It remains to be seen whether the Commons will give countenance to the new and severe measures sought by the Lords to be adopted against the convicted man at liberty under ticket-license. One thing is certain, it would be better to do away altogether with tickets-of-leave than use them as stumbling-blocks to a man’s reformation. The only object of a ticket-of-leave is to give the holder a chance of returning to honest courses some months earlier than, under the rigid term of his sentence, he would be enabled to. Undoubtedly it is necessary to guard against, as far as possible, an abuse of the privilege. Full and sufficient opportunity should be allowed a man to follow honest pursuits, if he be so inclined; but it is only fair that the authorities should reserve to themselves the power of holding him in tether, so to say, so as to be able to haul him back to fast anchorage, should his ill-behaviour make such a step desirable; but meanwhile the tether-line should run slack and free—it should by no means be wound about a man’s hands so as to impede his honest use of them, or about his neck so as to strangle him. At Wakefield we are informed there is an organisation by which every prisoner on his discharge—whether on a ticket-of-leave or otherwise—could find a home for six or twelve months, till he is able to find employment for himself, or till an employer came to look for him. Eighty per cent of the persons attached to the Wakefield establishment had engaged in, and settled down to, honest employment. Surely such a result should encourage those in authority to found similar institutions in other parts of the country.
To return, however, to the projected Habitual Criminals’ Bill. It is not the ticket-of-leave man alone who has reasons for quaking lest it should become law; quaking for fear of injustice, not justice, that is to say. The class its stern provisions chiefly, and, as I venture to opine, cruelly affect are those unfortunates who have suffered two distinct terms of imprisonment. From the date of his second conviction a man is to be subject to police supervision for a term of seven years. They have the advantage over the ticket-of-leave man, that they are not required to report themselves periodically at a police-station; but, like the criminal of deeper dye, any day within their seven years of supervision they are liable to be arrested by the police and taken before a magistrate, to prove that they are not deriving a livelihood from dishonest sources. Should they fail in doing so, they are to be committed to prison for a year. Of the question itself, “What is an habitual criminal?” remarks the Times, commenting on the communication of its correspondent, “we say, take a walk with the police, and they will show you the class in all its varieties as easily as you could be shown the animals in the Zoological Gardens. Here they are,—men about whose character and calling nobody would ever pretend to entertain a doubt. We have been all perplexing ourselves with the possible fate of some contrite convict disposed to become respectable, but thwarted in his efforts by the intervention of the police. Why, among the real genuine representatives of crime—among the people described by our correspondent—there is not a man who dreams, or ever would dream, of any honest calling . . . The profession has its grades, like any other; and so here is a company of first-class thieves, and another company representing the opposite end of the scale. At one establishment they are fashionably attired, and not altogether ill-mannered; at another the type is that of Bill Sykes himself, even to his bulldog. But through all these descriptions, whether of house or inmate, host or guest, high or low, thief or receiver, there runs one assumption which we press upon our readers as practically decisive of the question before us. It is this: that about ‘the habitual criminality’ of the whole class there is not, in the mind of any human creature concerned, the smallest doubt whatever. . . . The practice of the past generation was simple: some petty offence commonly began, then as now, a criminal career. It was detected and punished, and the criminal was sent back to his place in society. A second, and perhaps a third, act of deeper guilt followed, and the graduate in crime was condemned to transportation beyond seas. As long as this punishment retained any terrors it may have been efficient; but long before it was abandoned it had come to be recognised as an acknowledged benefit rather than a penalty by those who were sentenced to it. The result was the constant secretion of a criminal class on one hand, and the removal on the other to another sphere when they became ripe for the voyage—the removal being viewed as an encouragement to the commission of similar offences. We must make the painful acknowledgment that part of this dismal cycle cannot be materially altered. When a man is convicted of his first criminal act, we cannot know whether it is an isolated deed or whether it is the first-fruit of a lifetime. When he has gone from less to greater, and has proved himself indurated in crime, we are forced to protect society by removing him from it. . . . Nor does the proposal involve that extensive and minute system of police espionage of which some people have been apprehensive. An honest man can always keep out of such questionable circumstances; and unless he places himself within them, he is as independent of the police as any unconvicted Englishman. When a man has been twice convicted, it is surely no great hardship to deprive him of the privilege of attempting and plotting crime with impunity.”
III.—Professional Beggars.
CHAPTER XII.
THE BEGGAR OF OLDEN TIME.
“Only a Beggar”—The Fraternity 333 Years ago—A Savage Law—Origin of the Poor-Laws—Irish Distinction in the Ranks of Beggary—King Charles’s Proclamation—Cumberland Discipline.
Were it not that the reader’s sound and simple sense renders it quite unnecessary, it might be of importance to premise that to be “only a beggar” does not constitute a human being a curse against his species. There are those amongst the greatest and most famous who have been beggars, and many of the mightiest, groaning under the crushing burden of distracting power and unruly riches, have bemoaned their fate and envied the careless beggar whose dwindled strength was at least equal to carrying his slender wallet, whose heart was as light as his stomach, and whose wildest dreams of wealth never soared vastly above a cosy barn to sleep in, a warm old cast-off coat, and a sixpence. To be sure, in many instances these dissatisfied ones may not have given any steadfast consideration as regards such a decided change of state as might happen to suit them. It is related of a King of Scotland that, wearying of the cares of government, he slipped away from his palace and its cloying luxuries, to taste the delights that attach to the existence of ragged roving mendicants; but though his majesty affected to have enjoyed himself very much, and discoursed afterwards gravely of the great moral profit it brought him, it is not recorded that he persevered for any very long time in the pursuit of the newly-discovered blessing, or that he evinced any violent longing to return to it. Perhaps, having convinced himself of the advantages of poverty, he generously resolved to leave it to his subjects, contenting himself with such occasional glimpses of it as might be got by looking out o’ window.
It is now 333 years ago since the beggar ceased to be dependent on voluntary charity, and the State insisted on his support by the parishes. In the year 1536 was passed an Act of Parliament abolishing the mendicant’s right to solicit public alms. Under a penalty of twenty shillings a month for every case of default, the parochial authorities were bound to provide work for the able-bodied. A poor’s-rate, as we now understand the term, was not then thought of, the money required for pauper relief being chiefly derived from collections in the churches, a system that to a limited extent enabled the clergy to exercise their pious influences as in the old times, and before the destruction of monasteries and religious houses by Henry VIII. It was the wholesale spoliation in question, that occurred immediately after the Reformation, that first made known to the people at large the vast numbers of beggars that were amongst them. The Act of 27 Henry VIII. c. 25, prohibited indiscriminate almsgiving.
What the charitable townsman had to give, he was bound to distribute within the boundaries of the parish in which he resided. Under the old and looser condition of affairs the beggar derived the greater part of his gettings from the traveller; but the obnoxious Act effectually cut off from him this fruitful source of supply, since it provided that any parishioner or townsman who distributed alms out of his proper district, should forfeit to the State ten times the amount given. Whether the recipient of the bounty was in a position to act as “informer,” with the customary advantage of receiving half the penalty, is not stated.
Against sturdy beggars the law was especially severe. On his first conviction he was whipped, the second led to the slicing-off of his right ear, and if after that he was deaf to the law’s tender admonitions, sentence of death was executed on him.
This savage law, however, remained in force not more than ten years; one of the earliest Acts of Edward VI. was to mitigate the penalties attaching to beggary. Even under this humane King’s ruling, however, a beggar’s punishment was something very far beyond a joke. Every person able to work, and not willing, and declining a “job,” though for no more tempting wages than his bare meat and drink, was liable to be branded on the shoulder, and any man willing to undertake the troublesome charge might claim the man as his slave for two years. His scale of diet during that time was more meagre than that allotted to the pauper in our own times. If the slave’s master was a generous man, he might bestow on him the scraps from his table, or such meat-offal as his dogs had no relish for; but in law he was only bound to provide him with a sufficiency of bread and water. If such hot feeding did not provoke him to arouse and set to work with a will, his master might chain him and flog him to death’s door; and so long as he did not drive him beyond that, the law would hold him harmless. Sometimes the poor wretch so goaded would run away, but in the event of his being recaptured, he was branded on the cheek, and condemned to lifelong servitude; and if this did not cure his propensity for “skedaddling,” he was hanged offhand. Any employer having a fancy for such a commodity as an incorrigible runaway might have the man so condemned as his slave for life; but if no one offered, he was chained at the legs and set to work to keep the highways in repair.