Opening Address

BY THE

RIGHT HONOURABLE LORD ABERDARE,

PRESIDENT OF THE ASSOCIATION.

T has been the usual, although by no means the invariable, practice of those who have preceded me in the post I have the honour to occupy, so to frame their addresses as to present a general view of the objects of the Association, to set forth the progress which has been made in promoting these objects, to draw attention to the defects in legislation or administration which still check the career of social improvement, and to indicate the direction in which the efforts of the Association would be most usefully exerted.

Such a course has much to recommend it. Drawn by a strong and skilful mind, a sketch of all that has been done, and of what remains to do, would be at once instructive and animating. However dark might be the picture of the social condition of a large part of our population, of the ignorance, misery, and crime which dog the progress and mar the splendour of our national civilisation, an honest and faithful statement of past efforts and of the success which has followed them, could not fail to cheer us on to fresh exertions and brace us to pursue with renewed hope and courage the eternal struggle of good against evil.

On the other hand, the difficulty of investing with interest so wide a review within the reasonable limits of an address has determined me to pursue a less ambitious course, and to endeavour to concentrate your attention on one subject, which has not only, in my opinion, the advantage of being the one on which the labours of the Association have been most successfully employed, but has also the merit of touching at many points most of the subjects to which their attention has been directed.

My address will, therefore, be mainly devoted to the subject of CRIME; and who can deal with that theme, with any approach

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to completeness, without referring not merely to our systems of punishment, of repression, and reformation, but to the influence exercised upon it by our poor laws, by our national education, by the manner in which the poorer classes are lodged, by the rapid growth of our population and its tendency to congregate in large centres-to those topics, in fine, which have most constantly and anxiously exercised the thoughts and occupied the discussions of our Association?

It will, I think, be convenient at the outset to consider the past condition of crime as compared with the present. Such a review will enable us to perceive where we have succeeded, and from what causes and to what extent; where we have failed, and the why and the wherefore; and to form a judgment whether our treatment of criminals has in some cases been judicious and successful, and therefore ought to be continued; in others inappropriate and inadequate, and therefore requiring amendment or alteration. Or supposing-rather a daring supposition-that the conclusion at which we arrive is that legisÎation has done its utmost in its direct efforts for the prevention and repression of crime and the reformation of criminals, and that any other further diminution of crime is to be attained indirectly and only as the result of a more elevated national morality; it would be useful to consider by what indirect methods bearing on crime that national improvement can be advanced.

I need hardly insist upon the deep interest involved in these considerations. Perhaps, of all countries in the world, England is that in which the conditions of life have been and still are most conducive to the increase of crime, and where, therefore, the necessity for wise, strenuous, unceasing exertion is most stringent.

Let us dwell for a few moments upon some of these conditions.

Long experience and careful analysis have proved beyond doubt the close connection which subsists between crime and density of population.

During the present century England has been attracting nearly the whole of the natural increase of its population into its large manufacturing towns, and into districts already thickly peopled. This imported population has been generally poor and ignorant, and therefore unprepared to contend against the temptations and corruptions of great towns. On their first arrival they have been huddled into crowded rooms in narrow, ill-drained courts and lanes, forced to breathe a fetid and depressing air, and often been brought into contact with the

most vicious and degraded portion of the population. Exposed during the frequent vicissitudes of our commerce to the trials of poverty, they have seen around them enormous accumulations of wealth, ostentatiously displayed and imperfectly protected.

While these elements of social danger were fermenting with fearful rapidity, the growth of counteracting agencies has been slow and partial. While gin-shops and drinking-houses have been multiplied almost without check, churches and schools, public libraries and reading-rooms, parks and play-grounds-the means of moral training or healthy recreation-instead of preceding or accompanying this rapid increase of population, have followed it with slow and halting steps.

Nor was more done to repress crime than to encourage good conduct. Pauperism, the greatest curse of the poorer classes and the fertile mother of crime, was directly fostered by our then existing laws and by the spirit in which they were administered. Our police was inefficient; our prisons, dens of moral corruption and physical disease; reformatories, industrial and ragged schools as yet were not; our laws were so extravagantly severe as to insure their lax and uncertain application; our punishments were so devised as neither to deter nor to reform, and to be as expensive as they were ineffectual. So that in commenting on our prisons and penal settlements, a thoughtful writer of the last generation could say without exaggeration: In regard to the reformation of the offender, there is but one testimony, that New South Wales of all places on the face of the earth, except perhaps a British prison, is the place where there is the least chance for the reformation of an offender; the greatest chance of his being improved and perfected in every species of wickedness.' (JAMES MILL.)

There could be but one out-come of so much neglect, unwisdom, and misdirected effort. Mr. Porter writing, in 1851, on the Progress of the Nation, states that the number committed for trial in England and Wales was then more than five times as great as it was at the beginning of the century; that the proportionate increase in Ireland was still more appalling, there having been in 1849 twelvefold the number of committals that were made in 1805; that in Scotland, between 1815 and 1849, the increase in committals had been sevenfold.

I shall endeavour to be as little oppressive as possible in the use of statistics; but some, I fear many, figures are absolutely required for the elucidation of my subject.

In England, the number of persons committed for trial for

indictable offences was in 1805 only 4,605. With occasiona fluctuations, the number increased rapidly, till, in 1842, it reached 31,309, of whom 22,733 were convicted.

What proportion did this increase of criminals bear to the increase of population?

While the population between 1805 and 1841 had increased in the proportion of 79 per cent., the increase of criminals was 482 per cent. So that serious crime had increased at a sixfold greater ratio than population.

When we come to particular counties the relative increase of crime to population is still more startling. Thus, while in Monmouthshire, the increase of population in these thirty-six years had been 128 per cent., its increase of crime had been 1,720 per cent., or 13 times greater. In Worcestershire, the increase of population had been 67 per cent., its increase of crime 1,009 per cent., or 15 times greater. In Staffordshire, crime had increased 9 times more rapidly than population, in Cheshire 10 times, in Devonshire 11 times, in Bedfordshire 12 times.

Yet it might have been argued with some show of reason, that the efforts made by the Government to rid the country of its worst criminals ought to have been rewarded with greater success. Between 1805 and 1831 the number of offenders sentenced to death rose from 350 to 1,601. But as of the latter number only 52 were executed, it is obvious that the severity of these sentences was neutralised by their uncertainty. Yet those who were not hanged were, with numerous other malefactors, transported to distant colonies, from which comparatively few returned home.

In one decade from 1834 to 1843, not less than 39,844 of our worst criminals, an average of nearly 4,000 a year, were transported to Australia. And it might reasonably have been expected that the land, purged of such a mass of crime, would not have failed to give early proof of greater purity. In this conviction, the country clung with desperate tenacity to transportation. The terror lest all these offenders, representing the most hardened and desperate classes of criminals, should be retained in this country and set loose on society at the expiration of their sentences, was natural, if not quite unselfish, and found energetic expression in 1841 when the Government of Lord Melbourne was defeated in the House of Commons on an address, carried against them, praying that their policy in keeping at home a large portion of the criminals sentenced to transportation might be reversed; and again, in 1847, when a select committee of the House of Lords was

appointed with the avowed object of restoring transportation to its former position as the greatest of secondary punishments.

History repeats itself. And certainly this obstinate adherence to a mode of punishment, now all but universally condemned, bears a remarkable resemblance to the grim determination with which, from the Tudor days almost to our own, our legislators clung to the punishment of death for offences to which it was misapplied, and insisted upon maintaining laws which they could not or dared not execute.

As early as the reign of Henry VII. Sir Thomas More tells us, that one day when he was dining' with Cardinal Morton, then Chancellor of England, there happened to be at table one of the English lawyers, who took occasion to run out into a high commendation of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who, as he said, were then hanged so fast that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet; and upon that, he said, he could not wonder enough how it came to pass, that since so few escaped, there were yet so many thieves left, who were still robbing in all places. Upon this (says Sir T. More) I, who took the boldness to speak before the Cardinal, said there was no reason to wonder at the matter, since this way of punishing thieves was neither just in itself nor good to the public.' And he proceeded to recommend milder remedies and the policy of prevention. His counsels, however, were far in advance of his age, and bore no fruit.

Three centuries later, in 1808, when Sir Samuel Romilly brought in a bill to repeal a statute of Elizabeth which made privately stealing from the person' a capital offence, and proposed to limit the punishment to seven years' transportation, Mr. Burton, a Welsh judge, objected to the change on the ground that the crime of picking pockets had become extremely common and was increasing, and maintained that at Chester, where he sat as judge, he had to try for this offence a great number of boys, who seemed to be educated to this way of life.' This argument, that the crime was increasing, and that therefore there ought not to be any mitigation of the severity of the law, was also much insisted on by Plumer' (afterwards Master of the Rolls). To Sir Samuel Romilly, as to Sir Thomas More, and as I hope to most of us in these days, it appeared that no better reason could be given to altering the law than that it was not efficacious; and that instead of preventing crimes, crimes multiplied under its operation. But many a tough battle had to be fought and lost before Sir

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I assume, after most of the commentators on the Utopia, that More attributes to the fictitious Hythtoday an incident in his own life and the expression of his own opinions.