A CONVICT ON CONVICI1SM.

A num, tract,* one of a series giving an account by Mr. John Frost of his experiences as a convict in Van Diemen's Land, forms a remarkable appendix to the blue-books on Secondary Punishments. Our readers remember the position in which the question stands. In 1837, Sir William Molesworth's Committee pronounced the Convict system to be ineffectual as a deterrent, and

* "A Letter to the People of Great Britain and Ireland on Transportation ; showing the Effects of Irresponsible Power on the Physical and Moral Condition of Convicts. ByJohn Frost, late of Van Diemen's Lind." Published by Holyoake and CO. reductive of ag vated crime ; in 1856, a Select Committee on Secondary Pum. I "eats, which made no report, dogmatically passed a resolution which could not have been embodied in a report on the evidence declaring transportation deterrent and reformatory in its effects. Some of the witnesses who were best informed, while showing that a renewal of transportation was impossible professed to admit that improved regulations had mitigated the evils incidental to it. Mr. Frost denies the mitigation ; and in the most positive manner, of his own knowledge as well as on the report of others, he makes statements which corroborate his denial.

He shows that the same unutterable crimes which compelled the disuse of transportation on the report of 1837 continued under the " Probation ' system as they (Rd under the " Assignment " system. He relates that lads said to be "reformed," were in the most horrible manner compulsorily made victims ; while the consequences of profligacy were a wholesale scourge to the adults. He asserts, that in enforcing regulations to maintain discipline— probably, we may add, to check the profligacy—the authorities and their officers were led into vexatious and frivolous rigours upon trifles, inflicting lashes for the slightest offences, or even for forgetting complicated regulations.

Mr. Frost was a convict, holding a ticket-of-leave for eight years : his tract shows no great intellectual power, but there is no charge against him as an honest and truth-speaking man according to his lights. He refers to particular facts, and to many of them ; in several cases he gives the names of persons having, a professional or even an official repute, as vouchers for his truthfulness ; so that his volunteered evidence can be put to some teat.; and it is too important to be passed over with easy contempt at the complaint of a discharged prisoner and an extreme politician. One of his averments peculiarly bears upon the character of the evidence already tendered : he shows that while a frightful rigour visited trivial offences against rules and discipline, a not unnatural desire to veil that which is in itself hideous induced officials to record the most horrible events, committed with a flagrant publicity, simply as "disgusting conduct." And it is the direct effect of replacing the veil which Sir William Molesworth tore Off, that even Judges of high position talk of "renewing transportation " !

"CONSOLIDATION" OF THE STATUTE LAW. No. IV. CONTINUED.

THE manifest consequence of making the "Criminal Law" the "Class I" of the Consolidation Acts, is the omission from its proper introductory place of all the important matter of our statute-book relating to rights, obligations, preventions, and remedies, and so the obscuration of the whole matter : the congregation into one place of acts whioh cannot be defined, and which are only by an accident "offences," and by another accident "indictable offences ": the separation of all these acts from the places where their definition would be plainly signified by their mere collocation : and the introduction of the reader to a body of law, of which he is not permitted to see, any more than its framers have seen, either the beginning or the middle or the end.

What is very remarkable is, that the Lord Chancellor and his

Commissioners have practically discovered the impossibility of the realization of their present plan in all the cases in which it has been accidentally brought to the test, and yet that they do not perceive the fact that their difficulty is one not of mere accident but of principle. When any part of the law has by chance been already consolidated, so as to contain a connected arrangement of the rights and obligations of the _persons concerned2 it is found that the preventione' remedies, and penalties for the infraction of the law, are inseparable from the body of the law : that the primary law would itself be made a fragment by extracting from it its appropriate enforcements, civil or penal ; and that these separated penalties jumbled together with all other heterogeneous penalties, would be equally out of place in this new disconnexion. The Lord Chancellor says " They (the Commissioners) found that there were some offences as to which consolidation would be inconvenient, and even impracticable in a great measure. There were a great many offences arising out of certain acts done in respect of the Customs' and it was thought that the Consolidation of the Customs Acts would be imperfect if it did not contain the criminal part as well as the civil part. Again, the same remark applied to the bankrupt laws : if a bankrupt did not surrender, he was liable to serious penal consequences' but to introduce that class or offimees into a general measure relating to crimes and punishments, would have induced the necessity of explaining the laws with respect to bankruptcy. Therefore these two classes of offences were omitted in the bills in question."* The Lord Chancellor sees that if offences relating to the Customs be taken out of the Customs Consolidation Acts, and put into the "Criminal Law Consolidation Acts," the Customs Acts would be " imperfect" ; and he sees that if the offences of a bankrupt were introduced into a general measure relating to crimes and punishments, "it would induce the necessity of explaining the laws relating to bankruptcy " ; but his Lordship does not see that every one of the offences he includes in his "Consolidations" are equally torn away from the civil matter of which they are a necessary part; that every wrong separated from the right and obligation it infringes, and the remedies provided for it, is equally dispUe. whether that right or that obligation have or have not already been made the subject of a "Consolidation Act." When they come severally to be consolidated, this will then be visible to the Lord Chancellor and his Commission: but it was to be supposed that all these eminent persons were brought together

• Debate, House of Lords, July 21, 106.

for their accomplishments, for their power to see a little beforehand the relation of "crimes" to the rest of the Lsw, to foresee

that a "criminal law" consolidation was, first, a violent disrup

tion of matter from its proper place, and secondly, an incongruous jumble of the dislocated fragments: it was supposed that such eminent persons would of themselves know these truths—at all events that they would not reject the information officiously offered to them ; that it would not be necessary that they should first make the blunder in order to find it out, as they have done in

these few cases ; and that, at all events, if they did practically arrive at the knowledge in any cases, their intelligence would have been sufficient to discover that the difficulty was not accidental, Val:dined to bankruptcy, or customs, or stamps ; but that it is lyrstematie, universal, and inherent in the very nature of the subject matter.

It must be a aubjeet of astonishment that the Commission should have commenced a work of systematic "consolidation" with a fragment that has no completeness, and is neither begin ning nor end, nor indeed any connected or combined section of the matter. This Commission is charged with the whole matter

of the statute-book, abounding with matter illustrative of every part of the law, from its simplest primary elements to the most complicate combinations ; it is under no external compulsion to begin with any part, and is only under a moral obligation to begin and proceed in some useful intelligible order. At all events they were bound by the consideration of the twenty-four years of wasted time, and the 50,0001. of money wasted on the effort to consolidate the "Criminal Law" by all the previous Commissions to consider before they renewed operations on this isolated fragment of the law, the natural and inevitable impediments to the performance of the task. These impediments had been fully expounded to them, as to their predecessors ;.1and it is probable that no person who has ever given an attention to the subject has had a different view upon it ; certainly every compiler of books on the subject has distinctly urged it or impliedly admitted it by the insertion in his compilation of the necessary antecedent matters. But the fact, after' all, is perhaps easily explained. The old Commissions, being only charged with this duty of digesting the "Criminal Law," had no choice to select an earlier part of the matter, and had worked up, in reports and draughts, all the matter of these bills ; after the last of these Commissions had expired, bills were framed out of these materials, by gentlemen paid but not forinally commissioned for the work, who, aware of the cliseonnexion and dislocation 9f the matter, attempted to give it consistency by the addition of general and anticipatory matter, properly the siubject matter of "Civil" portions of the law ; and so their bills were necessarily and properly rejected. After this, a k Vgentleman prepared a bill on the same matter, which the Lord Chancellor said he had received in the session of 1853. The present Commission was, during last session of Parliament, represented by Sir Fitzroy Kelly to have made great progress with their work, and he obtained permission in February 1856 to bring in two of their bills. The session passed, and these bills were never forthcoming, unless indeed one of them is identical with one of those presented by the Chancellor : but it was industriously announced, and was indeed well known, that Sir Fitzroy Kelly was energetically exerting himself to get something in readiness for presentation. This energy appears to have been fruitless, except of this result—of bringing up again the old and often wrecked and stranded matter of the former Commissions and their private successors in the shape of these Consolidated Acts. The explanation is, that nothing having been really done by this Commission, the work of the old Commission might appear, if not discovered, as the work of the new, and so seem to redeem the Lord Chancellor's and Sir Fitzroy Kelly's large promises. The Lord Chancellor now tells us at the opening of the present sessiona that "the Commission has succeeded in +consolidating the whole of the Criminal Law." That they have taken possession of the work, the result of 50,0001. of expenditure made before their time, is apparent : that "they have suc ceeded" in anything else remains to be seen. G. C.

+ See Papers appended to Mr. Ker's First Report, page 62, note +. II. of Lords Vapor, 1853, (438.) t Debate, House of Lords, Feb. 3, 1857.

trittro Ill tO (Rau.

INCONGRUOUS LEGISLATION: THE NEW SAVINGSBANES BJLL.

Beffaat, 10th March 1857. Sin—Permit roe to call your attention to an incongruity in legislative work.

A bill has been brought forward by Government for the better regulation of Savings-hulks, containing, among other clauses, one affising.penalties to the crime of attempting to obtain money from a savings-bank under false pretences. Why should there be one law for attempts to defraud a savings-bank, and another for attempts to defraud any other party ? I believe this kind of incongruity is by no means uncommon in our legislation. But what can a Government which is understood to be ready with a Consolidated Penal Code mean V introducing a penal clause into a purely administrative measure ? ampectfully yours,J. J. M. •

SEWAGE: FIRE P. WATER.

1 Adam Street, Adelphi, 2d March 1857. Silt—It is, I believe, a generally acknowledged fact, that where human dwellings are congregated in manses, there is, even with the best-regulated system of drains and sewesa, a constant accretion going on of the excretso of human bodies in the soil beneath, or in sonic proximate watercourse or

other locality. Lord Palmerston tells us that "dirt is only matter he the wrong place." Now this matter placed beneath the soil is always in the wrong place, =leas in a process of decomposition where the evolved gases can be absorbed by plants. In cities, so often as the soil is opened and the buried matter is exposed to atmospheric influence, so often will human health be exposed to deterioration, and in a tidal river the process is one of burying and exposing every few hours. With regard to liquid excreta there is no difficulty; they are valuable enough to collect pure, and will pay a large profit after transit to farms. The solid excreta constitute the difficulty, and are of comparatively little value for agricultural purposes ; yet these solid excreta, magnified enormously in bulk by the mischievous modern practice of dilution, are the real

cause why, we are seeking at a cost of millions to construct enormous sewers from London to the German Ocean, to collect a huge pestilence on its shore, and then probably to discover that the cost and labour have been wasted. We require either to use the ftecal solids or to destroy them absolutely. It is at our option to do either, so as absolutely and for all time to get rid of them in their noxious form of poison. Estimating the population of London at two and a half millions, the bulk of solid faces will be that number of cube feet per annum, weighing each cube foot about 52 pounds. This matter in the dry state is fuel, i. e. coinbustiblei—as much so as the "buffalo chips" of the American prairies. Burned in close retorts, i. e. subjected to destructive distillation, it will give forth weight for weight a similar result to coal, in earbureted and sulphureted hydrogen. That is, the solid fiscal matter of London is convertible into illuminating gas, and would probably be as valuable as an equal weight of coal for that purpose. Here at least is a useful purpose, which in the thoughtful mind may induce the reflection—" If fiscal matter can serve for manure and for illumination, may there not also be qualities in coal convertible to the purposes of manure as well as illumination ? "

The collection of the substance would not involve any mechanical difficulty in construction, so as to convey the whole matter away to the gas-retorts, the total amount in London being only about 130 cart-loads per diem.

But there be people, who, not having the proposition of Lord Palmerstou before their eyes, affect a horror at the idea of illumination from such a source, though feeling none at the idea of food thus manured in its growth. Well, then, there are abundant purposes to which we may apply this questionable gas,—heating baths and wash-houses„ and the metallurgic arts; and the residuum or cinder will be very valuable in iron and steel working. It is obvious that a new construction of closet would be required, and a new arrangement to prevent gaseous exhalations, other than water-traps. In this there is no difficulty beyond the expense involved by change of system; an expense which would be lessened in original structure as compared with ordinary plans. If there is truth in these views, the question is how are they to be put in execution—tested.

Certainly not wholesale, or in the heart of the city, where drains and sewers exist. But there are places where there are no sewers, but only black ditches, even for wealthy residents. Supposing, then, a family of twelve persons : there would be required to be destroyed once a month by the ordeal of fire a cubic foot of matter. • If, therefore, that matter were placed in a cast-iron box placed in a furnace, with a proper arrangement of valves, the combustion of a few pounds of coal during part of a night once a month would absolutely destroy the offending substance, by the most searching of all purification fire; and the gas produced might be burnt at the same time. If this were done throughout London, and the valuable liquid excreta) rim into station-cisterns, and the refuse of gas-factories provided for, the river would be practically purified, and might again come to be a salmon-stream ; and London would need no deep sewers, but simply surface-drains of sufficient depth to take off the storm-waters. All this is so obvious, such plain common sense, that the wonder is in its not having been done long ago, and can only be accounted for by the fact that habitual routine causes most men to lose sight of first principles. In the "far West" a small pig was once put under a hen-coop as the most convenient enclosure to prevent his getting astray in the forest. As he grew up to be a hog the hen-coop was found too small, so a larger hen-coop was built, by the aid of a meat-axe in the absence of other tools. The practice was stereotyped, and thence came the saying, "Lend us the loan of your meat-axe to make our hog a hen-coop." Is our sewage practice much better ? The recipe is this—" Mix your solid excreta with water to the highest possible state of dilution; then run it down a huge sewer to Dagenham or the German Ocean ; and there evaporate it to dryness, and form it into bricks to sell to the farmers at some two shillinns per ton, as is the case at Leicester." I he ancients burned dead bodies ; and they were wise. It were wise in us to brim the refuse of living bodies ; and how to do so conveniently, by efficient structural arrangement, is an inquiry peculiarly appertaining to the Board of Health. The subject is not a pleasant one, but some one must deal with it ; and covering up "dirt" to ignore it, is not exactly an act of cleanliness.

I sun, Sir, yours faithfully, W. BRIDGES ADAMS.

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On the 17th February, at Viia.ge, in Norway, the Wife of E. J. Blackwell, Esq., of Anmney Park, Gloucestershire, of a daughter. On the 24th, at Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Robinson, Royal Engineers, of a son. On the 7th March, at Hawstead House, near Bury St. Edmunds, the Lady of If. C. Meteidfe, Esq., (late Ninety-first llegiment,) of a daughter. On the 9th, in Lowndes Street, the Wife of Colonel Goulbum, Grenadier Guards, of a daughter. On the 9th, in Charles Street, Lowndes Square, the Lady Anne Sherson, of a daughter. On the 9th, at Southsea, the Wife of Captain Harris, R.N., of H.M.S. Illustrious, of a daughter. On the lath, at Blackheath, the Wife of Captain G. A. Halsted, RN., of a daughter. On the 10th, at Holland Hall, Ashbourn, Derbyshire, the Wife of John Wright, Esq., of a son and heir.

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