had already been in prison or convicted one or more times. A more fearful testimony as to the worse than inefficacy of the present system could hardly be given.

It is a fact so well known that I need not here give proof of it, that the greater part of those who incur the penalties of the law are from the poorer classes; we cannot therefore avoid the conclusion that poverty and ignorance are the chief predisposing causes of crime; but poverty can never be entirely removed, and it is to be doubted whether we have yet adopted efficient means for remedying the mischiefs of ignorance. It cannot be too often repeated, that reading, writing, and a slight tincture of arithmetic, with the repetition of some questions and answers learned by rote, do not constitute education. The school may teach these; but the actual education-namely, the formation of habits of thoughtremains in the hands of parents, or companions, and, as the world is at present constituted, is in great measure the result of circumstances. The mode of thinking of the people has not yet been cared for by the legislature: and the apparent acquirements of children in schools as they are at present managed, serve only to blind the eyes of those who endeavor to ascertain the mental state of the poor; for too frequently under this seeming quickness we shall on inquiry find an ignorance which would surprise those not accustomed to mix with the lower classes. I have within these few years visited workhouse schools, where a regular system of education is supposed to be carried on; but I have universally found that it consisted of mechanical instruction only; the mind was not cultivated, and it was a rare thing if any child could go a word beyond the mere formula which he had committed to memory. I have examined children from national free schools, and with deep regret have found myself obliged to come to the same conclusion. It is not therefore by this mechanical education that we can hope to counteract the incitements to crime presented in so many ways to the poor man.

There has been so much party spirit excited by the Act for the amendment of the Poor Law, that I come to this subject with regret, yet in consideration of the increase

of crime during a period of considerable duration, balanced only by a decrease during the last two years, which is quite insignificant when compared to the whole mass, it is not possible entirely to pass over so large an element in the condition of the poor,* and though I am by no means inclined to assert that robbery is usually attempted in order to relieve want, for I believe the experience of all who have watched the state of the poorer classes will contradict this, yet I believe it to be generally the consequence of the state of mind which want engen. ders, and to this the mode of administering relief of late years has largely contributed. The poor man has a right to this relief given him by law; but the same law which confirms his right, requires that he shall be put to every sort of inconvenience in endeavoring to obtain it. He must walk long distances, or if the husband be ill, the wife must do so to the neglect of all her home duties: medical advice, when obtained at the cost of walking fourteen to fifteen miles, often comes too late:† or if the

* The following is the table officially given of the criminal commitments during eight consecutive years:

To which may be added a decrease of ten per cent. in the committals during the year ending Dec. 31, 1844, upon a comparison with those of the preceding year. The new poor-law came into operation 14th Aug., 1834. In that year the proportion of crime to population in England and Wales was 1 in 619, in 1843 it was 1 in 537!

† It is a fact within my own knowledge that a poor man having been taken ill with inflammation of the lungs, the attendance of the medical practitioner could not be obtained in less than 48 hours. By that time the disease had made too much progress for medical aid to be of any avail, and the man died almost immediately after.

sick man be removed to the workhouse, the kindly attention of wife and children is denied, and mental is added to bodily irritation, sometimes with fatal effect. If the removal to the workhouse be the consequence of want of work, the parents and the children, the husband and wife are separated; low diet is added to imprisonment,— for whatever name be given to it, such is the confinement in the workhouse, de facto,-and the man, wounded in mind and lowered in constitution, leaves the asylum for want, offered by the public, a far worse member of society than when he entered it.

It is in vain that political economists determine to treat of man as of an animal only;-if he could be reduced into that state, the world would need that a new race should be created to assume dominion over the most cunning and ferocious of all animals; but by the rule already laid down, in our legislation we must consider him in his double ca pacity; and those very domestic ties which he finds so rudely severed by the law,-that very feeling of natural justice which teaches him that sickness or lack of employment is no crime,—are the safeguards of the well being of society, and were implanted in man's heart by that Greater Legislator whose decrees we can never break without suffering the penalty which He has attached to their breach, and which is never remitted. Nine years have now passed since the experiment was made, a clear increase of forty per cent. in the number of crimes committed has coincided with,-I will not say, been caused by it; but nevertheless the character of the crimes perpetrated seems to tell of such a kind of demoralization as the philosopher would have expected from such a law. The man of the workhouse is sinking into the sensual ferocious animal.

With all these causes of crime at work, can we expect that an imprisonment of six months will have any effect in deterring from crime? The man who is guilty of nothing but his poverty, suffers six months' imprisonment during the winter if he cannot obtain employment, or happens to be ill: and his diet in the jail-(and when the finer human affections and motives are crushed this becomes a consideration) is better. Thus a man who has

once tried the workhouse, will probably the next time prefer the jail, and will commit some trifling theft or of fence in order that he may obtain admission there for the sake of a maintenance: but he comes out instructed in robbery as a trade; and thus the law has arranged a set of grades for the perfection of crime; the workhouse first, the jail next, then a penal colony. What the working of this second part of the system is I shall now endeavor to show.

2. Deportation to a distant colony is the penalty of the greater offences, (with the two exceptions of murder and high treason,) and of the repetition of smaller ones, since a criminal who has been frequently convicted of larceny, is usually sentenced to transportation for a term of years at last. This punishment which from its very nature, must fall with very unequal weight on different kinds of offenders, is indiscriminately inflicted on men of all ranks and all characters. Let us consider its operation. In the case of forgery, the law has generally to deal with a man who has displayed great ingenuity in accomplishing, and deriving a profit from his fraud, and this ingenuity has been exercised in robbing his fellow-creatures of their property with comparative safety to himself. He is sentenced to transportation for life. He enters a new colony where talent is sure of making its way; his fertile invention is soon at work to ameliorate his condition, and ere many years are over he is in the possession of property and is a person looked up to in the country which is become a new home to him. There is little to deter from crime in such a prospect.

On the other hand turn to the rick burner of Suffolk or Norfolk. A laborer whom neither his parents nor society has taught the simplest rudiments of knowledge, but whose body is vigorous and capable of labor, asks for work and can get none, or if any, at wages insufficient to feed and clothe himself and his family. He is starving in the midst of surrounding plenty; the squire of his parish is living in affluence; in the farmer's yard are goodly corn stacks; and reasoning in a dull illogical way he connects his own wretchedness with the abundance of those whom he looks to for employment and protection, or perhaps in

his suffering he considers it as caused by ill will on the part of his superiors in station, and he burns down the barns. He also is sentenced to transportation for life.

Surely the state of these two individuals differs as light does from darkness, yet by law the punishment is the same. The only ground that can be imagined for this equality of punishment is, that the consequences of the crime as felt by society are as great in the one case as the other: a computation of punishment formed somewhat in this manner: A. utters one hundred pounds worth of forged 51. notes, and therefore deprives various members of our society of property to that amount in pound sterling. B. destroys a rick of the value of one hundred pounds, and thus deprives a member of our society of property to that amount; therefore the punishment which society shall inflict upon B. shall be precisely the same as that inflicted upon A. What principle is at work here? Not one which by punishment seeks to prevent others from committing a similar crime and at the same time tries to reform the criminal, but on the contrary, something very like retributive vengeance which inflicts a penalty upon the offender exactly commensurate with the wrong which society has suffered. But this, as we have already seen, is a vice in social law.

We may take another instance of a yet different kind, in which by law a like penalty is inflicted. C., a man of strong animal passions, who has been unaccustomed to control them in any way, inflicts for their gratification, or in revenge of some supposed wrong, "a grievous bodily harm" upon the person of a fellow man. C. may be an ignorant or an educated man, for although the cultivation of the intellectual faculties doubtless tends to curb the animal nature, when its uncontrolled indulgence does injury to ourselves or others, yet sometimes we see great mental energy combined with very ill-regulated animal appetites. More frequently, however, it is the ignorant man who sins against the law which protects the persons of individuals. However, be he ignorant or not, it is clear that he differs much, both in nature and habits, from either A. or B., and again it is difficult to recognize any principle but that of vengeance in the punishment inflicted, for it