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"Among dogs, we have a modification of structure and function made fixed and permanent, and more or less hereditary. Habits got by training are transmitted to the offspring of certain breeds of dogs as their very nature. It is so in the wolf-dog and the hound. The pointer, also, from original teaching, shows as the pup, while yet in the farmyard, a tendency to point at every fowl or bird it sees before it has ever been afield. The shepherd dogs-perhaps above all others -show inherent sagacity of an extraordinary kind from transmitted habits by training. It is the same in certain castes and races and communities of the human family; and is the transmission of thieving and other criminal habits to form an exception to other analogies?

"One of the most remarkable examples of a criminal family I know of is as follows: Three brothers had families amounting to fifteen members in all.

Of these, fourteen were utterers

of base coin. The fifteenth appeared to be exceptional, but was at length detected setting fire to his house after insuring it for four times its value.' The importance of checking, if possible by legal restrictions, such criminal tendencies, is brought out in this case, when it is calculated that thousands of offences might have been prevented by these three brothers being permanently imprisoned before they became fathers of families, and thereby perpetuated crime by heritage."

After some further general remarks, the author, whose opinions are thus expressed, sets forth some statements of a more specific kind as to inmates of the prisons under his own medical charge:

"At the same time, one hundred prisoners were known to be in the same prison out of fifty families. Of one family eight were known-often two or three-at the same time. The father had been several times under

long sentences; and since 1843 this family had been chiefly supported at the public expense in prisons. The relations I found in prison were: the father, two sons, three daughters, one daughter-in-law, and a sister-in-law. Doubtless other connections not discovered were there also. When these notes were taken there were in this prison three cousins (two being sisters), two aunts, and two uncles of the same family. Of two families, six were in prison about the same timeviz., four brothers and two sisters. Of three families, there were three prisoners from each family, chiefly brothers and sisters; also several mothers and their daughters at the same time. From four families, two brothers belonging to each family. From eight families a brother and a sister. From ten families two sisters."*

This is a gloomy statement. Where are we to find materials for weighing against it hereditary groups of poets, artists, metaphysicians, and mathematicians? It is but a morsel gathered from an overwhelming mass of testimony, proving that the human animal is most prolifically hereditary in the class of accomplishments that ought if possible to be extirpated. The facts stated by the writer just quoted are to be depended on, for he

was an honest man and an indefatigable investigator. There is no doubt, too, a sort of truth in the sweeping conclusion that a deal of crime and mischief would have been obviated had the three fatal brothers referred to been committed to permanent imprisonment before they became fathers of families. how is such a feat as this imprisonment to be accomplished in a country like ours, where the law keeps jealous watch on the liberty of the subject, and will be reluctant to

But

* The Hereditary Nature of Crime. By J. B. Thomson, F.R.C.S., Resident Surgeon, General Prison for Scotland at Perth. Pp. 8, 9.

take it on the word of any man, expedition near the door of a church that some other man is sure to be the sire of a race of housebreakers and pickpockets? A time was, indeed, when there seemed to be a pleasant prospect of such a practical realisation of philosophical positivism. The phrenologists would have done the world the service of identifying the proper objects of restraint by manipulation of the bumps of the skull. But the day and influence of these adepts has passed away, and the world is not even conscious of the calamity it has endured in the privation.

The criminal classes are extremely dexterous in catching and appropriating any popular cry likely to be of service to them. In recent years they have evidently been lending an attentive ear to the loud wailings of a portion of the community against the jovial habits of another portion. Drink did it all that weary drink;" "If it hadn't been for the drink we never would have been here," are assurances often repeated by the jailbird. The doctrine is a consolatory one to them, as it in a manner brings in as the accomplices, and, indeed, in some respects as the instigators of their crimes, all who commit themselves as "participa tors" by the pot of porter or the pint of wine taken at dinner-time. If we take this in the sense of some jolly bout having been the cause that drove or tempted the partaker in it to the commission of some predatory crime, no alliance of cause and effect can be more preposterous. No group of human beings is likely to be more absolutely untouched by the influence of any intoxicant than the companions who have arranged a heavy "cracksman's" or housebreaker's job; and the experienced hand who goes on a special pickpocket

or theatre will be as uncontaminated in his sobriety as the adept who is striving after the solution of a difficulty in the higher mathematics. There is a belief that criminals are apt to indulge in a jolly fit after a good take. Such an incident has been told as that a crew of housebreakers having found liquor with the other rewards of their skill and industry, have been prompted to partake too rashly of it on the premises, and in their excitement and exuberance to revel in excesses that have betrayed them to their capture. But drinking is not so markedly the vice of the habitual criminal as of some less offensive members of society. of society. There seems to be something in the excitement of criminal work that is sufficient in itself and needs no aid. The expert pocket-picker is shy of anything that would tend to injure the nicety of his fingering.

On the other hand, the partaker whose excesses have carried him so far beyond the bounds of selfcontrol as to bring him into the class called "habitual drunkards," sometimes comes within the walls of the prison under conditions terrible and tragical. He has committed some great act of violencegenerally the greatest of allmurder, and it often happens that the victim is some member of his own family whom he had been known in the days of his sanity to cherish and protect from all harm. The usual arrangement for dealing with such tragedies is to find the perpetrator to have been insane at the time of committing the act, and decreeing that he shall be put at the disposal of the sovereign. By this arrangement an addition is made to the class treated as "criminal lunatics." Then comes a diffi

cases that no time must be lost in reinstating them in safety.

culty in dealing with such when the man who has brought himself to lunacy by his evil habits is restored to the condition of sanity by treatment in the prison or the hospital. There are causes exciting to furious and criminal lunacy other than excess; but these, and the treatment of the poor creatures affected by them, belong to a science beyond the acquisition of those who merely deal with the criminal in possession of his senses. Perhaps the adepts in it know something in the nature of cause and effect as attending on the treatment they administer to its victims; but the unlearned onlooker, however closely he may look, being under the same roof with the mysteriously afflicted, finds it a vain. task to endeavour to solve the mystery. One clear result, however, is perceptible among the mysteries and difficulties, and though it may go to the aid of those who are apt to be intolerant in their conclusions and vociferous in supporting them, they are entitled to possess it. The result points very clearly to the irreclaimability of the habitual drunkard. There has been for some time at work an arrangement, by which persons detained as criminal lunatics have been set at large, or rather removed from the prison or asylum, under conditions of supervision or espionage, so that they may be immediately restored to seclusion in case of an outbreak of the old insane malady. Among these the dipsomaniacs as a class were found less curable than the others, and of course more apt to find their way back to the old retreat. Years of untainted abstinence passed over some of them abiding in respectability and peace, when, as if by some caprice of destiny, the fatal primary drop was swallowed and followed by a wild career of orgies, proclaiming aloud

A dialogue was once overheard between one of these "Queen's lunatics," as they are often called, and a person in authority over the prison where he was in custody. He had been for years in possession of his senses, and they were the senses of a man who had received a good education to qualify manners naturally inoffensive and gentle. He represented the hardship, to a cultivated man like himself, of restriction to the society of the loathsome lunatics around him. It was pleaded in vindication: "Ah! but you know when you are at large you are apt to play such tricks." The latest of these tricks that had occurred was, that he had been caught in Paris rushing along a street with a bloody knife in his hand. Restraint brought him to composure, and it was thought a safe and judicious arrangement to send him to his grandmother, residing in a quiet village. He was much attached to her, yet, nevertheless, in one of his grim revels he cut her throat. After some years of treatment the arrangement for liberation under supervision was tried in his case; but he tasted the fatal first drop, and had to be hustled back into close custody.

At this point of his story it happened to the writer of it to dip into a book called 'Buried Alive; or, Ten Years of Penal Servitude in Siberia, by Fedor Dostoyeffsky, translated from the Russian by Marie von Thilo.' The tone of the book he found utterly antagonistic to all experience of convict-life in Britain. For instance, "My First Impressions"

"I distinctly remember being very much struck at first to find that my new life was, after all, not so very different from my old one. I seemed to have known all about it beforehand.

When on my way to Siberia I tried to guess what my life would be like. It was not till I had spent some time in the convict-prison that I fully realised what an exceptional and unnatural existence I was to lead henceforth, and I could never make up my mind to bear it patiently. My first impression on entering the prison was a feeling of intense depression; yet, strange to say, the life of a convict seemed to me less hard than I had pictured it upon the road. The convicts were in chains, but still they were free to go about in the prison, to smoke, to swear at cach other, sing whatever songs they liked; a few even drank brandy, and some had regular card-parties every night. Neither did the work appear to me very difficult, and it was not till later on that I began to realise that it was

rendered irksome and unbearable through being imposed as a task which had to be finished by a certain time for fear of punishment. Many a poor labourer who is free works perhaps harder than a convict, and even spends sometimes a part of the night working out of doors-especially in the summer-time. But he works for

himself only; and this thought, and the knowledge that he will profit by his labour, is enough to reward him, while the convict is obliged to work at something which can never be of the slightest use to him."-Pp. 28,

29.

It is scarcely necessary to say that the portion of this sketch of prison-life, dealing with brandy and card-parties, has no parallel-or anything approaching to a parallel in our British prisons. The other part of the picture, representing the distastefulness of labour bringing no gain to the labourer, admits of some explanations that may be found instructive as well as curious. Perhaps the reader has heard of the "mark system," yet if he has not come in personal intercourse with it, his impression of it may be vague and indistinct. When it was first suggested, it gained little respect from the old hands, whether

among prisoners or their keepers. Its first announcement came in the midst of a crowd of ingenious suggestions, devised by distinguished pundits in prison discipline, as infallible remedies for all the mischiefs of crime, and potent instruments for the regeneration of the human race. There was something, however, about this suggestion of marks that recommended it to the practical mind; and it gradually took a form capable of overcoming many of the difficulties in the way of bribing prisoners under punishment into the pursuit of industry.

The first danger was that, giving the prison-bird certain benefits for good conduct, the system could only be worked by the officers of the prison, and would be open to abuse from the difficulty of bringing home responsibility for fair-dealing to them. To meet this came a complicated system of records or diaries, where the conduct of the prisoner, being recorded from day to day, it would not be in the power of the officer, if he quarrelled with the prisoner, to alter the record to his prejudice; while, on the other hand, if the record were damaging, he would not have an opportunity, if, through bribery or otherwise, he desired to benefit the prisoner, to effect his purpose. Hence it came to be an understanding that marks were to be earned for industry solely. Thus they were payment for specific work, and the character and value of the work being in existence and produceable, its price became credited in marks.

Still conduct called for consideration, and hence for specific acts of misconduct marks came to be forfeited. Of course there might be a possibility of false evidence in the reasons for forfeiture, but the process would have the distinctness of any other punishment, as by a fine,

and would not leave the same openings to the exercise of partiality or enmity in the prison officers, as the method, no doubt simpler, of conferring the marks according to the character and conduct of the prisoners as these were appreciated by the officers.

Dissipation and dirt within the walls of a prison are now in this country traditions of the far past, but scantily finding any place in the memory of living men. It has been in some respect calamitous to a district to be forward in the race of improvement, since it may have happened that a prison has been erected for it, not equal to the demands of these declining years of the nineteenth century, yet too good to be sacrificed. Of the prison that, with a curious baronial picturesqueness crowns the Calton Hill of Edinburgh, this may be said. An acute recorder of the events of his time thus commemorates its coming into existence:

"The year 1808 saw the commencement of our new jail on the Calton Hill. It was a piece of undoubted bad taste to give so glorious an eminence to a prison. It was one of our noblest sites, and would have been given by Pericles to one of his finest edifices."

Fortunately the writer of this brief announcement was acquainted with the old building, celebrated by Scott in the great romance of the Heart of Mid-Lothian,' and has given this potent description of it:

"The completion of the new jail implied the removal of the old one: and accordingly, in a few years after this, the Heart of Mid-Lothian' ceased to beat. A most atrocious jail it was, the very breath of which almost struck down any stranger who

One week

entered its dismal door; and as ill placed as possible, without an inch of ground beyond its black and horrid walls. And these walls were very small; the entire hole being filled with little dark cells; heavy manacles the only security; airless, waterless, drainless; a living grave. of that dirty, fetid, cruel torture-house was a severer punishment than a year of our worst modern prison-more dreadful in its sufferings-more certain in its corruption; overwhelming the innocent with a more tremendous sense of despair-provoking the guilty to more audacious defiance."*

The structural character of the more recent prisons, as well as the purifications in the whole system of arrangement, have done service to the officers in extinguishing one of the old traditional plagues of their existence in the dealing with gentlemen criminals. There may be little doubt that the man of education and social position, who has yielded himself to crime, may be fairly considered a more guilty mortal than the race of habitual criminals cursed with the nature that is found in them. But this will not prevent the exceptional inmate from grumbling at the sordidness of conditions not so acutely felt by his neighbour the rough, and the official staff of a prison is not unlikely to sympathise with such grumblings. They may in these days, however, be substantially met. For that essential that is said to be next to godliness, there is perhaps scarce a gentleman's house in the empire quite so cleanly kept as the large convictprisons. The diet is with careful skill adapted to the ends of wholesomeness and nutrition. The medical authorities are supreme in the enforcement of these qualities; and it would be neither beneficial to

* Cockburn's Memorials of his own Time.

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