104 Baines's History of the Cotton Manufacture. more under the influence of avarice, nor less under the influence of better motives, than any other class of men. On the contrary, many of them are men of enlarged minds and humane feelings; most of them have the means of instituting these improvements, which would require but a trifling expenditure; aud nearly all, from their very habits of business, are accustomed to those extended views and calculations, which enable them to look forward with confidence to a distant advantage from an immediate outlay. Some from benevolence, some from emulation, some from shame, and more, perhaps, than all, from a conviction that it would actually tend to profit, may follow the examples already set; and in ten or twenty years hence, the factories of England may be as much improved in the moral character of their operatives, as they have been in times past in the beauty and efficiency of their machinery. That it is the imperative duty of masters to use all the means they possess of benefiting and improving those who are under their control, no man of correct principles can doubt; and I believe the conviction is strengthening and spreading; that it is eminently the interest of a manufacturer to have a moral, sober, weil-informed, healthy, and comfortable body of workmen."-(pp. 482-484.) The subject here treated with such enlarged views-the moral and social condition of the workmen in our manufacturing districts-is one of the most practically important that can engage the attention of the public. As Mr. Baines justly observes, "factories might be made rather schools of virtue "than of vice." They must, however, be either the one or the other. Large masses of work-people of both sexes, and most of them in early youth, cannot be collected together and thrown into contact for many hours of every day, without some decided and positive influence, good or bad, resulting from it. Such establishments, conducted with an indifference to the moral interests of the operatives, will naturally breed vice; and that vice will spread itself through the community of which they form a part. But with a system of checks and encouragements, like that suggested by Mr. Baines, and with a vigilant superintendence on the part of the masters, the congregating of so many work-people together might be found to facilitate the diffusion of knowledge, and of sound principles. It is the duty of every manufacturer to look to the interests of his workmen and his country, both of which are clearly involved in the management of those hives of industry-the mills of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Glasgow. We believe that large capital tends to good management; and that the capitalist who is wisely liberal and careful, in attending to the interests of his servants, thereby promotes his own. It is found indispensable to the efficiency of the great masses of machinery in the Moral Statistics-Prisons of Paris. 105 mills, that all their parts should be made of sound and good materials-that they should be perfectly adjusted that they should be kept free from dirt and rust-and that accidental injury should be quickly repaired: surely it must be of equal necessity, and of far superior importance, that the moral machine, to which the other is subordinate, should be sound in integrity and virtue-should be disciplined to order-preserved from all that would defile or corrupt-and that its frailer parts should be watched with especial care, not overstrained, not rudely driven, but placed under sure guidance, and regular impulse. We cannot close this volume without expressing the high sense we entertain of the talent and information it displays. Mr. Baines has earned for himself an honourable position in the literature of his country; and should he now discontinue his exertions, he may rest satisfied in the conviction of having rendered an important service to the industrial community to which he belongs-of having discharged that duty to society which every one, according to his ability, is called upon to perform. ARTICLE V. Examen Historique et Critique des diverses Théories Pénitentiaires, ramenées à une unité de Système applicable à la France. Par M. Marquet Vasselot. 3 vols. 1835. Rapports de la Société pour le Patronage des jeunes libérés du Département de la Seine, pour les Années 1833-4. Par M. de Berenger, Président de la Société. Les Bagnes. Rochefort. Par Maurice Alhoy. 8vo. Paris: 1830. First, Second, and Third Reports from the Select Committee of the House of Lords, appointed to inquire into the present State of the several Gaols, and Houses of Correction, in England and Wales. 1835. THE first three works whose titles we have just transcribed, afford a gratifying proof of the spirit of discreet philanthropy, in which the great questions of prison discipline, of the correction of juvenile delinquents, and of secondary punishments, are now treated in France; and they give rise to a cheering hope, that the time will come when the duty of social chastisement will be performed with that temperate austerity, which terrifies the wavering and reforms the guilty; and when the same moral instruction, which it is the object of the recent law on education to extend amongst the body of the people, will reach the workshop of the delinquent and the cell of the criminal. In the course of the following pages we shall have occasion, more than once, to allude to these works; it is not, however, to them that we shall chiefly or exclusively refer. Our intention is to offer to the reader such fruits of our own observation and experience as we deem acceptable to the public eye, concerning the criminal population of France; and to describe the condition of the prisons of Paris, of the department of the Seine, and the system of inland secondary punishment which now obtains in that country. We shall take leave, whenever our subject admits of, or demands detail, to make free use of a note book which lies upon our table, from whence we hope to draw such information as may illustrate the lucubrations of a reviewer. The memoranda which this notebook contains were made on the very spots to which they refer; and it may be sufficient to say, that we hold ourselves responsible for the accuracy of the facts which they describe. The causes of delinquency, amongst the lower classes in Paris, may readily be traced to those seductions which their national character renders most irresistible, and to that excitement which their national history has kept alive. The criminals of Paris come of a race intemperate in pleasure, and impatient of control: they live at a time when the licentiousness of society has been alarmingly increased at the expense of its pristine gaiety; and they plunge into the career of guilt with the ardour of awakened passion and of genius misapplied. The revolutions of 1789 and 1830 have conferred upon the gaminand the ouvrier de Paris a degree of political importance, that has increased his petulance, and stimulated him to the pursuit of those fickle successes in pleasure and in power, which are the objects of his homeless and adventurous life. The twofold love of sensual gratification and of independence-the dislike of labour, which is inadequate to purchase complete enjoyment, and the dislike of authority, whether it be that of a father, a master, or a gend'arme-are the main causes which tempt thousands of lads from their homes, to cast them upon the world, and to drive them along that fatal career of vice, guilt, and punishment, through which we shall shortly trace their steps. By the events, or rather by the chances of his earliest years, the boy is either thrown into the tide of licentious pleasure, or subjected to the painful rule of labour and apprenticeship. If the former, the experience which is speedily acquired by mere children in all the wildest of human passions the enterprising expeditions which he joins, or even leads the boldness with which he gambles his last pence, his father's earnings, or (if all his stakes have failed) the buttons upon his jacket-the ardent love of dramatic amusement, with which he sculks, night after night, at the doors of the theatres on the Boulevards, or traps himself in the pilfered tinsel of a carnival-mark him out as the future thief, the cunning and covetous enemy of industry and property-which he plunders only to enjoy. If the latter, the sufferings which The following cases may be quoted in illustration of these young adventurers; the individuals to whom they refer are at this moment in the Maison des Jeunes Détenus, at Paris. “Gabriel P― extremely small in person, but with a countenance expressing ferocious determination joined to extreme cunning. He was the captain of a band of juvenile, almost infant, delinquents, twelve in number, being himself at that time about twelve years of age: his comrades surnamed him "Le Petit Vidocq," from the remarkable skill and boldness of his exploits. His companions pilfered from the shop windows and stalls (ils travaillaient aux étalages); but he reserved his talents for picking pockets (il travaillait à la tire); he very commonly got as much as thirty francs a day, which he went to spend with his band, outside the barrière. "Auguste R―, only ten years of age, was taken up as a confirmed vagabond; he had a natural passion for climbing, and he escaped through windows and chimneys, whenever his father locked him up: when he was transferred to the préfecture de police, he and the boys he met with there amused themselves with gambling for sous, with dice which they made of bread. We happened to see this child the first time he entered the refectory of the prison, with the other boy prisoners; he was perfectly unmoved by the novelty and the loneliness of his position. Indeed, it is a general remark that the children who roam about the streets of Paris, sleeping on the stones, and stealing scraps of food from the meat-shops (charcutiers), forget the sense of dependence, and lose the gift of tears. They are as barbarous and as brave as North American Indians." he may have endured under the harsh treatment of a master or the abandonment of a parent, joined to a sullen fear of evil consequences, and an unquenchable hatred of the hand which coerces him, impart a degree of immoral experience, which prepares him for the coarser pleasures and more hardy crimes of the outlaw. These are the characteristics of that singular being, that wandering bedouin of civilised cities, the Gamin de Paris! "C'est cet enfant criard que l'on voit à toute heure Battant les maignes chiens, ou le long des grands murs Cet enfant ne croit pas, il crache sur sa mère, Le nom du ciel pour lui n'est qu'une farce amère ; C'est le libertinage enfin en raccourci, Sur un front de quinze ans c'est le vice endurci :" says M. Barbier, the empassioned satirist of modern France. If in his earliest years this being anticipates the excesses, the passions, and the follies of a maturer age, he retains through life the untamed independence of his boyhood; and the gamin de Paris grows up (if he survive the diseases of misery and intemperance), to fill one of the lowest stations within, or one of the worst stations without, the pale of civilised society. In the course of the year 1833, 27,460 children were born in Paris, of whom 9347 were illegitimate; in 1834, the total number of births was 29,130, of which 9985 were illegitimate; only 1170 of the latter were acknowledged by their parents. This source alone would suffice to supply the consumption of guilt by the produce of sin, were not the majority of these unhappy babes swept off at a very early period of life; the rest are cast homeless upon the world. It has been found that, of the juvenile delinquents in Paris, one fifth are orphans—one half fatherless—and one quarter motherless. (See the Rapport de la Société de Patronage, for 1833, p. 4.) But the ties of marriage are now so ill cemented in France, that the family circle affords small moral protection, and scarcely a common shelter to the beings who are born within it; hence again the alternative of ill-regulated enjoyment, or of hopeless labour arises; no religious principle strengthens the bonds of love; no spirit of mutual succour unites the inhabitants of those poor chambers; but the passion of equality triumphs over the first and holiest |