d disseminating the spirit of rebellion than that which is adopted in
our convict establishments. We collect all these rebels from the
various counties into a few localities, 600 here, 1000 there, and 1500
somewhere else, and along with them we place a certain proportion of
comparatively untainted men. We subject them to a course of rigorous
discipline in matters of diet and exercise, the sole effect of which is
to stimulate them still more against society. We allow them a certain
amount of intercourse with each other; liberty to the old to
contaminate the young; to the veteran ruffian to enlist and drill the
new recruit; to all to plan their new campaigns, and hatch new
conspiracies, and then disperse them throughout the country to sow the
seeds of sedition, and raise the standard of rebellion wherever they
may go. This is really what is being done in our convict prisons. Take
an extreme case, and keep out of sight altogether the characters and
dispositions of our criminals, and imagine a hundred of England's most
steady, honest, and industrious working men placed in our convict
establishments for a few years, and what would be the result? It would
most probably be this: if they were young, and had only received an
imperfect education, fifty of them would join some branch of the thief
profession if kept by force in convict society for three years; seventy
of them would do so if kept for six years; and if kept ten years, they
would almost all be corrupted, and become when liberated a source of
corruption themselves.

But if the hardened and incorrigible criminals were really punished in
any proportion to the others the system would have a kind of consistent
iniquity about it which it does not possess. My left-hand companion was
an old agricultural labourer, one of a large class to whom a convict
prison is no punishment. He had been brought up to work, and although
an old man, he could work far more than a city thief, and yet not work
hard. He had brought up a family who were all scattered abroad. He had
now no real home when out of prison, and his third penal sentence of
fourteen years was very much lighter punishment to him than fourteen
days, with loss of character, would be to anyone in the upper or middle
classes of society. I met many such men in prison, and I used to ask
them how much money they would take to do my sentence in addition to
their own? One would say 100_l._, another, 50_l._, another 40_l._, and
some