What is still more to the point, the punishment of blinding is quite as repugnant to those sentiments of humanity which are said to be outraged by the depriving a fellow creature of his life. As we have before intimated, the spectacle of pain inflicted is at all times an evil in itself. Even the presence of those gloomy buildings, devoted to all the wretched purposes of incarceration, is, we should say, a public calamity. The more men see of misery, the more callous do they become to it; the less effort do they make to relieve; the more ready are they to inflict it. Punishments should be multiplied as little as possible. Very slight offences had better be left to the correction of public opinion, and very grave offences should be severely visited, as well to spare punishment as to prevent crime. We at once admit that it is an evilthe spectacle of putting a man to death. But this of putting out his eyes is, in act, scarce less revolting, and the spectacle is perpetuated. The public execution lasts his lifetime. There is something, too, from which we recoil in associating what has hitherto been the most pitiful affliction of humanity with the idea of punishment of crime. A blind man walks amongst us the universally commiseratedand good need he has of our commiseration; it would be a sore addition to his calamity to make his condition one of suspected turpitude, and expose him to the hazard of being classed with murderers.
With respect to that greater severity of the punishment, on which our author eloquently enlarges, the only severity which a legislature ought to seek is that which is available in the shape of threat; and no threat can be more effective than that of taking from a man his life, since he can always, in his own imagination, commute any other punishment into that. If it be true, on the one hand, that death is a mere privation, and not to be compared, in real severity, to very many of the positive afflictions of life; and if, on the other, it is still the greatest threat which society can hold outthese two facts together would go far to prove that it is the very best punishment which could be devised.
Dismissing this exception of the punishment of death for the crime of murder, imprisonment at home or abroad, accompanied with hard labour, or periods of solitary confinement, is the sole threat of any moment which the law holds out against offenders; and it becomes, therefore, of infinite importance to establish an effective prison discipline. We look upon this simplification of our penal operations as an advantage; and we are by no means disposed to favour those inventive gentlemen who would devise new punishments, or revive old ones, for the purpose, it would seem, of having a variety of inflictions corresponding to the variety of offences. A well-regulated prison, where the severity of the taskwork, the nature of the diet, the duration and the strictness of the confinement, all admit of apportionment to the offence, seems to include all that is desirable in this matter of punishment. Here, if any where, can plans of reformation be combined with penal inflictions. Such plans ought, by all means, to be encouraged; but they are notwhatever Captain Maconochie, and other zealous reformers, say to the contrarythe first and peculiar object for which a prison is designed.
Captain Maconochie was for some time superintendent of Norfolk Island. A rough experience. But prison discipline must be much the same in its elements, in whatever part of the world it is carried on. We are not about to enter into the variety of questions connected with transportation, or the management of penal colonies. Wherever imprisonment or compulsory labour are to be undergone, the same class of difficulties and dilemmas must arise; and we shall deal only with Captain Maconochie's remarks, as they apply generally to all convicts, whether transported or not.
It is quite curious to observe the unconscious pranks that men of sound understandings, but not philosophically disciplined, may be led into, when, from some favourite point of view, they suddenly rush into generalities, and proclaim as reasoning what is the dictate of a momentary sentiment. Captain Maconochie, desirous of enlisting our sympathies in favour of his convicts, assimilates their condition to that of the black slaves, whom the philanthropic efforts of Wilberforce, and others, succeeded in emancipating. The parallel isto say the bestvery surprising and unexpected. Convicts in the colonies stand in the same predicament, with regard to society, as their fellow-culprits at home; and the gallant Captain would hardly preach a crusade for the liberation of all the prisoners in Englandfor all who are undergoing the discipline of our houses of correction. To be compelled to labour for another man's advantage, and at another man's will, because one is "guilty of a darker skin," and to be compelled to the like taskwork because one has committed burglary, are two very different things. Full of this happy comparison, however, Captain Maconochie proceeds"They (the blacks) were thus, in the main, merry, virtuous, and contented beings; they did not advancethis their condition as slaves forbadebut neither did they recede; and whatever the influence of their condition on their own character, it ended nearly with themselves; they were subjects, not agents, and no one was made materially worse through their means. In every one of these respects, convicts are differently, and far more unfavourably, circumstanced. True, they have sinned, which is often alleged as a reason for dealing with them more harshly; but who has not sinned? Who will venture to say, or would be right if he did say, that, similarly born, educated, and tempted, as most of them have been, he would have stood where they have fallen? They are our brothers in a much nearer sense than were the negroes." Now, if language such as this means any thing, the convict is a most maltreated person, and should not have been punished at all. It is really the duty of sober sensible men to put their veto on such oratory as this; there is too much of the same kind abroad. We must all of us be ready to acknowledge, that if we had been "born, educated, and tempted," as many of these felons, we too might have been felons. Does it follow that we ought not to have received the punishment of felons? Is this sort of argumentum ad hominem, which makes the crime in imagination our own, to bribe us into an utterly ruinous indulgence towards it? Crime is not punished on earthas divines teach us it will be punished in heavenon a principle of retributive justice, and according to our moral deserts. To prove that this is not the principle of judicial punishment, we have only to call to mind that, whereas, in a moral point of view, the force of temptation diminishes the guilt, men, in framing their laws, invariably increase the punishment in proportion to the temptation. The facility to commit a crime, is one great element in the temptation to commit it; and this facility has been always considered (as in the case of forgery) to call for a counterbalance in the severity of the penalty.
In matters of penal legislation, there are two currents of thought, which must be always kept distinct. The one relates to the natural and little cultivated feelings of mankind, which demand retaliation for injuries committeda vindictive or retributive justice. Here is found the rude motive power by and on which legislation has to work; sometimes shaping these feelings to its purposes, sometimes shaping its purposes to them. The other current of ideas is purely legislative, purely prospective, having for its sole end the well-being of society, and looking on punishment; not as retributive, or vindictive, or as morally due, but as a sad necessity for the preservation of order.