THE GREAT UNARRAIGNED.
A SEPARATE point has been raised in the transportation controversy, which ought not to pass without further examination, for it is really worth exploring. Last week, we noticed the hysterical and over-excited cry for protection against criminals, some portion of whom at least are made so by the state of society, which they have no influence to modify ; and we observed that not a few of those who have been called " innocents " can scarcely bear the contrast even with the condemned criminals. "There is one class of criminals," we said, "more dangerous than those who are out on tickets-of-leave, and that consists of the unarraigned criminals." Our facetious contemporary the Globe gives to this remark a meaning different from its plain intent. "If we are to wait to punish vulgar felons who are detected, till we have infallibly ascertained that there may not be among us genteel felons who are not detected, truly we may wait till the Greek kaknds. But this species of reasoning, if it is good for anything, is good for closing all our courts and throwing open all our prison-gates. We do not know' forsooth, whether we have a quorum of righteous men to punish anybody. Then society may shut up shop altogether ; or rather, Marleys more fortunate than the late one may rob any shop they please, with any violence they may find necessary. There is no one who can come into court with clean hands to call them to
account. Tantararara—rogues all!' This is a prosiqing of Captain Macheath's prison reflections
' If every thief, like me, were to swing
Upon Tyburn-tree !'
The society that admits such an argument is self-stultified—self-dissolved; and the only social power left will be that of the Felonry, who have no such scruples as to their right of free action. "Our contemporary's allusion to the unarraigned criminals' seems to us of no more cogency than to the undetected ones. There may be some such person at large, screened by station and connexion= unarraigned,' and only
whispered of. What does that prove ? What more than some weak connivance of the select few who come in contact with such ? Individual cases of the kind glanced at (they cannot be pretended to form a class) surely supply no argument for indulgence to the ravages of the burglar and garotter amongst the many, who are in no manner cOncerned or implicated in the legal impunity of any 'noble' or 'honourable' emulator of Bill Sykes."
Certainly there was nothing in our paper intended or calculated to impede the capture and punishment of the offender ; on the contrary, we say, and said—Seize him at the very earliest
stage, and hold him fast so long as you consider that it would be dangerous to let him go at large. No " leniency!"—no delay ! But the controversy has hitherto been discussed as if there were on one side a malignant class of monsters called criminals,
and on the other side a totally different, contrasted, and defined class, unconnected with it, who have actually been called "the innocent." But is it so? From the one extreme, the purest in nocence of the child, to the opposite, the unspeakable depravity of the vilest man, there is every gradation : you may see the graduated chain of interwoven links even in a single family; how
much more in society, where a line of division aiming to separate the classes, however carefully, drawn, would leave many a guilty creature among the unaccused, many an unfortunate among the convicted, with as many a tie between the imprisoned and the world at large. Mrs. Inchbald tells in her book of Nature and Art the story of a woman who is tried for killing her child, and arraigned before
one of the heroes of the tale, William. He is a man of energy and prudence, who, although not eschewing the indulgences of the world, is faithful, not to principle, but to appearances, and in the worship of appearances has broken off with the mother of his child, abandoning her to utter misery. She has destroyed that child, and the successful worshiper of appearances sits on the bench as her judge. The evidence is conclusive ; there is no answer to it. The judge asks her, mildly, "What defence have
you to make ?" The sweetness of the tone encouraged her : she did not call to mind that this gentleness was the effect of practice, the art of his occupation, which at times is but a copy of the benevolent brethren of the bench by the unfeeling. In the present judge tenderness was not designed for the consolation of the culprit, but for the approbation of the auditors." There were no spectators by her side when that same man parted from the unhappy woman ; "if there had been, he might have been awed to pretence of pity." The prisoner hears with apathetic indifference the verdict of " guilty " ; but "when William placed the fatal velvet on his head, and rose to pronounce the fatal sentence, she rose with a kind of convulsive emotion, retreated a step or two back, and, lifting up her hands with a scream, said, Oh! not from you!'" " Serene and dignified as if no such exclamation had been uttered," William pronounced the final speech, ending with "dead, dead, dead." He had not recognized her who had recognized him.
This is fiction, but it performs the highest work of fiction, in illustrating real life ; a function which romance sometimes performs better than " authentic " accounts since the whole circumstances of any painful event in real life are not brought out. When a criminal belongs to "respectable" society, it inevitably happens that a part of the story is suppressed. We have instances before us, and we see that our contemporary is not unacquainted with some of them. Nor are those instances singular: we have reason to believe that in more than one case—more than two or three—and not a hundred years ago—when criminals have stood up for sentence, the bystanders have witnessed that strange scene, a thief upon the bench sentencing and admonishing a thief in the dock.
The case in Mrs. Inchbald's story is that of individuals, with a direct relation between them of injurer and injured ; and it may be said that there was no such relation in the cases to which we have alluded. We may be told that the peaceful man has a right, irrespective of his own moral condition, to be protected against the aggression and depredation of the overt and detected criminal; that the proved scoundrel must not be let off because another scoundrel escapes. True ; but if you talk of "example," you only do your work by halves when you redouble your severity to the low scoundrel, and still leave the high scoundrel unscathed. If we are not individually responsible for the savage state of certain classes, we are collectively. The low have no power to influence society and its laws ; but the high scoundrels mix with the very classes that do give society its "tone" and its laws. Their position renders their example snore dangerous than that of the humble ; and a Draconian severity suddenly taken up as a nostrum, and applied to the low, savours of revolting hypocrisy and a reckless immorality. The very connivance to secure impunity for the high offender, the indulgence shown to him when he has the misfortune to fall into the haads of justice, prove the necessity for considering other circumstances besides the mere turpitude or danger of the crime. If you cannot summarily drag a " gentleman " to the police court, or kick him off-hand into a common cell, neither can you treat the common felonry as savages—foreigners—whom you have only to war upon and exterminate. They are born of our society; they are bred by us ; they belong to us ; there is not a clear contrast and a total strangeness between us. If there are felons among respectable society, it has been proved—and even Jebb avows it— that there are the misguided, the unfortunate among the " abandoned " classes. Let them be punished, let them be disciplined, in God's name ; but if you talk of merciless rigour as your nostrum, then we repeat, "Let him that is without sin cast the first stone."
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