The labour of the prison consists, in the first place, of all the domestic work of the establishment, its cleansing, painting and repairs, its cooking, and the manufacture of every article worn by the inmates; and secondly, of yarn spinning, weaving and making shirts for the little navy of Belgium,[25] and drawers for the soldiers, together with other similar articles suited for public sale. Prisoners who have learned no trade, are permitted to make their choice, and are taught one. The cleanliness of every corner is really incredible, and such are its effects upon the health of the inmates, that the deaths, on an average, do not exceed, annually, one in a hundred. After paying all its expenses of every description, the profits of the labour done in the prison leaves a surplus to the government, annually, to an amount which I do not precisely remember, but which is something considerable.

Amongst the prisoners, one very old man was pointed out to me, named Pierre Joseph Soëte, seventy-nine years of age, sixty-two of which he had spent within the walls of this sad abode. He was condemned, at the age of seventeen, for an atrocious offence; in a fit of jealousy, he had murdered a girl, to whom he was about to have been married, by tying her to a tree and strangling her. He entered the jail when a boy, and had grown to manhood and old age within its melancholy walls; and the tenor of his life, I was told, had been uniformly mild and inoffensive. Five years since, the father of our friend, Count D’Hane, who was then Governor of Ghent, had represented the story to King Leopold, and the unfortunate old man was set at liberty; but in a few weeks, he presented himself at the door of the prison, and begged to be permitted to enter it again, and to die there as he had lived. I asked him why he had taken this extraordinary resolution, and he told me that the world had nothing to detain him; he had no longer a relative or a living face within it that he knew; he had no home, no means of support, no handicraft by which to earn it, and no strength to beg, what could he do, but return to the only familiar spot he knew, and the only one that had any charms for him! Poor creature! his extraordinary story, and his long life of expiation, rendered it impossible to remember or resent his early crime, and yet I could not look at such a singular being without a shudder.

Another, but a still more melancholy case, was pointed out to me. I asked the physician, Dr. Maresca, if there were any foreigners in the jail, and he told me there were several from Germany and France; and one, an Englishman, who had been confined some years before for an attempt at fraud, and who, between chagrin and disease, was now dying in the hospital. I went to see him, and found him in bed in the last feeble stage of consumption. His story was a very sad one—his name was Clarke, he seemed about thirty-five or thirty-six years of age, and had come over with his wife to seek for work as a machine maker at one of the engine factories in Ghent. He was disappointed—he could get no adequate employment—he saw his young wife and his little children perishing from hunger in a strange land, and, in an evil hour, he forged a document for some trifling sum to procure them bread. He was detected, tried and condemned to five years’ imprisonment in the maison de force. What became of his family he no longer knew; they had, perhaps, returned to England, but he could not tell. The physician told me that his conduct had all along been most excellent, so much so, that the government reduced the term of his imprisonment from five years to four, and he had now but eighteen months to remain. But he was dying, and of a broken heart through sorrow and mortification. The physician had tried to obtain a further reduction of his term; but it was not thought prudent at the time to accede to his representations, and now it was too late to renew the application. Dr. M. thought he would now be liberated if the application were repeated, but it was more humane, he said, to leave him as he was, as he had every attention he required; the hospital was comfortable, and the rules of the prison had all been relaxed in his favour, so that he had books and every indulgence granted to him, and a few weeks would soon release him from all his sorrows. Poor fellow! I hardly knew whether he seemed gratified or grieved by our visit; but his situation, surrounded by foreigners, to whose very language he was a stranger, far from home and England, and without a friend or relation to watch his dying bed was a very touching one, and it was rendered, perhaps, more so, by the very sympathy and kindness which seemed to be felt for him by all around him.

On the opposite side of the canal, we visited the sugar refinery of M. Neyt. This is a trade of much importance to Belgium, and, like almost every other department of her manufactures, at present in a very critical condition. The establishment of M. Neyt, though of great extent, being calculated to work twenty-five tons of sugar in the week, is not greater than some others in Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels. The machinery is all of the newest construction for boiling in vacuo, upon Howard’s principle, with some recent improvements by, I think, M. Devos-Maes; which, though expensive in the first instance, tends materially to diminish the cost by accelerating the completion of the process.

All the sugar we saw in process was from Java and Manilla, and vessels were loading in the canal in front of the works with purified lump for Hamburgh. This branch of Belgian commerce has been retarded by a series of vicissitudes, and seems still destined to perilous competition, not only from Holland, which already disputes the possession of the trade with her, but from the states of the Prussian League in which there are eighty-four refineries of sugar already. Holland and Belgium have, for many years, enjoyed a large revenue from this most lucrative process for the supply of Germany and for export to the Mediterranean; a manufacture in which they have been enabled to compete successfully with England, owing to their being at liberty to bring the raw material from any country where it is to be found cheapest, whilst Great Britain has necessarily been restricted to consume only the produce of her own colonies by the protective duty imposed upon all others. Holland has, however, by her recent treaty with Prussia, taken steps to preserve her present advantageous position as regards the supply of Germany, whilst her bounties to her own refiners afford an equal encouragement with that held out by their government to those of Belgium.

The false policy of the system of bounties has, however, operated in Belgium, as it has invariably done elsewhere, to give an unreal air of prosperity to the trade, whilst it opened a door to fraud, the never failing concomitant of such unsound expedients. To such an extent was this the case, that on its recent detection and suppression, a reaction was produced in the manufacture, that for the moment threatened to be fatal. The duty on the importation of raw sugar amounts to 37 francs per 100 kilogrammes, and a drawback was paid down to 1838 on every 55 kilogrammes of refined sugar exported. This proportion was taken as the probable quantity extractible from 100 kilogrammes of the raw article, but the law omitted to state in what stage of refinement, or of what precise quality that quantity should be. The consequence was, that sugar which had undergone but a single process, and still retained a considerable weight of its molasses, was exported, and a drawback was thus paid upon the entire 75 to 80 kilogrammes, which, had the process been completed, would only have been demandable on fifty-five. The encouragement designed to give a stimulus to improvement, thus tended only to give an impulse to fraud, and vast quantities of half refined sugar were sent across the frontiers, and the drawback paid, only to be smuggled back again for a repetition of the same dishonest proceeding. The attention of the government being, however, awakened by a comparison of the relative quantities of raw sugar imported, and of refined exported, on which the drawback was claimed, a change was made in the law in 1838, by which the drawback was restricted to a per centage on nine tenths only of the raw sugar imported, thus securing a positive revenue upon the balance, and at the same time some practical expedients were adopted for the prevention of fraud for the future. These latter were found to be so effectual, that four establishments in Antwerp discontinued the trade altogether immediately on the new law coming into force, and this example was followed by others elsewhere.

There are still between 60 and 70 refineries in Belgium, and in 1837 and 1838, the importations of raw sugar and the exports of refined were as follows:

RAW SUGAR IMPORTED.

In 1837.20,128,618 kilogrammes.
In 1838.16,814,940 kilogrammes.

REFINED SUGAR EXPORTED.