never suffered to sleep; and when, above all, the reformation is attempted step by step, and the prejudices of mankind are not assailed by the bolder course which appears to contemplate destruction and not repair. The name of reform in the criminal laws had not been heard in the House of Commons for fifty-eight years, when, in 1808, Romilly carried his bill for the abolition of the punishment of death for privately stealing from the person to the value of five shillings; in other words, for picking pockets. It is instructive to see how, through the force of the circumstances around him, Romilly approached the subject of this reform with a caution which now looks almost like w akness. His object was originally to raise the e according to which a theft was rendered capital. In January 1808, he gave up the intention of bringing forward even this limited measure he was sure the judges would not approve of it. To another distinguished lawyer belongs the merit of having urged Romilly to a bolder policy. His friend Scarlett, he says, 'had advised me not to content myself with merely raising the amount of the value of property, the stealing of which is to subject the offender to capital punishment, but to attempt at once to repeal all the statutes which punish with death mere thefts unaccompanied by any act of violence, or other circumstance of aggravation. This suggestion was very agreeable to me. But, as it appeared to me that I had no chance of being able to carry through the House a bill which was to expunge at once all these laws from the statute-book, I determined to attempt the repeal of them one by one; and to begin with the most odious of them, the act of Queen Elizabeth, which makes it a capital offence to steal privately from the person of another.' Upon this prudential principle Romilly carried his first reform in 1808. But the House of Commons, which consented to pass the bill, forced upon him the omission of its preamble: 'Whereas, the extreme severity of penal laws hath not been found effectual for the prevention of crimes; but, on the contrary, by increasing the difficulty of convicting offenders, in some cases affords them impunity, and in most cases renders their punishment extremely uncertain.' The temper with which too many persons of rank and influence received any project of amelioration at the beginning of this century, is forcibly exhibited in an anecdote which Romilly has preserved for our edification: 'If any person be desirous of having an adequate idea of the mischievous effects which have been produced in this country by the French Revolution and all its attendant horrors, he should attempt some legislative reform, on humane and liberal principles. He will then find, not only what a stupid dread of innovation, but what a savage spirit, it has infused into the minds of many of his countrymen. I have had several opportunities of observing this. It is but a few nights ago, that, while I was standing at the bar of the House of Commons, a young man, the brother of a peer, whose name is not worth setting down, came up to me, and breathing in my face the nauseous fumes of his undigested debauch, stammered out: "I am against your bill; I am for hanging all." I was confounded; and endeavouring to find out some

In 1810 Sir Samuel Romilly brought in three bills to repeal the acts which punished with death the crimes of stealing privately in a shop goods of the value of five shillings, and of stealing to the amount of forty shillings in a dwelling-house, or on board vessels in navigable rivers. The first bill passed the House of Commons, but was lost in the Lords. The other two were rejected. In 1811 the rejected bills were again introduced, with a fourth bill abolishing the capital punishment for stealing in bleaching-grounds. The four bills were carried through the House of Commons; but only that on the subject of bleaching-grounds was sanctioned by the Lords. The constant argument that was employed on these occasions against the alteration of the law was this-that of late years the offences which they undertook to repress were greatly increased. Justly did Romilly say: 'A better reason than this for altering the law could hardly be given.' On the 24th of May 1811, when three of the bills were rejected in the House of Lords, Lord Ellenborough declared: 'They went to alter those laws which a century had proved to be necessary, and which were now to be overturned by speculation and modern philosophy.' The lord chancellor, Eldon, on the same occasion stated, that he had himself early in life felt a disposition to examine the principles on which our criminal code was framed, before observation and experience had matured his judgment. Since, however, he had learned to listen to these great teachers in this important science, his ideas had greatly changed, and he saw the wisdom of the principles and practice by which our criminal code was regulated.' In 1813 Sir Samuel Romilly's bill for the abolition of capital punishment in cases of shoplifting was carried by the Commons in the new parliament; but it was again rejected in the House of Lords. No further attempt was made towards the amelioration of this branch of our laws till the year 1816; which attempt we have now more particularly to record.

On the 16th of February, Sir Samuel Romilly obtained leave to bring in a bill repealing the act of William III., which made it a capital offence to steal privately in a shop to the value of five shillings. He described this act as the most severe and sanguinary in our statute-book; inconsistent with the spirit of the times in which we lived; and repugnant to the law of nature, which had no severer punishment to inflict upon the most atrocious of crimes. As recently as 1785, no less than ninety-seven persons were executed in London for this offence alone; and the dreadful spectacle was exhibited of twenty suffering at the same time. The capital sentence was now constantly evaded by juries committing a pious fraud, and finding the property of less value than was required by the statute. The consequence, if severe laws were

CHAP. VII.]

never executed, was, that crime went on to increase, and the crimes of juvenile offenders especially. On moving the third reading of the bill, on the 15th of March, Sir Samuel Romilly called attention to the great number of persons of very tender age who had recently been sentenced to death for pilfering in shops. At that moment there was a child in Newgate, not ten years of age, under sentence of death for this offence; and the recorder of London was reported to have declared that it was intended to enforce the laws strictly in future, to interpose some check, if possible, to the increase of youthful depravity. The bill passed the Commons, but was thrown out in the Lords on the 22d of May. On this occasion the lord chief-justice agreed with the lord chancellor, 'that the effect of removing the penalty of death from other crimes had rendered him still more averse to any new experiment of this kind. Since the removal of the vague terror which hung over the crime of stealing from the person, the number of offences of that kind had alarmingly increased. Though the punishment of death was seldom inflicted for crimes of this nature, yet the influence which the possibility of capital punishment had in the prevention of crimes could scarcely be estimated, except by those who had the experience in the operation of the criminal law which he had the misfortune to have. When it was considered that the protection of the property in all shops depended on the act before them, and that even now thefts of that description were numerous, the House would not, he trusted, take measures to increase them.'

When we look back on the debates upon the criminal law, from 1809 to 1816, and see how little was asked by Romilly, and refused to him, compared with the amount of reform that has since been accomplished, we can only regard the arguments for the support of the ancient system of capricious terror, as the arguments of men slowly and painfully emerging from barbarism. When, in the time of Henry VI., more persons were executed in England in one year, for highway robbery, than the whole number executed in France in seven years; when, in the reign of Henry VIII., seventytwo thousand thieves were hanged, being at the rate of two thousand a year; and when, in the reign of George III., as we have seen, twenty persons were executed on the same morning in London, for privately stealing-we see the principle of unmitigated ferocity, the savagery which applies brute force as the one remedy for every evil, enshrined on the judgment-seat. The system went on till society was heart-sick at its atrocities, and then rose up the equivocating system which lord chancellors, and lord chief-justices, and doctors in moral philosophy, upheld as the perfection of human wisdom-the system of making the lightest as well as the most enormous offences capital, that the law might stand up as a scarecrow-an old, ragged, ill-contrived, and hideous maukin—that the smallest bird that habitually pilfered the fields of industry despised while he went on pilfering. With the absolute certainty of experience that bloody laws rigorously administered did not diminish crime, the legislators

39

of the beginning of the nineteenth century believed, or affected to believe, that the same laws scarcely ever carried into execution would operate through the influence of what they called 'a vague terror.' As if any terror, as a preventive of crime or a motive to good, was ever vague. The system was entirely kept in existence by the incompetence and idleness of the law-makers and the law-administrators. A well-digested system of secondary punishments never seemed to them to be within the possibility of legislation. We are very far from the solution of this great problem in our own days; but we have made some steps towards its attainment.

The revolting cruelty and the disgusting absurdity of our criminal laws, thirty years ago, were in perfect harmony with the system of police, which had then arrived at its perfection of imbecile wickedness. The machinery for the prevention and detection of crime was exactly accommodated to the machinery for its punishment. On the 3d of April, on the motion of Mr Bennet, a committee of the House of Commons was appointed to inquire into the state of the police of the metropolis. The committee was resumed in 1817; and two reports were presented, which were amongst the first causes of the awakening of the public mind to a sense of the frightful evils which were existing in what we flattered ourselves to be the most civilised city in the world. Twelve years after, a committee of the House of Commons thus described the police system of 1816 and 1817: 'If a foreign jurist had then examined the condition of the metropolis, as respected crime, and the organisation of its police-and if, without tracing the circumstances from which that organisation arose, he had inferred design from the ends to which it appeared to conduce he might have brought forward plausible reasons for believing that it was craftily framed by a body of professional depredators, upon a calculation of the best means of obtaining from society, with security to themselves, the greatest quantity of plunder. He would have found the metropolis divided and subdivided into petty jurisdictions, each independent of every other, each having sufficiently distinct interests to engender perpetual jealousies and animosities, and being sufficiently free from any general control to prevent any intercommunity of reformation or any unity of action.' Another committee of the House of Commons, reporting in 1833, says of the same system: 'The police was roused into earnest action only as some flagrant violation of the public peace, or some deep injury to private individuals, impelled it into exertion; and security to persons and property was sought to be obtained, not by the activity and wholesome vigour of a preventive police, which it is a paramount duty of the state to provide, but by resorting from time to time, as an occasional increase of the more violent breaches of the law demanded it, to the highest and ultimate penalties of that law, in the hope of checking the more desperate offenders.' The same report says: Flash-houses were then declared to be a necessary part of the police system, where known thieves, with the full knowledge of the magistrates and public officers, assembled; until the state, or individuals, from the losses they had sustained, or the wrongs

6

they had suffered, bid high enough for their detection.'

Flash-houses, known in the scientific phraseology of the police as 'flash-cribs,' 'shades,' and 'infernals,' were filthy dens, where thieves and abandoned females were always to be found, riotous or drowsy, surrounded by children of all ages, qualifying for their degrees in the college of crime. There,' says a Middlesex magistrate, examined before the committee of 1816, they (the children) see thieves and thief-takers sitting and drinking together on terms of good-fellowship: all they see and hear is calculated to make them believe they may rob without fear of punishment; for in their thoughtless course they do not reflect that the forbearance of the officers will continue no longer than until they commit a forty-pound crime, when they will be sacrificed.' A forty-pound crime !-the phraseology is as obsolete as if it were written in the pedler's French of the rogues of the sixteenth century. A forty-pound crime was a crime for whose detection the state adjudged a reward, to be paid on conviction, of forty pounds; and, as a necessary consequence, the whole race of thieves were fostered into a steady advance from small offences to great, till they gratefully ventured upon some deed of more than common atrocity, which should bestow the blood-money upon the officers of the law who had so long petted and protected them. The system received a fatal blow in 1816, in the detection of three officers of the police, who had actually conspired to induce five men to commit a burglary for the purpose of obtaining the rewards upon their conviction. The highwaymen who infested the suburbs of the metropolis had been eradicatedthey belonged to another age. Offences against the person were very rarely connected with any offences against property. But the uncertainty of punishment, the authorised toleration of small offenders, and the organised system of negotiation for the return of stolen property, had filled the metropolis with legions of experienced depredators. The public exhibitions of the most profligate indecency and brutality can scarcely be believed by those who have grown up in a different state of society. When Defoe described his Colonel Jack, in the days of his boyish initiation into vice, sleeping with other children amidst the kilns and glass-houses of the London fields, we read of a state of things that has long passed away; but, as recently as 1816, in Covent-Garden Market, and other places affording a partial shelter, hundreds of men and women, boys and girls, assembled together, and continued during the night, in a state of shameless profligacy, which is described as presenting a scene of vice and tumult more atrocious than anything exhibited even by the lazzaroni of Naples.

The brilliantly lighted, carefully watched, safe, orderly, and tranquil London of the present day, presents as great a contrast to the London of 1816, as that again contrasted with the London of 1762the year in which the Westminster paving and lighting act was passed. Street robberies, before that period, were the ordinary events of the night : security was the exception to the course of atrocity, for which the government applied no remedy but to

hang. For half a century after this the metropolis had its comparative safety of feeble oil-lamps and decrepit watchmen. The streets were filled with tumultuous vagabonds; and the drowsy guardians of the night suffered every abomination to go on in lawless vigour, happy if their sleep were undisturbed by the midnight row of the drunken rake. In 1807 Pall-Mall was lighted by gas. The persevering German, who spent his own money and that of the subscribers to his scheme, had no reward. The original gas company, whose example was to be followed not only by all England, but the whole civilised world, were first derided, and then treated in parliament as rapacious monopolists intent upon the ruin of established industry. The adventurers in gaslight did more for the prevention of crime than the government had done since the days of Alfred. We turn to the parliamentary debates, and we see how they were encouraged in 1816-nine years after it had been found that the invention was of unappreciable public benefit: 'The company,' said the Earl of Lauderdale, ' aimed at a monopoly, which would ultimately prove injurious to the public, and ruin that most important branch of trade, our whale-fisheries.' Alderman Atkins contended that the measure was calculated to ruin that hardy race of men, the persons employed in the Southern and Greenland whale-fisheries, in each of which a million of money and above a hundred ships were engaged. If the bill were to pass, it would throw out of employ ten thousand seamen, and above ten thousand rope makers, sail-makers, mast-makers, &c., connected with that trade.' Who can forbear to admire the inexhaustible fund of benevolence that for ages has been at work in the advocacy of the great principle of protection? At every step of scientific discovery which promises to impart new benefits to mankind, however certain and unquestionable be the benefit, we are called upon to maintain the ancient state of things, amidst the terrible denunciations of ruin to some great interest or other. It is quite marvellous the ruin that has been threatening us since the peace, when capital has been free to apply itself in aid of skill and enterprise. The ruin that gaslight was to produce is a pretty fair example of the ruin that has gone on, and is still going on, for no objects but those of thinning our population, diminishing our manufac tures, crippling our commerce, extinguishing our agriculture, and pauperising our landed proprietors. There never was a nation doomed to such perils by the restless character of its people. They will not let well-enough alone, as the only wise men say. In 1816 they risked the existence of the British navy, which depended upon the whale-fisheries, for the trifling advantage of making London as light by night as by day, and bestowing safety and peacefulness upon its million of inhabitants. And yet, at the very moment that this ruin was predicted to oil, it was admitted that we could not obtain a sufficiency of oil. There are some lessons yet to be learned on the subject of protection, even from this petty fight of oil and gas.

A committee of the House of Commons was appointed in 1815 to inquire into the state of

CHAP. VII.]

mendicity and vagrancy in the metropolis and its neighbourhood; and they continued their sittings in 1816, reporting minutes of the evidence in each year. Beyond these reports no legislative measure was adopted. The evidence went rather to shew the amount of imposture than of destitution. To collect such evidence was an amusing occupation for the idle mornings of members of parliament. To inquire into the causes of destitution and its remedies would have been a far heavier task. The chief tendency of the evidence was to shew how the sturdy beggar was a capitalist and an epicure; ate fowls and beef-steaks for supper, and despised broken meat; had money in the funds, and left handsome legacies to his relations. The witnesses, moreover, had famous stories of a lame impostor who tied up his leg in a wooden frame, and a blind one who wrote letters in the evening for his unlettered brethren; of a widow who sat for ten years with twins who never grew bigger, and a wife who obtained clothes and money from eleven lying-in societies in the same year. But the committee had also some glimpses of real wretchedness amidst these exciting tales of beggar-craft-as old as the days of the old Abraham men. They heard of Calmel's Buildings, a small court of twenty-four houses in the immediate vicinity of Portman Square, where more than seven hundred Irish lived in the most complete distress and profligacy; and they were told that the court was totally neglected by the parish; that it was never cleaned; that people were afraid to enter it from dread of contagion. In George Yard, Whitechapel, they were informed that there were two thousand people, occupying forty houses, in a similar state of wretchedness. Much more of this was told the committee; but the evil was exhibited and forgotten. Very much of what was called the vagrancy of the metropolis was a natural consequence of the administration of the poor-laws throughout the kingdom. A large proportion of the money raised for the relief of the poor was expended in shifting the burden of their relief from one parish to another; and Middlesex kept a number of functionaries in active operation, to get rid of the vagrants that crowded into London, by passing them out of the limits of the metropolitan county, to return, of course, on the first convenient occasion. The vagrants were dealt with 'as the act directs' that is, they were committed to a house of correction for seven days, and then passed to their respective parishes, if they belonged to England; or carted to Bristol or Liverpool, if they were natives of Ireland. As Middlesex worked under the law of settlement, so worked the whole kingdom. This law of settlement was in full operation, playing its fantastic tricks from the Channel to the Tweed, when the peace filled the land with disbanded seamen and other servants of war; and agricultural labourers, who could find no employ at home, were wandering, as it was called, to search for capital, where capital was seeking for labour. The statute of 1662, the foundation of the law of settlement, forbade this wandering, and gave a very amusing explanation of the ground of its prohibitions: 'Whereas, by reason of some defects in the law, poor people are not restrained from going from one parish to another, and

41

therefore do endeavour to settle themselves in those parishes where there is the best stock.' The great natural law of labour seeking exchange with capital, was to be resisted by a law which declared that those who sought to effect this exchange were 'rogues and vagabonds.' But still, in spite of statute upon statute, the labourers would wander, and 'endeavour to settle themselves in the parishes where there is the best stock; and, the happy days being gone, never to return, when Poor Tom was whipped from tything to tything, and stocked, punished, and imprisoned,' the poor-law functionaries, in deference to the more merciful spirit of the age, employed a great portion of their time, and a larger portion of the public money, in carrying the labourers about from one end of the kingdom to the other, parcelling them out with the nicest adjustment amongst the fourteen thousand little divisions called parishes; and determining that, whatever circumstances existed in any one of these fourteen thousand divisions to make the presence of the labourers desirable or otherwise, they should go, and they should stay, where they had been born or apprenticed, or last lived for a year. The committee of the House of Commons on mendicity and vagrancy, in 1816, received evidence upon evidence of the extent of this transplantation of labourers, which set the whole country alive with the movements of vagrantcarts, without the slightest suspicion that there was something radically wrong at the foundation of a system which cost the rate-payers several millions annually in expenses of removal and of litigation, and with an indirect cost to the nation of many millions of profitable labour, which was destroyed by this constant exercise of the disturbing forces of ignorant legislation. After the peace, the clinging of parishes to the law of settlement became more monstrous than ever. 'Soon after the close of the war, when the agricultural labourers were increased by the disbanding of the army, and the demand for their labour was diminished from various causes, agricultural parishes very generally came to the resolution of employing none but their own parishioners; which ruined the industry of the country, and produced more individual misery than can be conceived by those who were not eye-witnesses: the immediate consequence of this determination was, the removal of numbers of the most industrious families from homes where they had lived in comfort, and without parish relief, all their lives, to a workhouse in the parish to which they belonged; and, without materially affecting the ultimate numbers in the respective parishes, the wretched objects of removal, instead of happy and contented labourers, became the miserable inmates of crowded workhouses, without the hope of ever returning to their former independence.'

On the 28th of May, Mr Curwen, an intelligent agriculturist, brought the subject of the poor-laws before the House of Commons, on a motion for the appointment of a committee of inquiry. Mr Curwen had a plan-as many others had their plans. His plan was to abolish the poor-rates, enacting 'that every individual who made any profit or advantage by his labour, should contribute towards a parish fund for the relief of sickness, age, or misfortune,

for the encouragement of industry and good morals, for a general plan of education, and such other objects as might be conducive to the comforts and happiness of the labouring-classes; to which fund capitalists and property should contribute.' Mr Curwen had a theory that the extension of manufactures, having raised the average rate of wages, had produced general improvidence; that improvidence was the main cause of distress and poor-rates; and that to abridge the means of improvidence, by converting all the labouring population into fourteen thousand parochial friendly societies, was at once to establish the comfort and independence of all who had been so long degraded and demoralised by parish allowances. It is scarcely necessary for us to dwell upon the practical absurdity of this benevolent dream. The scheme of Mr Curwen formed small part of the deliberations of the committee, which reported in 1817. Their recommendations for the remedy of the enormous evil of the existing poorlaws, did not penetrate beneath the surface. It may be desirable here to record what was the actual state of poor-law administration thirty years ago.

The system of poor-laws in England began, no doubt, in expediency. The gradual breaking up of feudal service and protection, the sudden dissolution of the monastic institutions, and the almost concurrent depreciation of the value of money consequent upon the discovery of America, produced an aggregate of misery which imperatively demanded a forced contribution from capital. The same laws which, justly and mercifully to a certain extent, required that casual misfortune should be relieved, also provided that 'the poor should be set to work.' The natural operations of demand and supply were here disturbed; the natural relations between profits and wages were interrupted; a fund was created for the labourers, which could not be distributed with reference to the amount of profitable labour; the fund for the support of profitable labour was therefore broken in upon; and, for three centuries, consequently, a struggle was going forward between the demands of want and the demands of industry. Circumstances, which arose almost within our own generation, went on, steadily breaking down the barriers which separated the two classes of claimants upon the labour-fund; and at the close of the war, with reference to the largest body of labourers, the agricultural, the distinction between the two classes of claimants had in great part ceased. The demands of want and the demands of industry were confounded. The members of one class had insensibly slid into the other. The wages of idleness and vice, and the wages of industry and good conduct, were to be paid out of a common purse; and it is not therefore to be wondered at if the easier claim upon the wages had been generally preferred to the more laborious.

In 1816, the sum expended for the relief of the poor of England and Wales amounted to £5,724,839. The average annual expenditure had gradually increased from about two millions, at the commencement of the war, to six or seven millions at its close. A very large portion of the money that had been spent in fostering pauperism during the war years,

by parish allowances in aid of wages, represents the amount of degradation and misery which the labourers endured, as compared with their unallowanced forefathers. The national debt represents, in a great degree, the money expended in unprofitable wars, the waste of capital upon objects that can only be justified by the last necessity, and which are the result of those evil passions which the improved knowledge and virtue of mankind may in time root out. In the same way, had the money expended upon fostering pauperism been raised upon loan, we should have had an amount of some two hundred millions, representing, in a like degree, the waste of capital expended in drying up the sources of industry and skill, and paying the alms of miserable indigence, instead of the wages of contented labour. It is difficult to conceive a more complete state of degradation than the allowanced labourers exhibited in 1816. With the feudal servitude had passed away the feudal protection. The parish servitude imposed the miseries and contumelies of slavery, without its exemption from immediate care and future responsibility. So far were the agricultural labourers slaves, that, although they could not be actually sold, like 'villeins in gross,' their labour was put up by auction to the best bidder by parish authorities. 'The overseer calls a meeting on Saturday evenings, where he puts up each labourer by name to auction; and they have been let generally at from 1s. 6d. to 2s. per week, and their provisions; their families being supported by the parish.' When we regard the high price of food in 1816, with the inability of many tenants to pay poor-rates, we can scarcely be surprised at these barbarous attempts to diminish the pressure of the allowance system. The whole adjustment of the social relations between the employer and the labourer, under this system, was founded upon injustice and oppression on one hand, and fraud and improvidence on the other. The farmer refused to employ the labourer till he had reduced him, by withholding employment, to beggary; robbed the labourer of his fair wages, to dole out to him 'headmoney,' not according to his worth, but his necessities; denied employ to the single labourer at all; discharged his best workman, with a small family, to take on the worst, with a large family; and left his own land uncultivated, that a congregation of worthless idlers might be paid upon the pretence of working on the roads, while the independent labourer was marked as a fool for making any attempt to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.' The authorities doled out their allowances upon the most partial and despotic system. The squire, the clergyman, and the farmer constituted themselves a tribunal for the suppression of vice and the encouragement of virtue, and they succeeded in producing either desperation or hypocrisy amongst the entire labouring population. If the junta was completed by the addition of a paid assistant-overseer, the discrimination was perfect. Squalid filth was the test of destitution, and whining gratitude, as it was called, for the alms distributed, was the test of character. If a labourer with a manly bearing came to the overseer, or to the vestry, to remove some sudden