The New-Zealander.

New Zealander, Volume 5, Issue 328, 14 July 1849, Page 2

The New-Zealander.

Be just and fear nott Let all the ends thou aims't at, be thy Country s, Thy God's, and Truth's. _

SATURDAY, JULY 14, 1849.

One of the most anxious subjects of Ministerial consideration,— one which, whether the State be ruled by Whig or by Tory, presents a varied and vexatious amount of delicacy and difficulty, is that perplexing question—" What Is To Be Done With The Convicts V The Prison Disciplinarians of England are « bothered entirely." They have meddled and they have made, until they have marred a system which worked well. They commenced a crusade against Transportation under an organization which achieved much Colonial prosperity. They determined that its proclaimed abominations should no longer exist ; and, like all impatient reformers, they sped their work with such reckless haste that, in rescuing from pollution, they pushed to prostration one ofyhe finest provinces of their philanthropic zeal. This zeal, however, was as injudicious, as it was unequal and unfair. Injudicious, that the labour source it denied was not permitted a gradual rather than an abrupt and improvident

extinction; — unequal, because a modified stream I was turned from a large absorbing channel ;—; — and unfair, because that stream was united to another stream whose blended torrent was poured upon a fertile and flourishing, but limited, field which, morally, socially, and physically, it destroyed. Had the blow been aimed at Transportation itself, rather than at the manner of working out its colonial details, its assailants would have deserved the approbation of every honest man : — but merely to turn that transportation from the defilement of one colony to the ruin of another ; — to inhibit a system, which had accomplished a reclamation of the soil, and a reformation of the soul, in immediate and in-j discriminate tentation of crude, undigested, an ft I still varying theories ; — to sacrifice a people In * solution of derogatory problems : — these are grave misdemeanours, for which the state that permits their indulgence should be bound to make compensation. Were this so, how heavy an arrear would be due to the ruined and roving settlers of unfortunate Tasmania ! Since the Assignment System received its quietus, how many Secretaries and how many systems have been tried in emendation ? First j Lord John Russell and Probationism •,, — so im- * proved by his successor Lord Stanley as to be * pronounced impracticable of operation by that experienced controller of Convicts the late^ Captain Matthew Foister, Mr. Gladstone who was just sufficiently long a Downing-slreet tenant to find the difficulty of his convict posi-> tion, and to propose a modified return of thej system to the greedy squatocracy of New South, Wales. The Right Honorable Earl Grey, whof entered into covenants with the same grasping body, and who now cares not if he impels to ) revolt the provinces he despises — who tells- the/ Cape colonists they have cost England monies? for the defence of England's own, and that ? | therefore, it is his Lordly pleasure that they \ shall, as a repayment, be felonized I — who in- ; vites New Zealand to approve of self constu-'< pration :— and who hawks his " Exile " regenerates, (with the audacious assertion that nine- t ty nine of every hundred convicts make good colonists) to every province likely, from utter want of labour, to accept, or from absolute lack of physical force to reject them ! , What is to be done with the convicts, is a question which seems to have placed England' in a, fix, because it is one she is unwilling to' deal with upon principle ; — because she merely • looks at it to determine how she may most ef- • fectually and cheaply serve herself, no matter what the injury or the misery she entails on. others. As one of the provinces wooed to subscribe to, (which we read warned to prepare for) pc- ' nal defilement, a consideiation of the question so far from being inappropriate seems to be ac-r. tually forced upon us. We have had a Publi£ Meeting on the subject, it is true ; and we have protested, ay, and loudly too, against such dedecration. And we have adopted Memorials tc\ Her Majesty, and to both Houses of Parliament, imploring their avertence of such a calamity. , But so, also, did the colonists at the Cape, and with this somewhat more practical effect that* their hands subscribed to the sentiments their • tongues had uttered, and to which their appointed delegates had given written expression.' Have we proved equally energetic 1 We fear, it mightily ! And, yet, we have but just heard,' the roar of the first felon breaker upon the, Australian shore, and may ourselves, ere long, be compelled to gulp a poison we are too apathetic to ward off or to neutralize. It is impossible to take up a London Journal, or in fact any British Political Magazine or Review in which " The Convict Question," is not n train and again discussed, and, in all, with this unruffled complacency that the colonies are the tit and legitimate dams for the evaporation of British crime ! We gave, last Saturday, an example of the cool and conscientious manner in which the Times vouchsafes to show the material advantage the Cape must needs derive from absorption of this feculent inundation. In a previous article, it is admitted that some of the Colonists at the Cape may be too stupid or too ungrateful to enter cordially into such arrangements, but that Lord Grey, upon the true Colonial Office principle " castigatque auditquc" had anticipated alike their argumeunts and their opposition by a shipment of two hundred and fifty of his pets. Of what utility the colonies, the Times thus conveniently shows. •' If England can be pi Irifled at the expense of her colonies, she will only be using them much as the metropolis uses the Thames. Could the Thames speak, it would doubtless complain. The Rhine washes Cologne, but what, asked the Poet, will ever wash the Rhine ? and if we send into our colonies the moral dirt of this country, what is there to purify the colonies V* Precisely ! In intimate connection with, and in demonstrative illustration of the unsound theories entertained respecting Prison Discipline, we transferred to our impression of Thursday week a treatise, from the Daily News of the 21st of February, entitled "The Great Prisons of

London -.--Pentonville,— lts Results. Pentonville Prison is a modem and a costly creation ; — a concession, it may almost be termed, to the opinions of the Anti-Transpor-tation mongers of 1837-8. It was designed to be an amendment upon the Colonial system of Assignment :— an engine to demonstrate the

superiority of British discipline, as contrasted with Australian. It was a mistake, and a most expensive mistake, ah initio ; and, at the very period when the theory of prison discipline was matter of anxious and antagonistic discussion, in and out of Parliament,— one in which we ourselves were warmly engaged, — we unhesitatingly predicted that this, then unfounded, prison, as an aid and an adjunct of an improved system of transportation, would prove an uttei and a miserable failure. And why ?— simply, because if it were designed to be a school of salutary check, of wholesome instruction to the convict, it should have been erected not in the land whence he was shortly to be thrust, but in that whither he was about to be transferred, where he was about to commence life anew. It seems miraculous that the brains of men of ordinary intelligence, could become so deplorably obfuscated, as not to perceive the utter fatuity of this Pentonville project. Had the prison been designed with no other view than the withdrawal of the convict from society during the term of his sentence ; to the instructing him in some useful trade ; to the moral and social regeneration of the man ; and with the view of turning him out an industiious and reformed member of the parent community, we should still have regarded it as but an amiable delusion, and for this most conclusive reason,— the difficulty, verging upon impossibility, which, in over peopled England, the unstained operative experiences in his honest desire of work ; the searching questions put by employers relative to the previous character and condition of those they engage, and the indignant resistance that would be offered by the employees themselves, to any association \vith Pentonville brands. But to establish Pentonville as a reformatory school prior to a long and demoralizing voyage 1 ? Can the force of absurdity farther go? What ! carefully train a man — strive to tutor him in the moral obligations and duties of life, and, then, when he has been weaned from the evil of his ways, when he is "believed" to he perfectly reformed, then to plunge him into that floating pandemonium a convict ship; to vender him for four long months the compulsory associate of the very wretches it had so clearly been the object of Pentonville to detach him from ! What can be expected but a return to old feelings, and a rancorous determination to cast the memory of Pentonville and its bitter expurgations for ever from them ? What would be thought were the directors of a Magdalene Institution to test the new born virtue of their inmates by exposing them to a three or four months sojourn in a brothel, ere placing them in private service 1 The idea is not more ridiculous, nor would the demoralization be more complete than that which the Pentonvilles experience. The improvement and the 'purgation take place at the wrong end. As we formerly remarked, the English investigator of Pentonville and its results has dealt merely with its English experiences. And how much do they prove 1 No more than this, that the prison is a most costly one ; that its system is calculated to " crush the spirit out of a man," and that the silent cell with its lock and key are omnipotent in subjugation of the most reckless : — so potent, indeed, that mortal sensibility appears unequal to sustain its spiritcrushing ordeal. A mitigation of its rules become imperative ; and to arouse the mind so that the body may be equal to the task of transference to a distant shore, the removable drafts are previously herded, a degree of " Saturnalia" encouraged, so that human feeling may be rekindled and human energy restored ! Can censure be more sweeping 1 Crime is but curbed, not quelled, in itsPenonville repository. The hand of violence may be chained, — the head of villainous contrivings may be controulled ; — but the heart, it is clear, is neither softened nor subdued, but on the contrary, it is impelled to the practice of deceit, which the absence of temptation, and the barriers which preclude that evil communication that leads to relapse, engenders. In the language of the Daily News, " no man is suffered to go (to Australia) , until he is believed by the chaplain and authorities to be quite reformed." The system thus begets an accomplished hypocrisy, and the semblance of reformation must be taken for reformation's self where there exists no test by which its sincerity may be proved. In this blessed state, the neophytes are whipped on board a transport, where stringent disciphue, (only a modification of that to which they have long bowed), continues to exhibit this " goodly apple " so foully rotten at the core. But the natural appetite, so long restrained within the cloisters of Pentonville, is full fed, not openly, but covertly and greedily, within the pestilential womb of the floating prison. The time, the toil, and the costly lessons of two or three years are, by the frightful education of the outward passage, scattered to the winds. What then are Pentonville and its results, when these regenerates are debarked upon Australian soil ? Why this — The lengthened abstinence from crime has provoked but a fiercer relish for its indulgence ; and, as an evidence of this incontestable fact, we shall cite the importations of the very ship Marion, spoken of by the Daily New«, whose reformees flew at it " like French falconers/ the moment they landed at Portland, the inhabitants of which settlement were astounded at their audacity, and complained

in the loudest terms, of the outrages to which they had been generally subjected. If the Port Phillip calendar of crime be narrowly investigated, who will be found so prominent as murderers, burglars, forgers, foot-pads, in short felons of every shade and grade of infamy as this most expensively educated TJu'cveocmct/ 1 Why, they are perfectionists not only in the art of appropriation, but in planning the means for the prevention of punishment; since with them oiiginated the brilliant idea of a Thieves Mutual Protection Association ! The fact is, that if ever Transpoitation were tolerable as a system, whether to the transports themselves, to the colonists upon whom they were let loose, or to the country expelling them, it was under the old and much aspersed Assignment plan. That there were many objections which could be conjured against it, it is perfectly true, but where, we would ask, is the system free of defect * and before one which had produced such astonishing results as those conclusively shown by its healthy workings in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, — before such a system should have been recklessly discarded, a substitute ought to have been tried and proved elsewhere, otherwise secondary punishments should have been transferred to other provinces, where the con- j vitts and the colonists might have grown together in unprejudiced ignorance of a simpler and a sounder plan for their mutual amelioration. Assignment dispersed the men ; dissevered their evil connexions, the moment the ship discharged her living freight. Probationism, pass-holdings, and the various subsequent botchings, banded the men together, and, when by mutual contact and much mutual edification, their criminal knowledge was complete, then, and not till then, were they permitted to hire with the settlers, whose moral welfare such a course of training professed to consider. Our own particular opinion of transportation is, that it is an outrage which no nation is justified in enforcing. It is an infamy which no province capable of resistance would permit ; and, as such, we cannot but denounce that country which foists her filth upon her struggling offshoots, simply because they lack the ability to force the abomination back upon their aggressor. But, if the evil must be borne, we think the very least that should be do ie to lighten its pressure, were to entrust its workings to those upon whom it is thrown, whose practical experience, and whose innate desire to turn the cuirse as much as possible to account, must necessarily suggest ways and means of amelioration which, by distant theorists with whom prison discipline is but a contingent hobby, not a vicious brute to bit and to break, can never thoroughly be understood. Such being our opinion — an opinion warranted by many a weary year of not unsuccessful prisoner management — we shall offer a few further hints upon convicts and convictism since England appears to be determined that the Southern Pacific shall continue to be violated by her crime. If colonies are to be overrun by convicts, England is bound by every tie of honour and honesty to provide adequate means for their coercion ; and no means could be found so effectual to convict reformation as the construction of numerous prisons with adequate supplies of the silent and the solitary cell. What has been the principal cause, not of failure of reformation, but of aggravated demoralization in the government gangs and penal settlements 1 What but the aggregations of depraved men, and, above all, the packing them i by scores, nay hundreds, in the most indecent sleeping wards ? j A few such establishments (but on an infinitely less costly scale) as Pentonville might | have been rendered the most invaluable accessories to an improved discipline ; not as prepatory schools for convict training, but as ,vholesome assistants in convict subjugation. Bad men, in the days of the cat and the triangle, would take their three dozen with comparative indifference and return to their service with an embittered spirit and a desire of revenge. Others, again, would endure the privations of the public gangs for the pleasure of its enlarged society, and the mixture of their odious dormitories, where previous feats were gasconadingly recounted and future projects mischeviously plani ned. We appeal to any man who has ever inspected the sleeping wards at Norfolk Island, at Port Arthur, at Cockatoo, or at any of the j large Australian stockades whether any but the most frightful results could arise from so brutal a penning up of men, during the long and silent hours of night %—% — Were convicts dispersed in private service, and were each district supplied with a house of correction furnished with an adequate number of silent cells, where the silent system of Pentonville could be rigorously enforced, there would be reason instead of ruin in punishment. The inmate would be taught to consider his own misdeeds, instead of gloating in delighted audience of those of others. He would shrink cowed into nothingness by his own solitary misery, instead of expanding into pioflgate importance by the inculcations of aggregated villainy. Those who, like us, have seen the workings of all the penal settlements, know that the aggiegation of men, especially in the night wards, has been the grand difficulty reformation had to contend with. We have the authority of Captain Booth, Cap-

tain Lines, Mr. Charles Ormsby, and many of the most experienced disciplinarians to prove the superiority of the cell over every other punishment ; and we have our own long tried experience to corroborate theirs — having, by the aid of the cell, effectually and permanently re* claimed those pronounced by the district Police Magisttate to be irreclaimable. Let those who doubt the abominations of the herding system, peruse the report of Mr. Stewart upon the state of Norfolk Island, and then determine whether any convict colony should be without numerous Pentonvilles ? not to crush the spirit but to control passions as injurious to the criminal as demoralizing to the country. If these were dotted throughout felon lands, colonial commentators would not be apt to pronounce them unproductive of results. From the passing of sentence to the hour of its expiration, Transportation is a grave and a grievous error. Judges are prone to elaborate and dwell upon the ordeal that awaits the convict in the land whose horrors the Justice frequently attempts to depict, but of whose features he is about as conversant as was Munchausen with those of the Moon. The entire tenor of Judicial sentences is an arrant absurdity. Death, for example, where no execution is ever intended. And Transportation for Life, in the teeth of the colonial practice of Tickets of Leave, Conditional, and Absolute pardons. Nay, as if in scorn of this solemn mockery, we have known more than one escaped lifer brought again befoie the British big wii^s and retransported for a term of Seven Years ! Why should they in England apportion the period of servitude 1 Why not confide the duration of the sentence to the Governor and Council of the colony to which the felon is to be consigned 1 ? The advantages of a vague sentence would be immense. A simple, undefined, sentence of Transportation would beget doubt, and impart awe, previous to embarkation ; and, upon the convicts arrival, it would place a mighty instrument in the hands of those entrusted to work his purgation. It would render him really serviceable to the community upon whom he was forced. His sting for evil would be drawn; whilst every incentive to order and propriety would be encouraged, seeing that upon his own good conduct would mainly depend the prolongation of his penal trammels, whilst a correct and oideily deportment would restore him (without reference to the absurd distinctions, frequently most unfairly instituted, of seven, ten, fifteen years men and lifers) to all the privileges and immunities he had forfeited. — Practical men, conversant with the workings of prison discipline, will perceive at a glance the gigantic moral lever such a plan would place at their command. If assisted by an adequate number of Colonial Pentonvilles, convict reformation, we repeat, would be of comparatively easy achievement.

We intimated, in a recent number, that Auckland was to be the established head quarters of the Sappers and Miners employed in these seas. We have since observed, in a late " Naval and Military Gazette," that the Royal Marine Artillery is to be considerably augmented, and that they are to be employed upon all Colonial duty, where Artillery is required. We cannot but feel gratified at such a determination, because it is an admission that our views (and we were the first to make and to reiterate the suggestion) were correct ones. The decision arrived at, however, grants but an instalment of our plan, which was to establish a colonial division of Marines, with whom to garrison all these remote colonies. Without retracing details, which we have already frequently put before the world, we may ennumerate one or two heads. The sav:ng it would effect by obviating the necessity of moving regiments. The facility with which the quarter bills of sickly or reduced ships could be supplied. The ease, with which ships from England could bring out supernumerary reliefs, and home going ships carry back those who had served their tour of duty. And, again, the integrity of discipline it would preserve in regiments of the line, detached and disorganized by remote and separate duty.

The barque " Louisa," Captain Wycherly, with a cargo of spars and other New Zealand produce, was in the stream, last night at sunset, on the eve of departure for London. As will he seen by our shipping list, she carries with her several of our old friends, but these, we believe, have only left us for a season, and we trust again to welcome them back after a pleasant sojourn in the land of their birth. Supreme Court. — Kawau Case. — Judgment will be pronounced, by His Honor the Chief Justice, in the case of scive facias the Queen veisus the Kawau Mining Company, on Monday morniajr next, at 10 o'clock.