Ignorance and Irresponsibility.
Sir John Bowring states that he remembers a murder occurring in Ceylon, and on the murderer being brought to trial, it was found utterly impossible to make him comprehend that he had committed any sin whatever in revenging himself upon one by whom he thought he had been injured. The consequence was that the Judge came to the conclusion that the murderer could not be held responsible for his crime. So ignorant was this man that he could not count up to the number of five, losing himself always at three.
Ticket-of-Leave Men.
Archbishop Whately, who always handles a practical subject in a masculine way, annihilates the English Ticket-of-leave system with a single sentence:—“What should we think of a right, encouraged by a Secretary of State, to go every day to a menagerie and let out by mere rotation one animal from a cage without inquiring whether he released a monkey or a tiger?” The Archbishop proposes that all sentences beyond fifteen years should be irreversible, except by an Act of Parliament, specifying the names, offences, and previous committals of the prisoners pardoned.
Cupar and Jedburgh Justice.
It is an odd circumstance that Lord Campbell, to whom both as judge and legislator the law of England owes so much, was born at a place which gives its name, “Cupar justice,” to the peculiar system of law which hangs a man first and tries him afterwards; and that he had his country residence (Hartrigge-house, Roxburghshire) in the neighbourhood of another town which gave the name of “Jedburgh justice” to an equally summary code, the great principle of which is, “Hang all or save all.”
What is to be done with our Convicts.
Transportation having had a fair and patient trial, and having altogether failed as a punishment, and having no colony fitted and willing to receive the sweepings of our gaols, the alternative to which we are compelled is to keep our convicts at home, and to make the best of them, by making them self-supporting. Or, in the forcible words of the late Mr. Charles Pearson, City Solicitor:
If the honest millions, as they pass through life, can, and do, during what is recognised as the producing age, not only provide for their own wants, but create a large surplus, by which the non-producing classes are supported and the institutions of society are maintained, it surely ought not to be endured that any portion of the same race and of the producing age ... should be permitted to renounce their allegiance to the fundamental law of their existence, and declare in practice, that by the sweat of the face of other men, they will eat of earth’s choicest fruits.
The only rational, merciful, and effectual corrective of such offenders against all laws, human and divine, is to classify and place them in secure prisons, surrounded by lofty and substantial walls; to subject them, week by week, to seventy, or at least sixty, hours of useful and profitable work; to allow them sixty, or at most seventy, hours for food, rest, cleanliness, and their other bodily requirements; to give them twenty-eight hours with means and opportunities for mental and spiritual instruction, and for the public and private worship of God.... If any Government, having thus placed at its disposal annually the hundred millions of hours of confiscated labour, which 30,000 criminals would yield, cannot make the class not only self-supporting, but productive of a surplus for the future benefit of those who produce it, such a Government would be pronounced by men of business unfit to be at the head of a great manufacturing and commercial people.