Note 245 — TRANSPORTATION (continued 5)
Reading edition
The following eloquent and touching appeal closes this very able production:—
"I am well aware of the scorn with which the main principle recognised in these pages—the reform of the culprit, is regarded by many persons. I know that the task is pronounced a hopeless, visionary one. But, that a being lives, is a Divine authority for believing him not to be beyond hopes, in which his own reclamation is implied. That the task is not an easy one, is admitted; but that is the case in reference to every other end of penal institutions as well: and, is it really so very much more difficult to reclaim a criminal than any other man given to vice? I believe not;—criminals, I think, will be found even more accessible to religious influences, sympathisingly applied, than those whose errors have had a less equivocal stamp. Their apparent hardness of heart is not always the native hardness of the rock, but more often the frozen hardness of the ice, which the sun of human sympathies may melt again. The world, accustomed to judge them harshly, to see only their crime, and to see it without its palliations—to out-cast them, makes them what they become; when instead, a discreet humanity might have converted many, after a first transgression, into useful and honored members of society.
'The tainted branches of the tree, If lopp'd with care, a strength may give, By which the rest shall bloom and live All greenly fresh and wildly free: But if the lightning in its wrath The waving boughs with fury scathe, The massy trunk the ruin feels, And never more a leaf reveals.'"
—Secondary Punishments. By Frederick Maitland Innes. 1841.