Page images
PDF
EPUB
[ocr errors]

and voters, whose 'invincible ignorance' leads them to maintain that it does, and I am quite sure that no Government, especially a weak one, would care to alienate support by insisting on an abstract truth as to the profits of mat-making. This trade therefore gradually and largely diminished as a prison employment; and there was another reason which illustrates one of the difficulties of prison trading. Those who discuss these matters with only theoretical knowledge to guide them think to avoid the charge of unfair competition by laying it down as a condition that prison-made articles must not be sold under the market price. But what is the market price' of anything? It is not a divine decree sent down from heaven, but is the result of what has been called the 'higgling of the market,' in which sellers get as high a price as they can and buyers pay as little as they canin which they are helped by the sellers being ready to undersell each other. The practical effect of the condition so laid down is that outsiders may undersell the prison, but the prison may not undersell the outsiders. Of course a prison-made article might prima facie be sold for less than an article made by paid labour, and there are other items of expense which a trader must cover by his profits, but which a Government department can neglect, so that the outside trader could easily be undersold by the prison. To avoid, therefore, unfair competition of this kind, it was the practice in Government prisons to fix a reasonable price for the prison produce, but the traders at once took advantage of this, their commercial travellers were authorised to undersell us, and we found our stocks accumulating on our hands. Of course we could have played the same game, but a Government department has its hands tied in carrying through

that sort of business.

In foreign countries there is a very common practice which seems at first sight to have much to recommend it. A contractor buys, so to speak, all the labour of the prison, and sets the inmates to work on anything he can turn their hands to. In places where the prisoners are all day in workshops and not in cells, this becomes more feasible, but it does not really provide employment for prisoners with very short sentences who know no trade, and who therefore practically do nothing useful.

We tried a version of this with our mat-making. We invited makers and dealers to compete under an arrangement by which they were to supply all raw material, plant, and necessary instruction. and to take away the produce at the price they tendered. This arrangement, however, which seems fair enough, aroused most strenuous opposition from rival manufacturers and workmen, who alleged they were undersold, and yet would not themselves give any higher price or compete for what they professed to consider such an advantageous contract. We also tried selling our mats by auction, with the result that the dealers combined to keep down the price

realised at the sale. These experiences show how difficult it is for Government to carry on trade and to turn prisons into factories of articles for sale to the public.

There is one other point on which I must make an observation as to the general advantage of industrial labour in prisons-a point which I find is generally overlooked. It is assumed as a general rule that by teaching a prisoner a trade he will be less likely to fall again into crime, and this is apparently founded on the idea that people fall into crime from want of employment or ignorance of any mode of earning their own livelihood. I believe that it is an entire delusion to suppose that this is true of any considerable number of criminals, and, moreover, I believe that it would be rather a misfortune than otherwise if any large number of men who are in the habit of earning their bread by outdoor or unsedentary labour should be tempted to adopt indoor work instead, especially any such as they could be taught in prison.

Even of those who might profitably carry on an indoor and sedentary employment, a little consideration will show that manufactures in a prison must in many cases at all events be carried on under conditions so different from what prevails in factories outside that the skill acquired in a prison can be of comparatively little use in obtaining employment after discharge. It has been stated quite erroneously that this sort of inefficiency is due to prisoners not being properly instructed, but it is not so at all. The evidence given. before the Prison Committee was to the effect that in these modern days most articles are made partly or wholly by machinery, and with a great division of labour, and it is skill in working under these conditions which is required, but which cannot be obtained under prison conditions.

To justify the setting up of machinery it would be necessary to be sure of a constant and large demand and a considerable infusion of highly skilled workmen, which could not be depended on when, as in a prison, they are constantly changing at short intervals. Moreover, all idea of separation and of good discipline among a naturally disorderly body of men would have to be entirely abandoned.

The only solution of all the difficulties, as I believe, is that prisons should be looked on as workshops for articles required for the Government service, considered as a whole: that is, they should be made sources of supply of articles required by other Government departments; and that it should be clearly established as a general principle that it is the duty of the officers of those departments to find employment for prisoners in making some of the numerous articles they require in such large quantities. Prisoners are in fact workmen maintained at Government cost, and as Government requires plenty of work to be done it is perfectly natural that the workmen it maintains should be employed for its benefit. I am well aware of

the difficulties that may be urged against this. It is no doubt much simpler to call upon contractors to tender to supply articles just when they are wanted than to go into the details necessary to have them made in workshops in which the number of workers fluctuates. Then there is the question of patterns of articles to be made, and if these are decided on without any reference to the capabilities of prison labour it is likely enough that the precise article required could not be produced in a prison; but a little good will would get over this difficulty if it were once accepted and recognised as an obligation to find work for prisoners. Difficulties of much the same kind have presented themselves as regards the construction of public works by convict labour; but this I know, that when once prejudices of this sort have been surmounted the officers of the Government departments which are carrying on the public works find that there are many countervailing advantages in having at their disposal a large amount of unpaid labour, and those who were opponents have often become the strongest supporters of this mode of employing convicts.

The upshot of the considerations I have brought forward is, I believe, incontrovertibly this: that however desirable industrial labour for prisoners may be from a moral point of view, it is impossible to apply it to more than a small proportion of those sentenced to imprisonment, both on account of the law applicable to prisons and on account of the shortness of the sentences of the large majority; that it is a delusion and a costly one to imagine that mechanical labour such as the tread-wheel can be made to produce the moral advantages of industrial labour by connecting it with milling machinery or other like method; that the advantage of industrial labour in local prisons, considered as enabling them to find employment in discharge, is considerably overrated, and that it is only in a very limited degree that crime arises from want of employment; that prisoners under the longer sentences may with facility and advantage be employed on industrial work so far as the law allows, providing consumers can be found for the work they produce; that the Government itself. considered as a whole, is the most appropriate consumer of such articles, and that prisons should therefore be looked at as Government workshops, for the inmates of which other Government departments should as a matter of duty and obligation be required to find employment.

E. F. DU CANE.

FRA FILIPPO LIPPI

I AM not ashamed to confess that, in my earlier days, I refused to believe that a Carmelite friar could have been the father even of a very celebrated son by a Carmelite nun. I thought it unlikely that a Carmelite friar who had transgressed the rules of his order should have remained a dignitary of the Church. But I have since learned that the lax morality conspicuous in the age of the Borgias was not less apparent a century earlier; and, painful as the fact may be, I cannot but admit that, amongst the religious artists of the Florentine revival, there were as many disreputable men as there were men of respectable lives.

What pains me most is to think that the art of Fra Filippo, the loose fish and seducer of holy women, looks almost as pure, and is often quite as lovely, as that of Fra Giovanni Angelico of Fiesole. We must therefore learn to count the moral qualities as part and parcel of the charm which is so inexpressibly attractive in Angelico at the same time that we endeavour to forget that the candour of Fra Filippo's angels is not the reflex of any similar quality in that painter.

No contrast is more striking than that which is afforded by the lives of the two Florentine friars who equally acquired fame and large practice in art in the fifteenth century without having any one feeling in common.

Belonging to different monastic communities, they both laboured inside and outside the edifices in which their vocation took them to live; each of them was a popular and finished craftsman. In one respect they differed greatly: one was a pattern of good conduct; the other a notorious example of corruption and foulness.

Fra Angelico, who was born in 1387, was a Dominican; Fra Filippo, born about 1405, was a Carmelite. Their pictures were of the same class: altar pieces or frescoes, Madonnas or illustrations of saintly legends. Their patrons were amongst the highest ranks of the aristocracy of Florence. Both reaped wealth and renown, and it was no doubt because they were so equal in their success that I felt so much inclined to doubt whether it could be true that the Dominican was a saint and the Carmelite a demon; though, when I

went so far as to try to clear Fra Filippo of a crime which seemed to contrast too strongly with the duties usually inculcated by the Church to be founded on reliable evidence, I was soon constrained to admit that I was mistaken in believing that a friar could not commit a most serious offence against morality without meeting with instant condemnation.

It now appears that Fra Filippo's career was marked, not only by offences against morality, but by breaches of the criminal law as administered in his time at Florence; yet that, in spite of the stain on his character, which was quite public, he kept his station as a painter, earned a competence, and was hardly less successful professionally than Angelico, who was acknowledged to have led the most blameless of lives.

Vasari seems to have felt that there was something unfair in the distribution of rewards to Angelico and Lippi. He contrasts their lives in a few sentences, observing that never was a churchman more devoted than the Dominican to the service of God, the benefit of the world or duty towards his neighbour, or one of such great and varied gifts, whose habits were so simple, whose thoughts were so pure, and whose piety was so conspicuous. He might have had wealth and enjoyed dignities; but he scorned them all, dying, as he had lived, a poor friar.

Fra Filippo enjoyed both honours and riches. He, too, was by nature gifted. But he was neither simple nor virtuous nor pious, and he was mostly prosperous without deserving to be so.

The fact is, adds the historian, men do not acquire fame because they are honest, or fail because they are dishonest. It is important only that they should excel in the profession they have selected. Honest men who excel do not fail to enjoy honours and wealth ; but their reward is as nothing in comparison with that which may accrue to one who has no moral quality of any kind to boast of. An honest man of ordinary parts, who falls into dishonest ways and has the ill fortune to be detected, generally receives condign punishment. A talented man of lax morality guilty of a similar offence, will be considered, in virtue of his gifts, as not having sinned. Not only is he not punished, but compassion is felt for him and justice itself deals mildly with his offence, even though he has but a shadow of honesty to recommend him.

Shall I confess that I was at first greatly distressed to learn that Fra Filippo, a Carmelite friar and an ordained priest, had a son who afterwards became a painter almost as celebrated as his father? I did all I could to rehabilitate his memory; but as evidence came piecemeal out of the dusty repositories of the Florentine archives, and I had to acknowledge that Fra Filippo was not only a man of dissolute life, but an offender against the ordinary laws which regulate the conduct of individuals, I was soon forced to look a-field

« PreviousContinue »