Neither is it necessary or proper to pollute the minds of our readers by entering more fully into a subject which is both painful and depressing to dwell upon.
There are, of course, degrees of morality, or rather immorality, even in the most depraved, but it is pretty generally acknowledged by prison officials that the worst characters generally belong to the class known as roughs, and the worst of all are the London roughs.
Their language, habits, and mode of life are so radically bad that they may be pronounced irreclaimable, and for this reason: they were debased and utterly lost before they reached man’s estate.
They are literally wild beasts, whose animal instincts predominate to the almost total exclusion of any intellectual or moral feeling, and with them kind words or good counsel must necessarily be thrown away.
There is but one mode of effectually dealing with them—brutes they are, and as brutes only can they be punished and coerced, and that is by the lash.
We have strong objections to flogging in the army and navy, but consider it to be the only efficient way in dealing with garrotters and ruffians who commit savage assaults upon either man or woman; in short, it is the only punishment that they dread, or that can exercise any influence as a preventive for crimes of this nature.
The man Baxter had passed through almost every gradation of crime; he had been a thief from his childhood, and so he remained upon reaching man’s estate.
He was, however, not an unmitigated ruffian.
To say the truth, there was more of the sneak about him than the ruffian. As to moral principle, he had none.
His favourite “lay” was pocketpicking, and this he had practised to an extent which might be said to be almost unlimited.