. He did not do much, but he said a great deal. He was bitten, like Sir Robert Peel, with the lecturing mania.

“The assistant Judge said that the prisoner Regan was a most dangerous character (a new light having dawned upon him); for within the last six years he had been convicted no less than nine times for assaults on the police, and he had been dealt with by magistrates (very mild ones) in summary convictions; he had aimed a blow at the policeman with a knife (fact), which had providentially (very proper) been stopped by a button (bathos), or there could be but little doubt that it would have penetrated the flesh (knives will do so), and caused the man to drop down dead (another possibility approaching to probability), in which case he would have been tried (certainly) and hanged for murder (by no means so certainly.) Such offences must be visited with a long imprisonment (a little stronger), and he therefore sentenced him to imprisonment and hard labour for eighteen calendar (not lunar) months. As the Jury (gentle jury) had only found Horrigan guilty of a common assault (a little sarcastic), he should sentence her to imprisonment (poor caged dove!) for four months (three times four make twelve, and twelve months a year, and seventeen years Miss Horrigan’s life; so that, should she expire at the expiration of her term, a one-and-fortieth portion of her valuable life will have to pass in duresse. Poor Miss Horrigan!)”

I suppose I need not tell you, Irenæus, that the parentheses are my own. The magistrate made a proper distinction between sauce for the goose and sauce for the gander; but he did not spice it highly enough for either. He should have kept a rod in pickle for the woman, and the man he should certainly have promoted to the post of honour par excellence. Among certain savages people change names as the Germans drink brotherhood, by way of compliment. I do not know the name of the assistant Judge; but I think yours, Irenæus, would suit him to a nicety, and you had better take his. On the part of those who execute and administer the law, this tenderness towards malefactors is more intelligible than it is in the case of other members of society. Were the abolition of the police force voted by public acclamation to-morrow, each man agreeing to watch for himself over his own person and property, and at liberty to do justice to any extent on all aggressors, there is no doubt about it that all crime would quickly cease, as the criminals are, after all, a ridiculous minority of the people, as may be judged by the statistics of the memorable 10th of April 1848, when the peace-keepers mustered as ten to one to the peace-disturbers; and this is one great argument in favour of an unpaid magistracy and an unpaid constabulary. In Guernsey, where, to the best of my knowledge—and I speak from information gained many years ago—the police functions are undertaken by amateurs, no such outrages on person or property are ever heard of. It was even a dangerous matter then to attempt a comparatively innocent lark in a place where any one convicted of breaking a lamp had to pay for all the lamps broken since the last conviction, and where some of our party nearly frightened to death, or to taking a fishing-boat to France in stormy weather, a fellow-undergraduate—who had broken a lamp by accident, while engaged in the edifying amusement of displacing the lamp-covers—by forging a summons from the Royal Court of Guernsey, with “God save the Queen” in large letters at the bottom. We were nearly overdoing the joke, for our friend was on the way to the Royal Court to make a clean breast of it; and when we told him we had concocted the summons ourselves, he was for some time too frightened to believe it, and might have implicated the whole party. It must be borne in mind that the abolition of a criminal population would lead to an economical outcry for the abolition of all paid magistrates and paid policemen, and we cannot expect that a class of men will take pains to destroy their own body, although such conduct is not unheard of in individuals. It is only on such a principle that we can account for the existence in the heart of our civilisation of that imperium in imperio—the kleptocracy of England—the definite number of thousands of convicted thieves at large, somewhat outnumbering, I believe, the legislative body of Athenian citizens, all “known to the police,” and yet living in perfect security under the wing and eyes of the law, until they commit some fresh escapade. Surely it is nonsense to talk of habeas corpus in reference to these gentry. We expect too much of human nature. We expect men-catchers as a body to be more disinterested than rat-catchers. And rat-catchers, it is well known, have a habit of transferring the rodential population of one barn to another, that they may get another job. This is quite enough to account for the ticket-of-leave system.

We have probably the finest detective police in the world; the trouble they take in tracing crime, and bringing it home to the offender, is scarcely credible to any one who does not know the facts, or has not read Dickens’s masterly sketches of their proceedings. The detective, like a stanch huntsman, runs his fox to earth, digs him out, bags him, but then bolts him for another run. Thus the same fox, like the carted deer, will serve for many days’ sport, and perhaps grow old in the service, and get to enjoy the chase as much as those who pursue him. The public, however, have begun to grow rather weary of this fun, crying “what is sport to you is death to us,” and adopting the ultima ratio of writing letters to the Times and other newspapers, proposing ingenious plans for self-defence, and even retaliation,—some of them likely to be considered by the mealy-mouthed as a little bordering on the diabolical. For instance, one correspondent of the Morning Post proposes that persons going about London or its suburbs by night, should wear an antigarotte collar, on the principle of the collars worn by sheep-dogs in the Pyrenees to protect them from wolves; the said collar to be set round with barbed fish-hooks, which will fix themselves under the epidermis of the human boa constrictor’s hands when he attempts to throttle, and the said fish-hooks to be previously prepared by taking them to the nearest dissecting-room, and steeping them in some decomposed subject, so that the garotter will be certain to die under the poison, as occasionally happens to medical students who unwarily prick their fingers in dissection. A correspondent of the Times, more mild in disposition, advises holding the chin tight to the chest and shouting for the police (who of course are in the area-kitchen below, but too well occupied to hear). Another, more practical, recommends that a wrestling dodge should be tried on the garotter, the patient throwing back his right leg, and entwining it with that of the operator, who will thus be thrown on his back, with the patient above him, to work his will on him. Another suggests to the consideration of athletic persons like you, Irenæus, the possibility of catching the arm of the operator, and holding it tight, bending the back and throwing him over the head of the intended victim, breaking his back against the flags, if possible, in the fall. Another suggests wearing hob-nailed boots, and shin-kicking; another, of Levantine propensities, a dirk in the sleeve. I wonder that none of them has suggested, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief, the dog-fancier. I would buy the ugliest procurable bull-dog, crossed in one generation with a terrier, faithful and stanch, and sure to make his teeth meet in the calf of any aggressor. It is pleasanter to get rough work done for one than to do it oneself. That Mike who figured in our police report, would be exactly the fellow for us; the only fear is, that he would recognise his older master in the garotter, and as the Saxons treated Napoleon at Leipsic, go over to the enemy in the crisis of action.

With respect to burglars, it is really time, now that one policeman has been convicted of burglary, for the public to take the law into their own hands. It has been done in one or two instances, where we would least expect it, by the softer sex. One young lady having found the head of a man poking through the shutter, diminished it, as the classics would say, with a crowbar; another, rather too precipitous, and without asking “wha it is at my bower door?” shot her unexpected sweetheart, not named Finlay, in mistake for the expected cracksman. Chains, bolts, and locks are of little use, except to make a noise. Bells are troublesome for the servants to put up, and give false alarms in windy nights. I propose three things. A little dog, a big dog, and a revolver. The little dog to wake the big one, who sleeps soundly, especially after dinner, and the big dog to wake the many-mouthed barker, and assist in a scuffle, if a scuffle ensues. As a further precaution, I would suggest some rather unintelligible notice, such as “burglars decimated on these premises,” large enough to be read by moonlight; if in Runic characters, so much the better, for crime is naturally superstitious. Timid persons might act in this way, but bolder ones might sit up in ambush, place some plate on the hall table, and leave a window temptingly open, trusting to their accuracy of fire to give a good account of the intruder, when once in their power. As I observed before, the interest the constabulary and magistracy take in the preservation, propagation, and general encouragement of blackguards is perfectly intelligible; it would be even more so if, like the preservers of game, they had a battue for their amusement once in a way; but much less intelligible to me is the interest that the humanitarians and model-prison people take in the same direction. Those persons who are for reforming the human race, should reflect that we all want reform more or less, and efforts of that kind are much more likely to be successful with the simply vicious, like nineteen in every twenty of us, than with the wholly criminal. But benevolence must be eccentric to gain a hearing in Exeter Hall. As Thomas Carlyle justly observes in his Latter Day pamphlets, these jail-sweepings are the worst possible investment for benevolence. These people might as well invest their money in coaches to oppose the rail, but that in simply worldly matters they are far more sagacious. But it is intolerable that they should exercise their Promethean philanthropic turn to the detriment of society at large, furnishing a premium on crime, and putting it into the heads of quiet Dorsetshire labourers that it pays better to break the law and get into Pentonville prison, than to attempt to support a wife and family by honest labour on twelve shillings a-week. A “Dorsetshire labourer,” writing to the Times, has discovered that the detenus (I use the polite French word) in that Model prison get each for the sum of his rations for fifteen months 213 pounds of beef, 248 pounds of mutton, 81 pounds of beef-shins for soup, and for luncheons and severe teas no less than 655 mutton chops, 432 pints of porter, extra allowance. How these figures would have made the mouths of our poor heroes in the Crimea water, whom we were starving while we petted our criminals! What a frightful expenditure of honest stolid oxen, and innocent sheep and lambs, and sound wholesome malt, on dishonest men, ox-like only in their stolidity, sheepish only in their hypocrisy, and committing positive sacrilege while they unappreciatingly imbibed the heavy-wet which furnishes thews and sinews to the ploughman or the artisan! What a holocaust of God’s creatures offered on the altar of his enemy! The bread of affliction and the water of affliction is the proper diet for these worthies, not bœuf à-la-mode, or cotelettes à la jardinière, or Barclay and Perkins’ extra stout. Why did they not do the thing well at once, and order them rations of Burgundy, venison, and turtle? They might by these means make them too aldermanic to commit any of the more active crimes again, especially if the treadmill be abolished, and thereby benefit society; whereas by only going half-way they merely keep them in good condition, good working order for committing fresh offences. And any parsimony is unaccountable, considering that the money lavished on the appetites of these hungry villains does not come out of the pockets of the visiting magistrates, except so far as they are units in the aggregate of the tax-payers of Great Britain. On the whole, I think it would have been decidedly more economical to have ordered them ortolans, truffles, and hock, and champagne to wash them down with. They will perhaps balance the account better in future. I have been lately much struck with the extreme tenderness of our age and nation, and reluctance to take human life when it has become worthless both to the individual and to society, as contrasted with men’s extreme heedlessness of exposing valuable human life, or letting it go to be destroyed by a hundred preventible accidents. While it requires almost Court interest to get hanged, the commonest regulations to insure the safety of railway passengers are disregarded; and during the continuance of the late gales it was perfectly awful to read the list of shipwrecks, where all on board perished, including two crews of heroes who went in life-boats to rescue seamen in distress, most of which might be prevented by the construction of harbours of refuge along the coast at proper intervals by the very hands of the very scoundrels in question, forced into doing some good to their kind against their will. Even Palmer seemed to have some chance of getting off, when a short time before we had sacrificed the flower of our army by the most abominable official mismanagement. And although such an argument would not have much weight with the peace-party, who would endure all things without flinching, both from Russians and rascals, it seems to me a much stronger measure to sacrifice some thousands of good men and true, both of ourselves and of the enemy, in an international war, than to obliterate judicially a few hundreds of scoundrels who are doing all the harm they can to society. But I am not advocating at present severe measures. I only ask, why it is necessary to pet criminals? why, instead of putting them out of harm’s way, they are put in harm’s way as much as possible by Pentonville indulgences, tickets of leave, and the like, perpetuating the corruptions of a society quite bad enough if left to its mere vices, and multiplying it as they perpetuate it, each criminal forming a nucleus round which others may gather, like cases of sporadic cholera, until they have gained such a head that they are too much for us all, and will be calling out, when Lord John Russell’s new Reform scheme comes on, for members analogous to those of the Universities to represent their corporate body, perhaps even for life-peerages for their higher graduates? Imagine Bill Sykes, Member for the “Minority”^[4] of Lambeth, and my Lords Erebus and Terror sitting cheek-by-jowl with the Archbishop of Canterbury! Or, perhaps, these gentlemen will end by swelling tickets-of-leave to the dimensions of the Red Spectre of Paris, and after a few days of barricades and blood, we shall find installed in the new palace of Westminster, a select provisional government of garotters, burglars, and murderers! There would be no question then of the social position of our humanitarian apostles, for even the moderados of villany will be superseded by the exaltados and swindlers; fraudulent bankers and adulterators of food will find themselves, for the first time, in the company of honest men, swept away in the general deluge. These people are either to be punished or not to be punished. If they have done nothing worthy of death or bonds, but only contracted a kind of moral measles which will give way to kind treatment and easy remedies, why put them in the close air of a prison at all? The virtue of a close sick-room is entirely exploded in the medical world, and only lingers in the opinions of superannuated monthly nurses. Why not put money in their purses, and pay their passages to some country where their antecedents are not known, and they will have a chance of living by honest means, which they have not here, even if they were to wish it? Why condemn them, if they do not wish to punish them, to the moral disease in perpetuity, inoculating others at the same time? Is it that they wish to keep them as interesting specimens, too valuable to the moral physiologist to be let go? If so, it is really time to interfere with the tastes of these pseudo-philanthropists, and to tell them that society has the same objection to their museums of abomination under its nose, as it has to tanyards and slaughter-houses near the public thoroughfares, or the putrifaction of the body of the great river-god who dwells in the Thames. As Gulliver recoiled from the embrace of the philosophers of Laputa, so will society recoil from the contact of those humanitarians who are engaged in a task of reconstruction or regeneration, equally hopeless, and equally offensive to the public senses. But and if these persons deserve punishment condign—if there is such a thing, and I am old-fashioned enough to believe it, as justice, human and divine—if impunity in crime inevitably reacts to the deterioration of human society, and pagan Nemesis has a living existence even for those who have discarded the divine authority of the Old Testament, I do think that nearly all the punishments enacted by law for offences, at least as administered by our magistrates, are most silly and inadequate; powerless, both for prevention and cure, and only calculated to reproduce the evil they profess to abate. A system which would be comparatively harmless in a country of sparse population like Norway or Canada, becomes multifariously pernicious in a bee-hive of human beings like that in which it is our destiny to breathe or try to breathe. It was a great principle with that famous schoolmaster Dr Arnold, who was withal a most humane and charitable man, in his conduct of a public school, to get rid as soon as possible of all pupils who, from his knowledge of human nature, he saw to be doing more harm than good to their companions and themselves by remaining, even before they were convicted of any overt infraction of law. Not that such cases are necessarily irreclaimable, but that in such a crowded place, the worst chance of reformation is given them, and the evil they do to others is indefinitely multiplied. With private tutors, or under the eye of parents, they might do better. He judged very much from physiognomy and physiology, nor was he often wrong. The consequence of his judicious system of weeding was, that he sent out into the world, as the rule, a class of high-minded and virtuous students, though, in the innocence of their hearts, generally Whigs and something more, being led to believe that the world in general was as much to be trusted as themselves, and their friends, and their beloved master. What is the population of London at the present day? How much above two millions, which is about the whole population of Norway? The drainage of the vast metropolis is a difficult problem in these days, but how much more difficult the problem of keeping the great Babylon sweet with such a cesspool of moral miasma festering in its vitals? Even a simple alien act, giving the executive the power of dismissing them from the focus of centralisation, would be better than the present system, as they would be easier to deal with when scattered abroad, and not living in a compact phalanx of opposition to all good government, shoulder to shoulder, as at present. It is perfectly frightful to think that the worst criminals are now often rescued from the officers of justice by a mob of bystanders, which implies that every individual in it is either a contemptible coward, or sympathises to the full extent with the crime they are committing. I should think, in charity to human nature, the former supposition the more probable, the metropolitan population having been panic-stricken by the long-continued impunity of those who set the law at defiance. Some time ago one Italian stabbed another in Rupert Street, and no one dared, although many persons witnessed the attempt at murder, to assist the police in arresting the offender. This is nearly as bad as the state of things said to exist at Rome, where the witnesses of an assassination run away as fast as they can, because it is the rule to arrest the nearest person on suspicion. British freedom is no doubt a fine thing, but like other fine things it has its drawbacks. It is one thing to leave the press unfettered and suppress the press-gang, and another to leave a university of convicted malefactors chartered and privileged to educate the young, and grant degrees to the old, in the heart of our metropolis: a Stinkomalee of rascaldom acting quite as much under the sanction of Government as Lord Brougham’s creation in Gower Street. This unquestionably diabolical university has more colleges than Oxford and Cambridge put together. It has its St Giles’ college, which answers to Christ Church or Trinity; its Bethnal Green college; its Tooley Street college; its City of London college; its slow colleges and fast colleges; its aristocratic Belgravian college, and its ecclesiastical Westminster college, a truly close foundation; its suburban colleges, situated half-pleasantly in the country, like St John’s, and Worcester, and Wadham at Oxford. It has its professors, who are better paid than ours at Oxford—professors of burglary, professors of highway robbery, professors of the gentler art of picking pockets, professors of stealing and receiving stolen goods, many of them on a more liberal principle than that adopted by our old universities—dissenters from the Church of England, and even of the Hebrew persuasion—and it has its realisation of the dreams of Mrs Colonel Bloomer in a strong staff of rights-of-women female professors, abominable she-devils who, having passed through and outlived every phase of infamy themselves, make it the last business of their lives to indoctrinate innocent freshwomen from the English counties, and if they cannot succeed in tempting them to moral suicide at home, do not scruple to use force and pack them off to Hamburg or Paris to be drugged and terrified into children of hell. Surely, if such an university must exist, it is strange that it is not thought advisable to put it under Government superintendence, and appoint regius professorships of Desmoterian History and Pastoral Demonology; Readerships in the “Mysteries of London,” the “Newgate Calendar,” and the “Memoirs of Harriet Wilson;” fellowships of felons, vacated like an Oxford fellowship by matrimony, but by no means by any of its imitations; chairs of Theoretical Toxicology and Clinical practice, combined with the whole art of child-murder. We cannot help wondering at the disinterestedness of a ministry, and that a Whig ministry, which overlooks such an abundantly fertile field of patronage, and so splendid an opportunity of providing outlying relatives and dependents at the expense of the nation. And what a fatal mistake it was to hang Palmer! He was just the man for the Chancellor of this liberal university of Alsatia, for that must be its most unchristian name. But to speak more seriously, if British freedom is not competent to put down such a state of things, and is for ever condemned to halt on one side, going about like the goddess Pœna of Horace, with a club-foot, would it be so very strong a measure to perform Tiefenbach’s operation on British freedom, and cut the shrunken sinew, or to put it on horseback and give it free action for a limited period? The Romans used to appoint a dictator in times of emergency whenever there was a Gallicus tumultus (which we might translate a French émeute), or even for the purpose of driving a nail into some door, and yet Roman freedom emerged from the temporary eclipse as bright as ever, perhaps even clearer and brighter. Might we not appoint a dictator for the purpose of knocking the nail on the head once for all, a strong responsible Hercules, who would turn the New River into the Augean stable of our social nuisances, and sweep them away once and for ever? Such men are to be found; at all events we might find a brook which would do the work of Hercules’s river, even Rajah Brooke of Borneo, the man who destroyed by one blast, like that of the destroying angel, some thousands of pestilent pirates. Such a man would, I take it, make short work with the “characters known to the police.” He might proceed either by secret fraud or open force. I should think he would prefer the latter. He might either, as Lord Shaftesbury did, call a public meeting of thieves, say in St Martin’s Hall, surround them with soldiers, and destroy them, as the Corcyræan democratical party in Thucydides did their political opponents; or he might lay all the heavy lighters in the Thames, which are so much in the way of its navigation, under an embargo, and have such a noyade at the river’s mouth as would turn the Goodwin Sands into corn and pasture land, superseding from thenceforth all necessity for lighthouses—an immense saving to the nation, and rendering the destruction of the villains of one generation a blessing to posterity, and a source of permanent security to mariners of all nations! And he would surely make short work of the tumbling down of all those streets, alleys, and courts of the metropolis known to be inhabited only by two-legged, four-legged, and six-legged vermin, scorching their sites with fire, and sowing the contaminated ground with salt; and he would burn with fire the gin-palaces, or Persian Jin-temples—(what a glorious illumination they would make, far better than that we had for the Peace!)—and feed the flames of their burning with all the poisoned products concocted by our adulterators of food, till all are consumed, the usual consumers standing by and applauding their great deliverance; and he would break down all the altars of Mormonism, Socialism, and hideous Infidelity, and burn Holywell Street with fire, and scatter to the winds the ashes of all ungodly and immoral publications, both letter-press and pictorial; and purify with the waters of lustration, so as to make them available for honest purposes, the Circumlocution offices, the Stock Exchange, the sanctimonious Banks, &c. &c.; in short, he would do all desirable good, and do away with all undesirable evil. And then, after his London season was over, during the continuance of which we would put the town in a state of siege, we would send him to star it in the provinces, and, to the tune of solemn music, perform the same office of lustration by all the other great towns of the British empire. I fear that were such a proposition mooted in the Imperial Parliament, it would be pooh-pooh’d by the Ministry, and received with derisive cheers by the Opposition, and voted unconstitutional by all, the consideration of it being perpetually adjourned to this day six months; and yet it is difficult to see how it can be any use to entertain the question of what we shall do with our criminals, without some such preliminary expurgation and purification.

Just as all measures for the diminution of the burden of our taxation are frustrated by the incubus of the national debt, so must all measures for the disposition of our rascals be rendered abortive by the enormous stock of them in hand becoming more morally putrescent and offensive the longer they endure, and effectually stopping the way of all sanitary and salutary improvement. It would seem, indeed, somewhat desirable that all questions of the day, now that the Russians have given us a little breathing-time, should be postponed to this, that our lay Legislature should turn away their attention from Committees of Supply, and our bench of Bishops from deciding on Liddell and Westerton, Ditcher and Denison cases, questions about more or less candles on the altar, boughs or flowers in the church, presence or absence of a cross, until this awful Frankenstein-ghost of our social condition is effectually exorcised and sent back to the place whence it came. But grant, for supposition’s sake, that it be done, that we have thus had one thorough sweeping and cleaning, painting and whitewashing, so as to be able to keep our house in order for the future by ordinary sweeping down of cobwebs, and the time come for us to consider what we are to do with our criminals, I should very much like to hear what your cool head and practical wisdom, Irenæus, has to say on this subject; and awaiting your reply, I venture, in the mean time, to lay before you my ruminations on this all-important matter. We must first take a glance at the nature of crime. Now crime is happily not the rule but the exception with men; it is otherwise with vice. Most men are more or less vicious, from those who suffer from delirium tremens down to those who take snuff; but few men, and fewer women, are criminal. Those that are so make such a fuss in the world, and succeed so well in establishing their importance, that they seem much more numerous than they are. The criminal classes, then, may be divided into the corrigible and the incorrigible, as, indeed, may the vicious classes, to which you and I belong, being one of us affected with the cacoethes scribendi, and the other with the evil habit of taking tobacco; and corrigible crime partakes of the nature of vice, just as incorrigible vice partakes of the nature of crime, and is apt to be resolved into it, as all the diseases of Athens were resolved into the plague. This division is, of course, as old as the hills and Aristotle, and I do not lay the slightest claim to originality in making it. Now it seems to me that our laws, in dealing with offences rather than offenders, take no cognisance of this division of human character, as to corrigible and incorrigible, except accidentally, and perhaps only by rule, in one case, that of homicide, where malice prepense is supposed to give it the character of wilful murder. But it strikes me that a murderer is by no means of necessity an incorrigible character, though the punishment of death may be just as the lowest in proportion to his offence. A man has sustained some grievous wrong from another, say that a scamp has run away with his wife; he cherishes his vengeance, he bides his time, he watches for him, and without going through the etiquette of a formal challenge, shoots him as you and I would be sorry to shoot a dog. Well, that man is a murderer, and I do not deny that, for the safety of society, he ought to be hung, and yet I know that he has lived honourably hitherto, if not very religiously and faithfully, in all the relations of life. He is certainly by no means one of the incorrigible class, nor is, as far as we can see, the forgiveness of Heaven out of the reach of his repentance. But here is a miscreant who has committed no act of violence, and whom, but for his aquiline features, you might take for a seedy dissenting minister, whose life has been passed till he is grey in discounting bills for foolish youths, and making them and their families miserable for life. He does not perhaps even cheat in his vile trade, but he pinches and pares and tortures with interest and compound interest, perhaps, in some cases, making the greenhorn into a parricide in thought by his post-obits, a fair specimen of an accomplished usurer, placed by Dante in a circle of the Inferno inhabited by very bad company indeed, and pelted with flakes of fiery snow. Well, I say that this man, though scarcely a lawbreaker, is an incorrigible criminal, an enemy of his kind, and it would be no more than justice to deal with him accordingly. Or take the case of thieving: one man steals a sheep, as Charles II. did at Boscobel, because he wants it to eat, or his little ones want it: he is corrigible. Another steals a widow’s mite in a bank, having seduced her into trusting him with it by a life of religious hypocrisy: this man is incorrigible, or corrigible only by the crank and a long course of penal discipline. Or take the very bad case of poisoning: a young woman was hung some years ago at Bristol for poisoning an old one who had frightfully and systematically maltreated her: no doubt the law did right, if it is right to hang women at all; but I do not look upon the case as necessarily incorrigible. But look at the case of a baker or a grocer who poisons the food of multitudes, at all events succeeding so far that he injures their health, and all for the sake of making a slight profit, from utter, cold, unmitigated selfishness. I say that such a man is incorrigible, and deserves to be hung, though whether or not it would be expedient to hang him is another question. Again, there is a manifest difference between old and young offenders committing the same crime, and I believe the usual practice recognises this difference. It does indeed seem to me unjust to punish at all little children, whom, in the spirit of our glorious constitution, we have left to be brought up by vicious parents, without being taught the difference between right and wrong, or rather, with having been taught to transpose these from the very first. We are all by nature liars and thieves, as much as these little children, and unless we had been taken in hand by kind parents and friends, who imitated in this only the example of a Greater, who ordered little children to be brought to Him, we should inevitably have grown up in the same moral ignorance. At the same time, a certain weight must be given to the fact that vice engenders vice as virtue does virtue, and that the human race is brutified by generations of evil living, as it deteriorates by living in a bad climate for many generations. The low stupid animal configuration is a sad puzzle to the philanthropist, the ragged schoolmaster, and the keeper of the juvenile prison; and the actually abandoned children of the metaphorically abandoned, appear often as hopeless of receiving instruction in better things as the Bushman or the New Guinea savage. Not that we need absolutely despair of any human being who retains a vestige of the human, which is indeed also a vestige of the godlike. He is still something more than an ourang-outang. Only when he fairly declares war against society, we have a manifest right to take his life, as we have the life of our enemies in international war, and on the principle of self-defence, not only against physical injury, but moral contamination. Now war is declared against society by certain definite overt acts, such as murder, and the existence of the incorrigible character, perpetually asserting, whether with truth or not, its incorrigibility. Although some who commit great crimes are doubtless corrigible, yet the world is not strong enough to pardon them, considering the greatness, or rather extreme dangerousness, of the acts they commit. And it is not the danger to life and property on which I would lay the greatest stress; it is the danger of their example to the crowd of waverers between guilt and innocence, which in fact comprises perhaps a quarter of mankind. Now, as long as they live, they are objects of a certain interest, and at least noticeable; whereas, had they ceased to live, they would be virtually and personally forgotten. If Madame Laffarge had been put to death for the poisoning of her husband, the crime of poisoning would have been in a manner put to death with her; whereas her perpetual imprisonment is a perpetual reminder of her offence. But it seems to some hard to put to death political offenders. So it is, if we consider the persons only and not the offence. But rebellion against established government is an act so very inconvenient to the interests of society that the law is doubtless in the right in making it a capital offence. And yet a rebel may be a glorious hero and genuine patriot. But no one ought to be allowed to assume this character cheaply. If he plays at all, he must stake his all, and be prepared, if he loses, for loss of head and confiscation of property. I readily admit that he may be a holy martyr if he loses, even as he is sure to be a very great man indeed if he wins: but no less should be the stake he plays for. Although I have a very high opinion of the French Emperor, and think that, having won, he most fully deserves to wear the position he holds, I think he would equally have deserved a bullet or the guillotine had he been unlucky. Nothing has done more harm in the case of murder than the foolish plea of insanity, and I do, from my heart, hope that Verger will suffer death for the murder of the Archbishop of Paris, a crime indeed complicated with sacrilege as committed at the altar of God, and parricide as committed by a priest against a spiritual father. The weak conduct of the poor Archbishop to this ungrateful ruffian, in suffering him to be appointed to a cure of souls, in spite of his manifest incorrigibleness, was well commented upon by the Times, and illustrates forcibly my general position. The man who murdered Mr Drummond some years ago (Macnaughten) ought to have been hung, as he had destroyed his moral sense by bad habits before he became insane, and his madness was evidently the child of his badness. Between the labials b and m there is not so wide a difference that the words are not often interchanged, and it would do no great harm in the world to kill, once in the way, a mad murderer, even if he is morally innocent, while it is productive of unending harm to suffer a bad one, who is assuredly morally guilty, to escape. It seems to me, then, that murder, no matter whether its subject be corrigible or not, always demands death; in case of treason the sentence must depend on political expediency. Our Government was quite strong enough to pardon Smith O’Brien, and doubtless did infinitely more good by remitting his sentence than by executing it; but still he would have no reason to complain had he been shot after a court-martial, by Inspector Trant, in the very cabbage-garden of the widow Cormack. Our Government did not so well in mitigating the penalties of the Chartists Frost and Co., who exposed a number of misguided men to be shot down, keeping out of fire themselves, and are still, as it appears, engaged in plotting mischief against the State. Arson should always be capital, because it is a crime of such portentous consequences, so easy to effect in these days of phosphoric appliances, and so entirely out of the pale of ordinary temptations. Whether any other offence should be punished with death should be decided by a reference to the character of the offender, and the circumstances under which it is committed. There are a great many crimes which, though slight in themselves, are evidences of a dangerous and hopeless brutality of character, and are even more so when committed in a state of intoxication, because it is in such a state that the real nature shows itself most strongly. I would cite as an example some furious assault on a wife by a drunken husband, who had starved her first to gratify his selfish appetites. Society might surely do without such a character, in a state of things where even the innocent have such a hard fight for existence. Again, it is difficult to decide on incorrigibility, and we are expressly forbidden by a higher law to judge the heart of man; but when incorrigibility is for ever declaring itself, and declaring war against society in the devil’s name, I think we should be justified, even if each overt offence were small in itself, and again, considering the difficulty of feeding our population, in putting it quietly out of the way. When Babylon was besieged, the government adopted the ungallant expedient of killing all the women except enough to bake bread for the fighting garrison; and as our modern Babylon is at present in a normal state of siege from the legions of darkness, perhaps the question is worth entertaining whether its incorrigible male population might not be abated by some short and summary method, even after our one great imaginary sweeping. Still, I will not insist on this point, for I fear to shock your feelings, Irenæus, and the prejudices which you imbibed in your early intercourse with the Society of Friends. And I cannot help imagining the reverend Celsus at my elbow with a face of unusual severity, admonishing me on religious grounds that we ought not to cut off from the wicked the hope of repentance, for we can never tell whether there be still room for it or not. Of course this argument would be tantamount to advocating the entire abolition of capital punishment. But what would you substitute? Solitary confinement? Would you convert a man by making him infallibly insane? Perpetual imprisonment and hard labour in company with others? Is he likely to think of his latter end in the company of those like himself? He is much more likely to laugh to scorn with them everything connected with it. What makes most of us so careless in these matters is, not that we believe we shall live for ever in this life, but that we do not know, for the next half-century or less, exactly when we shall die. But place certain death before our eyes at the distance of a month or so, and we should think it time, one and all, to make some arrangement of our affairs both for this world and the next. A prisoner confined in solitude or condemned to penal servitude for life is not likely to do himself any good, neither can he do good to the State, for keeping him and guarding him probably cost more than his hopeless labour. I forbear the deduction. It is a stern one, but I believe it to be true. The prisoner may ask for “a long day,” and have it, and benefit of clergy ought to be denied to none by those who have the thief on the cross before their eyes; nor ought the services of a national church, which buries all, as she baptises all, in charitable hope. Secondary punishments are of course a question of much detail and arrangement, and many plans have been proposed with regard to them, more or less sensible. It seems to me that means must be taken to banish from the country all criminals but the young and those convicted of trifling offences, or under great temptation, and to banish them for ever. First, they ought, properly classified and supervised, to be set to useful public works, and work out at home the term of their punishment, and then granted a passage to certain stated regions of the earth, not necessarily colonies, where the people would not object to receive them, if there were inhabitants already, and where they might, as it were, begin a new life under fairer auspices. Return to this country, under any circumstances whatever, should be punished by another and a very long lease of penal servitude. Nor should that penal servitude be too light, else it would be resorted to in some cases in order to effect an ultimate emigration. It should be very severe, but not untempered by relaxation both of mind and body; nor should the chaplain be the only reformer. I would have the musician, and even the actor of Shakespeare, to aid his efforts. Reparation and reformation are the two main objects of secondary punishments; nor is the more selfish protection of society, although important, to be weighed in the balance with them. If a crime is committed, according to divine law, it has to be expiated, sooner or later, in the person of the offender; and it can be no harm for human law to endeavour to be in harmony with the divine. After expiation, forgiveness may come, but not without it, both from man and God. God may forgive in any case, even the worst; but in the worst cases, man, conscious of his weakness, must submit to be unforgiving. As to lesser punishments, I have often wondered why that excellent summary process of flogging has fallen into such disrepute. Why should we have mercy on the skin of a man who has no mercy on the skin of his wife, and invest it with sacerdotal sanctity? And ought not cruelty to animals to be punished in kind, by scourging the animal that is cruel? As for the noble Stocks, which has become in most villages a significant ruin, it is a machine which seems to have been created expressly to curb the national vice of drunkenness. Put your silly Helot by all means in the stocks, and let all our young village Spartans have a good stare at him, especially at the time when he is beginning to get sick and sorry. No rotten eggs, if you please, far less a stone in a snowball! The poor fellow cannot run after you, and is sufficiently punished by the degrading exposure. I have no more time or paper, or I would say even more, Irenæus, on this subject of punishments; but I think you can see my general drift. After all, prevention is better than cure; and I would rather put another strain on our British freedom, and take away by force from their parents all the children who are being brought up under notoriously evil auspices; beginning by transporting them to be out of the way, and then bringing them back in ten or fifteen years’ time, if they wished to come back, to some other spot at home, far from the habitat of their parents, and not this till the death of their parents had been ascertained. But even they would perhaps do better in a new country, as would some of us, who have but a sort of struggle to live here, and yet very little of a moral nature the matter with us.

Farewell,

Your ever

Tlepolemus.

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