injustice and cruelty we are perpetually increasing the amount of crime in the country; for we allow no chance in life to persons who have once offended; and, as to our own sufferings from the sense of insecurity of person and property, we know it too well to need any description of it here.
Everybody says that something must be done. Is there anything that can be done? To this question, so wistfully asked every day, and especially as winter comes on, there is a clear, strong, confident answer by those who know best—“Yes, certainly: the evil may diminish from this day forward; and in a few years it may be entirely at an end.” The case is, in fact, one of gross mismanagement; and there is satisfactory proof that we hold the remedy in our own hands.
The first thing that occurs to many of us is that we did much better under the transportation system. Fifty years ago, when our criminals were hanged in rows, by threes and fours, or by dozens, we did not feel much more secure than at present. There were plenty of people then who cried out, like the tipsy young legislator who remonstrated with Sir Samuel Romilly, “Hang them all, damn them! Hang them all!” whatever their offences were: but it was in such days that the Marr and Williamson murders took place; and it seemed as if crime was actually propagated by the hanging of criminals: so we reduced the capital punishment, and found presently that less crime was perpetrated, and that what was perpetrated was more effectually discovered and punished. So far we succeeded.
At the same time we went on transporting our convicted criminals; and, when they were once shipped off, those who looked no further could rub their hands and say, “There! we are rid of them!” Society here was purified, we said; and a chance was afforded to the convicts to make a new start in a new country, if they chose to reform.
There was a drawback in the fear of returned convicts—a fear like that which prevails about ticket-of-leave men; but it was not very constant or oppressive. There was, however, a sequel to this experience of ours. Year by year we became aware that there was something very wrong in those parts of the world to which we sent hundreds upon hundreds of vicious men (with very few women among them), to poison every society they entered, or to live like wild beasts beyond the margin of society. I saw a family letter from Tasmania, twenty years ago, which revealed to me something of the workings of the system. It was from a gentleman in an official position, which seemed to command everything that the father of a rising family could wish for. He had fine healthy children, and schools were within reach; he had landed property in a district of great fertility and beauty: he had an honourable office with a good salary, and a command of all reasonable comforts and pleasures. Yet he and his wife were so miserable that they declared they must give up everything, and come to England to begin the world afresh, unless the transportation system was immediately discontinued. Anything was better than living in the moral cesspool in which they found themselves. The convicts spoiled their whole life. Not all the care they took to keep their children incessantly in their presence sufficed to prevent the contamination from entering their home, and poisoning the transactions of every day. I need not say more. The colonists generally said the same thing; and some acted so vigorously upon it as to render it impossible to thrust any more of our criminals upon them; and the system came to an end. Western Australia still receives a few, for the sake of their labour; but it is only for a time, and to a very small extent. As regards our needs, the method may be said to be abolished; and it is certain that it can never be resorted to again.
Now that we are obliged to deal with our criminals at home, we have occasion to learn more than anybody knew before of the natural history of the class. That study has produced some happy effects, and on a large scale. It is a vast blessing that the supply of criminals is mainly cut off by the care now taken of the desolate and doomed children who have hitherto grown up as a criminal class. The operation of our Reformatories and Ragged Schools is already very marked in the reduction of crime; and it will become more evident as the old generation of offenders dies out. But we still have to deal with that generation, and with such apprentices as they get hold of; and the crimes and alarms of the present year are a sufficient evidence that there is a good deal more for us to learn and to do.
Thus, it is not a return to transportation, nor any attention that can be paid to reformatory schools—satisfactory as those schools are for their purpose—which will relieve us of the immediate evil of our criminals at large. What is it, then?
“That is plain enough,” some reply. “There is not so much to learn as you pretend. The ticket-of-leave system is the mischief; and what we have to do is to get rid of it. We have never had any peace and comfort since we had ticket-of-leave men roaming the country.”
It is precisely those who make this reply who are most conspicuously in need of more knowledge. They at once fancy tickets-of-leave to be bad things, and suppose all discharged convicts to be ticket-of-leave men. It would puzzle them to have to recommend a plan for disposing of our criminals, in the place of the present system; and they are certainly not qualified to do so if they cannot distinguish between a convict who has gone through his whole term of imprisonment and one who is let out on licence, under a liability to be brought back, to undergo his full term, in case of misbehaviour.
Thus,—after everything has been done to cut off the supply of criminals by taking hold of the children, we must have some method of disposing of our convicts; and none has been proposed that can at all compare with the ticket-of-leave system, either in regard to practicability or to positive success, where it has been well administered. We may ask, on the one hand, where we are to put our convicts if they are not to be let out; and we may show, on the other, a part of
