“And what is the nature of the punishments inflicted in the country of your Royal Highness’s adoption?” enquired Sir John Lascelles.
“I will tell you,” said the Prince. “In the first place we have abolished the punishment of death, as barbarian, un-Christian, and demoralizing. Murder is punished by imprisonment for life; and imprisonment, fine, confiscation of property in the cases of single men having no persons dependent on them, and the loss of civil rights—these are the penalties used amongst us. The individual who is condemned to imprisonment, is not on that account rendered an useless member of society. Every criminal gaol is an assemblage of workshops where all trades and manufactures are carried on; and each prisoner must work at his own trade, or be taught one. If he have a family out-of-doors, his earnings go to support that family: if he have none, they accumulate until the day of his release. Should he refuse to work, he is put upon bread and water; and this fare soon compels him to adopt habits of industry in order to obtain plentiful and wholesome meals. Castelcicalan prisons resemble vast factories rather than gaols; and so admirable—so salutary—so reformatory is the discipline maintained in them, that a prisoner on his emancipation finds no difficulty in obtaining work again. Employers consider, in such a case, that he has expiated an offence which should not be remembered to his prejudice; and he begins the world again with a new character. He has, as it were, passed through a criminal bankruptcy court, and obtained his certificate. Should he, however, experience any difficulty in finding employment, the local authorities are bound to supply him with work at the average rate of wages. The results of all these arrangements are striking. In the first place, a Castelcicalan prison is reformatory instead of being a sink of contaminating iniquity: secondly, a man on leaving a criminal gaol, is not forced back into the ways of vice. If he relapse, it must be through determined wickedness: but relapses are very, very rare in the Grand Duchy—for happily those individuals are few who remain in the ways of crime for crime’s sake! And now, my lord, you will perceive how far the framers of all these salutary enactments respecting prisoners and prison discipline, were indebted to the following passage in your speech:—‘The criminal laws of England are only calculated to produce widely spread demoralization—to propagate vice—to render crime terribly prolific. A man no matter what his offence may have been—should be deemed innocent and untainted again, when he has paid the penalty of his misdeeds; because to brand a human being eternally, is to fly in the face of the Almighty and assert that there should be no such thing as forgiveness, and that there is no such thing as repentance. But the nature of punishments in England is so to brand the individual, and so to dare the majesty of heaven. For the gaols are perfect nests of infamy—sinks of iniquity, imprisonment in which necessarily fastens an indelible stigma upon the individual. He either comes forth tainted; or else it is supposed that he must be so. Under these circumstances, he vainly endeavours to obtain employment; and, utterly failing in his attempt to earn an honest livelihood, he is compelled perforce to relapse into habits of crime and lawlessness. This fact accounts for an immense amount of the demoralization which the Bishops so much deplore, but the true causes of which they obstinately refuse to acknowledge. The criminal gaols are moral pest-houses, in which no cures are effected, but where the contagious malady becomes more virulent. Society should not immure offenders solely for the sake of punishment—but with a view to reformation of character.’”
“Castelcicala has the honour of having taken the initiative in all the great and glorious reforms which you suggested,” said Mr. Hatfield, turning with admiration towards the Earl of Effingham. “In England reform is much talked of; and when a small concession is made—for a concession it is in this country, to all intents and purposes—the people congratulate themselves as if their complete emancipation were at hand.”
“There is a passage in the Earl’s speech,” resumed the Prince, “which particularly struck the Grand Duke and the Ministers when they were deliberating upon the proposed reforms and ameliorations to be introduced to the Chambers. That passage ran thus:—‘When a poor man is oppressed by a rich one, it is vain and ludicrous to assert that the Courts of Law are open to him: law is a luxury in which only those who possess ample means can indulge. In a case where some grievous injury is sustained by a poor man—the seduction of his wife or daughter, for instance—redress or recompense is impossible, unless some attorney takes up the case on speculation; and this is a practice most demoralizing and pernicious. But if left entirely unassisted in that respect, the poor man can no more go to Westminster Hall than he can afford to dine at Long’s Hotel.’—Now in Castelcicala, a plan has been adopted which seems to meet the difficulties set forth in the Earl of Ellingham’s speech, and which does not involve the additional danger of rendering law so cheap as to encourage litigation in every paltry quarrel. To every Local Court are attached officers denominated the Peoples’ Attorneys-General; and any poor man having a ground of complaint against a neighbour, addresses himself to one of those officers, who immediately examines into the affair, and if he see that the plaint be well founded, he prosecutes on behalf of the poor man. These officers are paid fixed salaries by the Government, and dare not take fees. They are selected with care, and are as incapable of bribery as the judges themselves;—and thus every means is taken to guarantee the poor man justice. Seduction and adultery are not made mere pecuniary matters in Castelcicala: they are punished by imprisonment;—and the penalty is very heavy in a case where a rich man debauches a poor man’s daughter. I now pass on to the subject of Education; and your treatment of this subject, my dear Earl, in your speech, is not the least remarkable portion of the oration. You declared that ‘it was positively shocking to think that such care should be taken to convert negroes to Christianity thousands of miles off, while the most deplorable ignorance prevailed at home. The Church enjoys revenues the amount of which actually bring the ministers of the gospel into discredit, as evidencing their avaricious and grasping disposition;—while the people remain as uneducated as if not a single shilling were devoted to spiritual pastors or lay instructors.’ You boldly ‘accused both houses of Parliament and the upper classes generally of being anxious to keep the masses in a state of ignorance. Where instruction is imparted gratuitously, it is entirely of a sectarian nature; just as if men required to study grammar, history, arithmetic, or astronomy on Church of England principles. The whole land is over-run by clergymen, who live upon the fat of it—Universities and public schools have been richly endowed for the purpose of propagating knowledge and encouraging learning,—and yet the people are lamentably ignorant. It is a wicked and impudent falsehood to declare that they are intellectually dull or averse to mental improvement. Common sense—that best of sense—is the special characteristic of the working classes; and those who can read are absolutely greedy in their anxiety to procure books, newspapers, and cheap publications for perusal. The fact is, that the mind of the industrious population is a rich soil, wherein all good seed will speedily take root, shoot up, and bring forth fruit to perfection: but the apprehensions or narrow prejudices of the upper classes—the oligarchy—will not permit the seed to be sown. Now as the soil must naturally produce something, even of its own accord, it too often gives birth to rank weeds; and this is made a matter of scorn, reviling, and reproach. But the real objects of that scorn—that reviling—and that reproach, are those who obstinately and wickedly neglect to put the good soil to the full test of fertilisation.’—All these observations,” continued his Royal Highness, “were as applicable to Castelcicala a short time back as they have ever been and still are in England. But the reforms in the Church and in the Educational System were not the least important of those which characterised the new order of things. The two institutions were separated, and rendered entirely independent of each other, the Church being abandoned entirely to the voluntary principle, and the duty of educating the people being attached to the State, a Minister of Public Instruction being appointed. All sectarianism in education is now abolished: the system is entirely secular. The schoolmasters are appointed by the municipal corporations in the various localities, and their salaries are paid by the State. They are all laymen; for it is now a principle established in the Grand Duchy that parents shall train up their children in the creed which they may prefer. Thus Protestants, Catholics, and Jews all receive the blessings and benefits of the secular education; no tampering with religious opinions—no proselytism being permitted. The whole scheme is on the broadest basis of liberality; and the people are delighted with its working. As for the Church, it is entirely separated from the State; and the order of Bishops has been suppressed. The Catholic religion is still that of the great majority: but it is shorn of its pomp; and ecclesiastical ostentation and vain display have received a blow which they will never recover. The result is, that the Christian creed has been restored to something resembling its primitive simplicity, and such as its Divine Founder intended. I have now, my lord and gentlemen, given you a hasty, but I hope intelligible sketch of the condition of Castelcicala at the present day; and it only remains for me to sum up the reforms which have been accomplished, and which completely carry out the views and the theories so ably propounded by you, my dear Earl, nineteen years ago. In the first place, there is a Throne surrounded by Republican Institutions; and the hereditary principle as well as the law of primogeniture have been annihilated—never to be revived. Then, we have adopted ‘a minimum rate of wages, to prevent the sudden fluctuation of such wages, and to compel property to give constant employment to labour:—indirect taxes upon the necessaries of life have been abolished;—the laws and their administration are equitably proportioned to the relative conditions of the rich and the poor;—a general system of national education has been established, and intrusted to laymen, totally distinct from religious instruction and sectarian tenets;—a complete reformation in the system of prison discipline has taken place; and establishments have been founded for the purpose of affording work to persons upon leaving criminal gaols, as a means of their obtaining an honest livelihood and retrieving their characters prior to seeking employment for themselves;—and the franchise has been so extended as to give every man who earns his own bread by the sweat of his brow, a stake and interest in the country’s welfare.’”
The Prince ceased speaking; and those who had been his auditors expressed their sincerest thanks for the gratifying explanations he had given them with so much readiness and affability. Nor less were they charmed to find that a truly liberal and enlightened system of policy would stand such remarkable tests, and work so well. The question, whether the nations of Europe are civilised enough to receive Republican Institutions, was completely solved, to their satisfaction; and even Sir John Lascelles, who was somewhat tainted with the doctrines of the Old School, acknowledged himself to be a convert.
The party then joined the ladies in the drawing-room where political subjects gave way to discourse upon less serious topics;—and when the company took their departure, the inmates of the lordly mansion did not separate to retire to their respective chambers until they had exchanged many enthusiastic comments upon the character, disposition, talents, and bearing of his Royal Highness, the Prince of Montoni.
CHAPTER CXXXIV.
A PAINFUL SCENE.
We deemed it advisable to break as little as possible, by comment or extraneous explanation, the thread of the Prince of Montoni’s discourse upon the reform that had been introduced into the Grand Duchy of Castelcicala. We therefore refrained from giving any account of the manner in which Charles Hatfield listened, and received—or rather, greedily drank in—the narrative of his Royal Highness.
To say that the young man heard with enthusiasm, were to convey but a feeble idea of his emotions as he hung upon every sentence—every word, that fell from the lips of the Earl’s illustrious guest:—when, however, we declare that even Perdita’s image fell into the back-ground of his mind, during the whole time that the Prince was discoursing, our readers may form some notion of the nature of that impression which was made upon him.
On retiring to his chamber at about one o’clock in the morning, Charles Hatfield thought not of seeking his couch: but, throwing himself into an arm-chair, he gave way to the agitating—conflicting—turbulent ideas which had been excited in his soul.