[245] 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.
[246] November, 1842.
SECTION XXIII
When the new secretary of state saw that the probation gangs, formed under Lord John Russell's directions, were not attended with moral benefit, he attributed the failure to the defective supply of religious teaching, and not to the inherent qualities of the scheme. It became necessary to reorganise the whole plan, and to provide for the transportation of 4,000 men annually. Lord Stanley was greatly perplexed; but Captain Montagu (dismissed by Sir John Franklin) and the attorney-general of New South Wales happened to reach Downing-street at the moment: in concert with them, Lord Stanley framed the celebrated "System of Probation," which has astonished the whole civilised world.
The employment of men in gangs, had been practised from the foundation of these colonies: they usually, however, consisted of persons under short colonial sentences, and who were only sequestered awhile from society. The distribution of ten or twelve thousand men over a settled country, in parties of from two to three hundred, and subject to an oversight not usually exceeding the ordinary superintendence of free labor, was indeed an experiment, and fraught with the most important consequences.
At the head of this scheme was a comptroller-general, appointed by royal warrant, who, as colonial secretary for the convict department, was in communication with the governor alone. Under him were superintendents and overseers, religious instructors, and all other subordinate officers. He was authorised to make rules for the government of the whole, and these were minute and elaborate; and gave to the department the air of a great moral and industrial association.
The most severe form of this discipline was established at Norfolk Island, for the prisoners for life, or not less than fifteen years. For this purpose the island was relieved of persons entitled by the promises of Captain Maconochie to a more indulgent treatment, and the remainder were detained to assist in the preparation of buildings for the new plan. Thus the traditions of Norfolk Island—a complicated theory of evasion, artifice, pollution, and fraud—were preserved on the spot, and propagated through all the gangs located in Van Diemen's Land.