436

We care not for the unhappy criminals.

sense of justice-oh, how injured! writhing under the neglect of his fellow-men, and having a whole world in him of which they know nothing. No! He is not to be a man, but a warning, an example. And was it for this that God created him? No wonder he blasphemes. How can he believe God cares for him when he sees man does not? With him it is a virtue to be an atheist, for the God that he deduces from the treatment he receives would be to him a demon. Is not his case hard? Yet God, perhaps, created criminals, that we might have our best feelings excited in trying to reclaim them. The sick are a cry for a physician.

To produce an inward change in an offender, to make the criminal feel that he is a criminal, and acknowledge the justice of his sentence, as regards himself and others-these are high ends which it were well to aim at. Criminals do not understand our justice. They have been born into the realm of nature, as her human wolves or tigers (there are also toads and bats, but these generally get on very well), badly organized, low in intelligence; and then they have not been elevated by discipline and education, their animal propensities have not been balanced by mental culture. Was this their choice? Do men choose misery and torture? Scarcely do they understand their own acts, not at all their punishment. Like Schiller's "criminal from lost honour," or the "Michel Kohlhaas" of Von Kleist, they imagine that they wage a fair war with society who has done so little for them. On our side, as Schiller truly says in the masterly preamble to his Verbrecher, &c. (speaking of a crimiual), "We regard the unhappy person, who was still as much a man as ourselves, both when he committed the act, and when he atoned for it, as a creature of another species, whose blood flows differently from our own, and whose will does not obey the same regulations as our own."

How beautifully does the great master go on!

"But the friend of truth seeks a mother for these lost children. He seeks her in the unalterable structure of the human soul, and in the variable conditions by which it is influenced from without; and by scarching both these he is sure to find her. He is no more astonished to see the poisonous hemlock thriving in that bed, in every other part of which wholesome herbs are growing, than to find wisdom and folly, virtue and vice, together in the same cradle. Not to mention (continues Schiller), any of the benefits which psychology derives from such a method of considering the criminal, this method has alone the preference, because it uproots the cruel scorn and proud security with which erect and untempted virtue commonly looks down upon the fallen."

Our treatment of criminals radically wrong.

437

From this great gulf between the two classes, designated, in common parlance, the good and bad (as if gradations between the two were not infinite), comes it that our efforts to convince many a criminal of his guilt and of the justice of his sentence are abortive. The right chord is not struck in them. Thus, Barthelemy (whose organization has been so finely explained in The Zoist) when he is assured of the chaplain's good will towards him, only replies, "If you mean me well, why am I not free to walk out of this place?" Difficult question to answer, when a man is only free to walk out from a prison to a scaffold. In the face of such a fact, it would be absurd to attempt to convince a criminal that society meant well by him. But, if we could say, "Let you out we dare not, for you would still do more than you have done, injure yourself and others; but we keep you here to teach you self-restraint," then indeed might we consistently talk to a prisoner of our Christian love towards him and our interest in his welfare. And even Barthelemy had a soft point in his heart. He wept when his father was mentioned, and held in his hand on the scaffold, as a last consolation, the letter of the only person who he thought really cared for him through guilt and sorrow.

Truly has Harriet Martineau said that the worst have in them a vulnerable point, a tender chord which may be touched, a fact which she exemplifies by relating how she tried in America to soften and better a prisoner under solitary confinement for some grave offence; how, at first, she failed so entirely as almost to doubt her own theory; till, at last, she happened to say to the man, "You have a mother!" when he burst into a passion of tears, and the ground was broken up for the good seed of gentle remonstrance.

That there is something radically wrong in our system of treating criminals, no one who observes facts can doubt. So far from teaching those, for whose instruction we are responsible, the worth and reward of good conduct, we seem to try to render it valueless in their eyes. With this tendency of our laws, I was struck during a visit to the Tothill Fields Prison, which, nevertheless, is as good a prison as can be under our existing systems, and is admirably and benevolently administered by Mr. Tracy, the Governor, a man whose zcal is in every respect, the opposite of that of Lieutenant Austen. Mr. Tracy had explained to me that certain placarded numbers affixed to the boys' arms meant the number of times they had been returned to the prison. Observing a boy of about eight years of age, with a non-criminal physiognomy, who yet had upon his arm No. Six, I asked the little fellow for what fault he had been so often committed to prison?

438 What happens in our prisons could not at Munich. The answer was, "For not moving on, Sir." I looked surprised, but Mr. Tracy assured me the boy had answered me with perfect truth. He was no thief, no ill-doer, only apt to be in the way of the police, because, like the poor boy in Bleak House, he did not know where to go. Yet on either side of this harmless and neglected one were little thieves of as arrant a dye as any organization could proclaim. Now, what must be the tendency of imprisonment on such a boy as the poor little fellow who would not (or could not) keep moving? Certainly not self-acquiescence in the justice of his punishment, but, unless he be a miracle of goodness, a rebellious dissatisfaction which must tend to make him a useless, if not a hurtful, member of society.

Again, see what happens from our prisoners not acquiescing in our tender mercies towards them, in our treadmills, silent systems, solitary confinement systems, and all the ingenious tortures devised on the terrible-example principle. Under the head of "Poisoning Extraordinary," I find in the Daily News an account of the death of a convict in the Junior Prison at Parkhurst. He was transported about five years since for robbing a till, that is, transported to the prison at Parkhurst. The evidence on the inquest disclosed the extraordinary efforts devised by the prisoners for escaping their daily employ (what daily employ ?), and gaining admission into the hospital. Some of them, with this view, were in the habit of making their eyes and legs sore, running stocking-needles right through their knees, eating ground glass, or bleeding themselves with knives or lancets (surreptitiously obtained) down to death's door. The man in question had, by the prescription of a fellow-prisoner, scraped verdigris off an old pump, made it up into pills with soap, thinking only to make himself sick; but, taking too strong a dose, had killed himself.

Now could such a case have occurred in the Munich Prison, or in any prison where the mind was ameliorated instead of the body being tyrannized over? Gross ignorance on the part of the criminals, ignorance that lies at our door, is at the bottom of all this. Our prisoners come out of an uninstructed class, and no pains is taken to make them feel the justice, or even understand the meaning of their punishment. Of the three men, who now lie in gaol for the Waterford murder, it is stated (in the Sun) that "they are all extremely ignorant, and seem unaware of the consequences of a conviction of the offence with which they stand charged." Ought these things to be?

Then, as to the useless labour system, so well repudiated in the Munich Prison, what good results can come from thus

No useless labour; nor unnatural system.

439

additionally degrading the degraded? If the wild beast be treated as a wild beast, will you ever make a man of him? I know that some persons, whose opinions I respect, think the treadmill and the grinding-wheel efficient instruments of prison discipline and government. And why? On the ground that there is nothing which the men fear and hate so much as this degrading useless labour. But is there no better appeal than dread to a human heart? aye, even the worst human heart? And, as I once before observed, how temporary are such expedients. Remove the lash, and the criminal is the same as before, only harder. Even if you, after a fashion, govern men in prison by fear, out of it can you continue the system? We pretend that human government is a shadow of the divine-that our justice, law, and polity, not only come from God, but imitate God's manner of administration. Would it were so. But ours is an inverted process. Providence teaches us by an intelligent system of consequences, with our self-reformation as the end in view. But we, in the face of nature, adhere to brute punishment. Think we then to lead back to nature by unnatural systems? Nowhere, but in our prisons and in the poet's exploded Tartarus, do we find Ixion's wheel and drawing water in sieves. It is no sentimental tender-heartedness which makes me speak thus, but downright practical philosophy, the philosophy of Mr. and Mrs. Meagles in Little Dorrit (how I congratulate the world on Dickens's conferring a new serial on us); a philosophy, which, more justly than that of the Gradgrind school, should confer on its possessors the denomination of "practical people." The good fruits of selfrestraining systems and intelligent labour are before us in a thousand ways. At Genoa I saw even a madhouse con, ducted on such principles with the best effect; and an intelligent physician at Bonn, who presides over an establishment of the kind, assured me that many a radical cure of the insane was effected by developing in them the power and pride of self-government. He told me that experience led him to have a kind of governmental system conducted by the insane themselves: monitors and persons of trust, as in the Munich Prison, chosen from among the very inmates of the institution. Thus, one of the patients able to control himself, would be sent out to walk with others less advanced in self-restraint, and, being made responsible for conducting them all safely back, was never known to violate his trust; while the confidence reposed in him generated a pride of well-doing that had the happiest effect in promoting his

restoration.

As to criminals, Australia shews us what healthy stimulus,

440 Books received, Notices to Correspondents, &c.

and giving up a man to himself at the right time, can do. The penal settlement has become a fine British Colony. On this track, therefore, we may safely and practically proceed. Let our criminals feel that we think of them as well as of society. Let our prisons be reformatory, as well as penal. Such a plan will doubtless cost money, but it may possibly be found in this, as in other cases, that Christian philanthropy is, after all, the best economist.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

Electro-Dynamisme Vital ou Les Relations Physiologiques de l'Esprit et de la Matière, &c. Par A. J. P. Philips.

We have not space to do justice to the ability and scientific attainments of the author, while we differ from him essentially in some of his views.

Mesmerism in its relation to Health and Disease and the present state of Medicine. By William Neilson, Esq. Edinburgh: Shepperd and Elliot. The author unsparingly, but not unjustly, exposes the hostility of the medical profession to mesmerism. The work is worth reading.

The British Journal of Homœopathy. October, 1855.

Bulletin Magnétique de Lyons. No. 16. September, 1855.

The Seer of Sinai. By J. W. Jackson. London: Tweedie, 337, Strand. 1856. The case of Luigi Buranelli medico-legally considered. By Forbes Winslow, M.D., D.C.L.

Dr. Winslow argues, as every one ought, that Buranelli was insane.

NOTICES TO CORRESPONDENTS.

We have received a letter from the Rev. George Sandby.

From Dr. Castle, of Montmorency, the case of a young gentleman disposed to take exaggerated views of matters which interested him, and live frequently in a waking dream and remain for days subsequently under its influence. Once he thus felt or saw the death of a relative, the news of which could not reach him till some time afterwards. He correctly predicted to Dr. Castle that he himself should die young and by a violent death: in fact, he was one day observed by his brother officers to be greatly depressed, said he felt that something horrible was impending over him, and in an hour was found in his room brutally murdered, together with his servant, by two young serjeants of his regiment. They had fine cerebral organizations, and murdered him from deep revenge, as he had acted with severe discipline towards them: they murdered the servant to avoid detection. They confessed the justice of their sentence, implored pardon from heaven, and then prayed for him whom they had murdered. The elder alleged that he had instigated the other to the crime, and requested to be executed the last, that the other might be spared the sight of his execution. In both Destructiveness and Benevolence were large and the intelligence good: Conscientiousness and Self-esteem well developed in both: and very large in the elder. In the murdered officer the only organs greatly developed were Ideality and Marvellousness.

An article on the divining rod by C. W. J., through General Bagnold. From Mrs. Schutze, 63, Marylebone Street, her own mesmeric cure. From Mr. Fradelle, of Camden Town, remarkable instances of clairvoyance, in the waking state and in sleep, independent of mesmerism.

From M. Lombard, of Geneva, on table-turning.

p. 288, 1. 9, for "flaming," read blawing

ERRATA.

p. 320, 1. 29, for "essential," read essence.