CONVICT MARRIAGES.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 2742, 8 February 1890, Page 6 (Supplement)

CONVICT MARRIAGES.

Witii an optimism certainly not jutified by tho medico-psychological literature of England, Germany, and Italy, or even of France itself, the French Government has sot itself to encourage the intermarriage of life convicts in New Calddouia with life convicts imported from the prisons of the motherland. In official reports published in vindication of the matrimonial arrangements it is said that " the Government of the Republic is animated in this policy by views of an exalted kind. Tho constitution of the family in our penitentiaries," the Government apologist continues, "is the best aid to morality. Some of those marriages between two peraons whom society has rejectod from its midst are prosperous, and Huch examples, although thoy are rare, are yet of a nature to warrant tho Government in promoting them. The painful exceptions, the number of which has been exaggerated, will tend to become fewer, and the marriages in question will in the long run be better assorted." Moro than a quarter of a century ago the late eminent Commissioner in Lunacy in Scotland, Sir James Coxe, in an anuual report of unusual interest, insisted on the necessity of breaking up and isolating the criminal class as the only way to check the multiplication of crime in our great cities. Forty years' experience in connection with the Perth Penitentiary had brought Dr. Bruce Thomson to the same conclusion, the soundness of which has derived confirmation from the testimony of numerous Continental alienists, of whom the Italian Lombroso may bo adduced as at once the moct recent and the most authoritative. "Simile simili gaudet," he demonstrates, "is nowhere more strikingly illustrated than iu tho transmission from parents to progeny of depraved habits and felonious proolirities, and his remedy is practically the ono recommended by Sir J. Coxe, that of separating the individual members of the criminal community as widely and effectively as possible, and of giving thom a chance under saner conditions of associa-

tion and intercourse of rehabilitating themselves physically and morally. Vice itself and, still more, vicious tendency can be lived down, but only by entire removal from the social atmosphere in which they havo been generated, and by steady application of a morally reinvigora-

ting regimen, tested by opportunity and modified by circumstances. With such facts and conclusions en evidence the French Government has surely allowed a sentimental optimism to sway it unduly when it encourages such a system as that recorded by impartial eye-witnesses.

"Girls, whether thieves or prostitutes," says M. Moncelon, "on arriving from the prisons of France and landing in New Caledonia are received in a religious asylum, superintended by the sisters of St. Joseph, The rule of this establishmoat resembles that ef a pension where

the girls draw lots for husbands. On the arrival of a convoy of such young women the bachelors imprisoned in the penitentaries are in great excitement, and if they ascertain that there are arty good-lookiug ones in the number they demand inter views or introductions. On a fixed day the convict-bachelor is brought into a parlour divided into two by an iron grating , . There the sister introduces him to tho girl, whom ho has fancied, and charges herself with tire preliminaries, which, beginning , with conversion, lead to a matrimonial engagement." Prom this not very promising experience, the marriage is contracted, with results, according to M. Louis Sarron, another eye-witness, tho reverse of encouraging. His gleanings, in fact, from tho journals of Now Caledonia form an instructive commentary on tho lex hereditaria, as involved by Darwin, and are sufficiently adverso to the continuance of an experiment hardly creditable to the countrymen of Esquirol and Pinel, of Paul Broca and Legrand du Saullo. — Lancet-