ROSSITER'S STORY.
itSTORY told by a convict this week to Baron Bramwell illustrates strangely two of the greatest evils of English society,—its restless social ambition, and its pitilessness. Nothing seems valuable to it without distinction, and no place is allowed for the possibility of repentance. A man named Rossiter, a person with some tincture of education, was tried before Baron Bramwell, at Gloucester, on a charge of stealing altar-cloths and Bibles out of a Wesleyan-chapel, and pleaded guilty. Called up for judgment, he read a statement which is said to have affected even the judge, a man by no means given to the softer emotions, and which was certainly one of the most suggestive explanations ever offered by a convict. It was a story of his life, and oddly worded as it is, and open as it may be to question by men fully acquainted with the facts of his Australian career, it bears in its utter frankness a prinal facie impress of truth. When only sixteen years of age, a mere lad, as the cultivated classes think, though a man, as the un- educated are apt to believe, he was sentenced for a burglary to fifteen years' transportation. The terrible penalty made no ap- parent moral impression, but it did the next best thing, it raised in his mind a determination to reach such a position that the "temp- tation to theft would be an infinite descent therefrom, and im- possible." He was sent to the Swan River Settlement, and not belonging to the dangerous classes, he soon obtained a conditional pardon, and det up a school, apparently for dancing, which soon became successful. The colonial ladies trusted their daughters to him, the " academy " increased till he E30011 "realized sufficient to maintain a respectable position," and he might, one would have thought, have been decently happy. On the contrary, he was miserable. His very soul had been ulcerated by the English era, e for "position," and position was the one thing which in Fremantle was unattainable to a convict. He might accumulate wealth, might influence politics, might take almost any part in public enterprise, but he could never by any exertion or any sacrifice raise himself to the level of the rawest pauper immigrant. To be free in Fre- mantle, as in the Southern States, is to be an aristocrat, and a free settler will no more associate with a convict than a Southern planter would associate with a mulatto. It was of no use to fall a grade or two lower, to associate with mechanics instead of school- masters, for the feeling pervaded every class of society. Fathers would send their sons to be taught, and mothers let their daughters learn waltzing of him, though, as one lady said, with equal ignorance of charity and natural science, "they knew his arm must be as a serpent's grasp around them ;" but they would not ask him into their houses, or enter his, they settled engagements on the door- mat, and they made of "cards of compliment turgid epistles barely initialed,"—" turgid" meaning doubtless in Rossiter's vocabulary "stately" or "formal." The man had the strength to make a resolution to rise and the perseverance to carry it out, but he had not the fortitude to bear this—to see his own pupils, as he says, paw him in the street unrecognized. It was awfully wea' no doubt. Apart altogether from his crime, -which, though se' ' was the crime of a boy, Rossiter seems to have occupied iimantle very very much the station he would have occupied in En sad, and had his employers lived in Gloucester, and treated him in much the same way, as many of them would have done, he would have considered his acquaintance with them a busi- ness one, and passel on unhurt. Tradesmen in England do not bow in Pall Mall to the Duke who buys their wares. At the same time, we must say he received very bard measure. If the Fremantle folk thought him fit to be trusted with their daughters they ought to have thought him fit to be spoken to in the street, at any rate after his conduct had earned from Government a free pardon. • They felt doubtless, as the planters feel, that the distinction of caste being impassable, any relation between castes may be allowed without fear, provided there is no attempt at social equality. His freedom made no difference, any more than enfranchisement would in the South make to a "light mulatto." Nobody could touch him,
which proved a failure, the confinement being insupportable, and he was fined 2/., and refused passage by the Provincial and Oriental LORD DERBY AND POPE.
latter, taught, we are bound to say, by long and bitter experience, a great dismay fell upon him, and " his nights were disturbed will not have " expirees," and as the last resort Rossiter tried a by dreams of long journeys through unknown ways." It was a plan from which even the Chinese shrink, worked his way on an true foreboding of his imagination, theugh never exactly realized. American ship to the Peruvian guano islands. The Americans For though he learned in time to create for himself vivid and have, however, even a greater horror of convicts, particularly for brilliantly painted scenes peopled with shapes named like Homer's theft, than even Englishmen. He was beaten and bullied, his heroes, or endowed like Homer's gods,—scenes containing the old ticket-of-leave nailed to the mast, and at last handed over to " sable ships" of the Greeks in the foreground, and towers as of the English Consul. This official believed him a runaway, and Ilium in the distance, or picturing the crests of Olympus and the proposed sending him back to Australia, a detention of six months, dwellings of the gods, with well-wooded Ida hanging on the far but he " pushed the clerk down," fled to the port, and obtained a horizon,—those " long journeys through unknown ways " had passage to New York, this time unsuspected. He worked at some effectually scared his imagination into inventing an improved seven- mills in Seneca county for two months, but was overtaken by the teenth-century copy of that ancient time and land which he had conscription, and unwilling to go into the field, and afraid, we may neither the will nor the wish to explore. Pope's Homer remains a presume, to plead British citizenship, fled back to England. In Bug- great poem, but about as like his original as Richmond Hill to land he tried to obtain employment, but had no references, sold his " Gargasus mother of wild beasts," or his own grotto by the clothes, stayed a week in a union, tried to enlist and was refused Thames at Twickenham to the dwelling of old Oceanus and for bad eyesight, forged a testimonial of character in the hope of Tethys on Earth's extremest verge. We do not suppose that raising thirty shillings to emigrate with, tried to live on one meal Lord Derby felt anything of the same imaginative oppression a day and so save the shillings, and at last, hungry and despairing, which weighed upon Pope before the commencement of his great stole the Bibles and cloths which might yield the money. For this task, or he would scarcely have completed it so rapidly as he has he was arrested, tried, and in spite of the emotion of every one in done,—indeed in the limited leisure of less than three years, as Court, including the judge, sentenced to fifteen years' penal semi- we gather from his preface. In the first place, he did not, like
tude as a relapsed convict. Pope, suffer any of the pangs of imaginative travail. Nor are the
The sentence was perhaps inevitable, for there was no proof of ways of Homer apparently quite so unknown to him as they were the story, and the man, still only twenty-four, had been twice con- to his great rival. He has within certain limits a strong sympathy victed, but it is impossible to avoid the thought that here was a life with the simplicity of Homer,—a profound appreciation of the out- destroyed by a failure in our social organization. There is not of-door freshness and the vigorous beauty of his pictures,—a keen a trace of cant in the whole story, the man never Wks of interest in the rivalries, the anger, and the scorn, which Homer his innocence, affects no religious feeling, acknowledges an paints with so happy a naturalism of touch, and a sincere delight in offence, the forgery of a testimonial, with which he was not animal force and physical beauty which is almost classical. In all charged, pleads no repentance, gives no motive for his best acts these respects he has the advantage of Pope, who did not understand beyond the desire to raise himself beyond the physical tempts; simplicity, who habitually thought nature inferior to art, whose tion to thieve—a temptation which he obviously still felt, sympathy with human rivalries and passions was tinged with Still his impulse was towards better things than crime, to make literary and artificial elements, and who looked upon the animal crime impossible if he could, and his weaknesses were precisely those side of life with mixed curiosity and envy. which make "respectable" members of society. That passionate The element in which Lord Derby succeeds most completely, in crave for "position," that desire to be honoured by those around him which he sometimes catches almost the movement of Homer, and in which cost Rossiter his school at Fremantle, induces thousands to which Pope fails most completely, is, we think, the direct nature- strive and toil and spend who else might remain contented, but com- similes which stud almost every page of the Iliad. Take, for instance, paratively useless members of society. Half the energy of England the beautiful passage where Homer compares the shadow which a is developed by this crave for distinction, which impels men who sudden breeze curving the waves casts upon the sea to the effect otherwise might have been comfortable enough to use their upon the advancing armies of the Greeks and Trojans of the capital in ever new adventures. Had " society " in Fremantle sudden halt which crowds their ranks and brings the glittering up- only pardoned him, accepted him as a man repentant enough to right spews into sharp contrast with their closely-shadowed see that bread honestly earned was sweeter than bread earned by phalanxes :— robbery, he might have lived a long life, earning his living up- "Dense around rightly, and died a respectable and in his way useful member of Bristled the ranks with shield and helm and spear.
society. Had Government merely condemned him to oblivion, A darkening ripple o'er the ocean waves,— changed his name, and suffered him to depart after his pardon, un- E'en so appeared upon the plains the ranks known and unrecognized, he might have lived his life a decent man Of Greeks and Trojans ;" in some American village, unable to break the law, if not from —while Pope, who had evidently never seen the sudden shadow inciple, then at least from fear. As it was, he was pursued in which a light wind casts upon the sea, writes :— ralia by caste feeling, in Peru by a Foreign-Office regulation, "The thronging troops obscure the dusky fields \ agland by the recollection of his former crime, till at last the Horrid with bristling spears and gleaming shields. law beized him to repeat the old, useless process once again. " It As when a general darkness veils the main was all his own fault ;" he should have gone to the Union rather The waves scarce heave, the face of Ocean sleeps, than have broken into the chapel ; but it is also society's And a still horror saddens all the deeps,— fault, which punishes criminals in order to deter, and when Thus in thick orders settling wide around in some rare case the punishment proves deterrent refuses At length composed they sit and shake the ground," to accept the reformation its own exertions and expendi- —a re-cast (if it can be called so) of the original simile, which not ture have secured. Better kill a man than hunt him as only falsifies it, but expands the false conception into other and yet this man says, truly or falsely, he was hunted. Baron Bramwell falser conceptions.
told him " feelingly " that the scorn of society was part of the Or take the comparison of the Greeks clustering to battle to burden for his crime, and that is true until his sentence was the flies which gather round the milk-pails, —a sight which Pope worked out. After that, unless all our theories are hypocrisies, and must have seen no less than Lord Derby ; yet he cannot resist the we merely lock up criminals as we would wild beasts, the man pleasure of running up a bower for the milkmaids, and burnish should have a new trial from society as well as from its laws. ing the small black ffies into bluebottles or dragon-flies. Pope
If he again errs punish him doubly, but till he errs there ought to gves "Thick as insects play, but nobody would associate with him, and after a desperate but as well as with God. As it i, he comes out at thirty-five, having ineffectual attempt to induce a free girl to marry him, he resolved passed twenty years of his life under sentence, and however he may
to escape to Singapore. be reformed, however determined he may be to live like a decent The convict stamp, however, was on him. The people of citizen, there is nothing for him if recognized but starvation or the Singapore, which he had reached in a steamer, " ruthlessly " Union. Indeed there is not even that, for even in a Union the refused him permission to land, the boats actually declining to take convict is a mark for every insult, and if he resents a foul word or him ashore, under the impression apparently that he was an escaped a blow there is no magistrate but will believe that he has been the convict, and he was compelled to return, having spent 45/. He next aggressor. The alternatives left by our system to a repentant man tried to obtain a passage to Sydney packed in a box, an attempt are a life of crime or 4uicide.
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