ENGLAND'S CONVICTS. [From the Times.]

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume V, Issue 418, 4 August 1849, Page 4

ENGLAND'S CONVICTS. [From the Times.]

Can we, or can we not classify our convicts? To ibis is the whole question of transportation reducible. If we can, let us lose no time in adopting a new arrangement of prisoners ; if we cannot, let us at once give up transportation of criminals to any dependency inhabited by a free population. We are in this position : — Our commercial and manufacturing greatness subjects a portion of our population to great vicissitudes

of fortune and position. It besets them with some of the temptations of wealth and the greater temptations of wont. It makes criminals through the desire of acquiriag sudden opulence, or of escaping inevitable indigence. It thrusts into the same dock, and brands with the same designation, and exposes to the same penalties, men of the most dissimilar conditions, the most opposite characters, the most unequal capacities, and the most unlike temptations — the Somersetshire "chaw-ba-con," the Lancashire artisan, the London blackleg, the cosmopolitan forger, and the man of hard and finished vice. Nor is there anything in the aspect of society or the condition of the country that can warrant out hope that this state of things is likely soon to cease. Commerce will, as heretofore, bring with it great revolutions of fortune ; civilisation will multiply the means and the desire of indulgence ; indigence will be felt with a severity proportionate to the luxury which confronts it. Wealth, luxuiy, wart — these have been and will be lor generations the nursingmothers of crime. It is a baseless hope which augurs that the age of laws, convictions, and penalties has passed au ay. W hat are we to do with criminals so manifold and so various? Shall we keep them at home? What to do ? To breathe the air of mutual corruption, and brood over the recollections of participated guilt ? Let those who have seen the forcats of Brest, Toulon, Castellamaie, and Nisida answer the question. Let those who have seen how like devils men may become when associated by the tie of confederate crime and punishment decide whether England shall be studded with the gloomy bastiles of a terrible demonocracy. Or shall we add to the taxation of the country by the erection ot stately and costly edifices wherein every scheme of benevolent ingenuity, and every appliance of refined enjoyment — the schooling of books, the conversation of educated clergyn en, and the soothing sounds of music — are to be monopolised by an indiscriminate herd of incorrigible ruffians, astute hypocrites, and weak or drivelling bunglers in crime ? We cannot keep anaccumulating mass of convicted criminals in England. France has lately shown us how unsafe this would be, politically and socially. It would be no less unwise on moral grounds. The comparative comfort of the prisoners would provoke the envy ot the innocent ; their supposed hardships would excite the sympathy of philanthropic ladies and rhetoricians. Moralnj and justice would be equally endangered. The only preventive of such a contingency is to exile those v\hosf crimes make them formidable at home. Then comes the second quettion — whither and how ? The maintenance of prisoners involves a considerable expense to the State. The State gains thereby a right to turn them to account. They have already lost, either for life or for some years, all civil rights. The relation which they bear to the State is thus that of slaves to a master. This may be more or less modified, according to circumstances. Its modification is one of the points to be adjusted, and depends upon a variety of antecedents ; upon its modification, again, depends the ultimate destination of the convicts. With a certain proportion of them sin has got possession of their every faculty, their every desire, their every thought. They have lo&t even the conventional hypocrisy of their class. The only things for which they retain an atom of reverence are strength and courage. The display of invincible power cows them. To every other quality they are insensible. Such men are familiar to those who have travelled far inward into New South Wales or Tasmania. There are doubtless in England some who I have witnessed the fiendish pleasure with which such wretches receive a new associate, and the diabolical delight which they show in bringing him down to their own degradation. We have heard travellers say that they never imagined how like devils human beings could become until they witnessed the strenuous and unceasing efforts of the hardened gangsmen in New South Wales to corrupt, vitiate, and debase «ach new partner in their sufferings. There was a m:lignant exultation when they caught a man of respectable birth, decent education, and comparatively reputable character — a mail, the victim rather of misfortune, infirmity, sudden temptation, ignorance, or credulity, than of willing and resolute criminality : they gloated over his humiliation, his debasement, and his agony ; but they gloated more over the vain repugnance with which he long resisted their foul contact, and the success which crowned their efforts to contaminate his mind, destroy his principles, and eradicate the last remnants of conscious virtue from his soul. Such convicts are the minority, we believe ; but they are a minority endowed with desperate wickedness and irresistible power. Shall we flood a community of civilized and moral beings with such miscreants ? Shall we expese the sanctity of homes, the purity of ! domestic life, to the loathsome taint of

wretches like these ? Shall we subject the morals of less guilty criminals to the contagion of their example and the impurity of their conversation 1 Let us separate the ir reclaimable from the unfortunate : the innocent and pure from the lepers of society. Generally, the State has a right to the service of her convicts. England has ample territory wherein to exercise that right. There are works in her colonies which no individual has money enough, and no company interest enough, to undertake. To render Australia habitable by a dense population will require the completion of works such as can be executed only by a Government, and a Government which can command a supply of slavish labour. One of the fiist things that must be done in that country, before population spreads far into the interior, is to construct reservoirs for water, tanks and other means for collecting those devious streams which, after pouring down the mountain in force and plenty, are lost before they irrigate the thirsty plains. Other works on the Northern and Southern coasts will be indispensable as the necessity for possessing fresh harbours arises. The incessant and continual labour which s>uch operations demand is precisly of that sort which convicts of the worst class can best supply. Working at a distauce from any rich or settled district, they have neither the opportunity of corrupting others.-nor the temptation to escape. The bush offers too precarious a subsistence to men who have at any rate the certainty of daily rations ; and by the time that their compulsory labour has induced a free population to cluster around them — which will surely happen — it will be desirable to transfer them to some other unoccupied place. Thus — perpetually shifting the scene of their sufferings, dispersed over the area of a continent nearly as vast as all Europe, and cut off from the amenities of social life — they will neither offend a virtuous population by their crimes, nor bequeath to a guiltless posterity the late remembrance of their degradation. Where they laboured there they will die; and the only tokens that they ever lived will be the structures which their hands have raised among the savage woods and silent deserts. But for that other class of convicts which, we believe, constitutes the majority — viz., those who have committed the least heinous crimes, and that too under sudden impulse and without the discipline of previous criminality — for that class we would implore a lighter and more merciful doom. Make them woik ; but do not debar them for ever from reaping the fruits of their industry, or eujoymg the salutary di&eipline of domestic lile; j do not obstruct their return into the ranks of respectability und self respect. Above all, do not force them to herd with the hardened proficient in villauy. To effect this desirable change, a system of classification ought to be enforced immediately after conviction. The antecedeut history of the prisoners should be ascertained, their own characters, the characters of their associates, and the circumstances which led to their guilt, diligently sifted. Slow and tortuous as the Bavarian trials may appear to Englishmen, they yet present an example which, in some respects, we should do well to imitate. If we did this, we should not huddle together in the same prison, nor send to the same colonies, men whose conduct and character were as widely different as their position, education, and capacity. We should not deluge New South Wales with the offscourings of our moral pest houses, at the very moment we pretended to animate the exertions and strengthen the resolution of the honest, independent, and respectable emigrant.