father had ever uttered, and every muscle in his face, every gesture, every step ought to have convinced him that his father always meant what he said.

In fine, my dear niece, learn to apply these little words aright and honestly; and, little though they be, you will keep the love of truth pure and unsullied.

Ah me! what worlds of joy and sorrow. -what maddening griefs and ecstacies-have these poor monosyllables conveyed! More than any other words in all the dictionary have they enraptured or saddened the human heart; rung out the peal of joy, or sounded the knell of hope. And yet not so often as at first sight might appear; for these blunt and honest words are, both, kindly coy in scenes of agony. There are occasions, and those the most terrible in life, when the lips are fairly absolved from using them, and when, if the eye cannot express what the muffled tongue refuses to tell, the tongue seeks any stammering compassionate circumlocution rather than utter the dreaded syllable. "Is there no hope?" says the mother, hanging over her dying child, to the physician in whose looks are life and death. He dare not say "yes,”—but to such a question silence and dejection can alone say "no."

May there be to you, dear Mary, not many scenes in life,some there will, there must be,-when you cannot utter either of these monosyllables; when truth will not let you say the one, and compassion will not let you breathe the other.

Believe me,

Ever yours affectionately,

R. E. H. G.

My dear West,

LETTER XLIII.

To Alfred West, Esq.

Sutton, Oct. 1847.

"The treatment of criminals" -a question on which you ask my opinion-is indeed a puzzling one. As to the plan of keeping them all in this country,-unless the most absolute necessity compels us, it is the very worst of all; at least, if the wretches are to be turned loose, after a term of imprisonment, on a dense population and an often glutted labour-market: this is simply the most comprehensive cruelty both to the innocent and the guilty. The criminal thus turned out of gaol, enfranchised with a pernicious freedom, cannot but relapse into crime. He cannot compete with honest poverty, unless the door of the counting-house and the factory be shut in its face in favour of the ticket of leave. Perhaps, here and there, one of our mad philanthropists would sacrifice unblemished worth to an absurd sympathy with guilt; but not one in ten thousand would; and, in nearly every case, the relapse of the criminal is inevitable.

The difficulties of the question almost force one on one of two courses; either a return, under some modifications, to strictly penal settlements—a horrible alternative!—or (what, in some moods, I have thought the truest mercy, not only to society, but to criminals themselves) the plan of making all crimes of violence, -murder, highway robbery, burglary, arson,-inexpiable except by enslavement for life; the criminal to be employed all his days on public works, under a system of strict military law; the triangle and the platoon to be the prompt and instant avengers of every serious offence against discipline. Why, indeed, at any rate, should the criminal code be milder than that of the camp?

I have sometimes fancied that such a chastisement of every deliberate forfeiture (by commission of crimes of violence) of the

protection of society, would do more than any thing else to prevent them. If every one disposed to invade his neighbour's liberty, saw over every prison door Dante's terrible inscription, —

"Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,”

I am inclined to think few crimes of violence would be deliberately committed.

But it is a question of immense difficulty. I remember, some years ago, reading all that Bentham all that Beccaria-all that others have said on the treatment of criminals, and thought it incomparably the most perplexing problem in political science.

If we could but give ourselves wholly to one of the two great aims of penal legislation,—the prevention of crime,— and leave the reformation of the criminal quite out of sight; if we could but make that which is the principal, the sole object, and apply to crime remorselessly the maxim, "Experimentum fiat in corpore vili,”—I fancy the most awful punishment and the most effectual deterrent of crime would be just to let it have its play among those who had been tainted by it; to select, for example, some island in the deep recesses of the ocean,- of sufficient fertility, and no more, to yield a scanty subsistence to its inhabitants, if they chose to work the stubborn glebe, and then put ashore there every one who had committed certain heinous crimes, and let them do their best or worst ; the Government simply keeping a port, and cruisers who should see to it that none ever escaped from that dreadful prison; but never interfering to prevent any ill consequences of this concentration of evil; to stay any tumult, to redress any wrongs, to punish any cruelties in this region of huge misrule.

You will think, perhaps, that sheer necessity, -the necessity which exacts "honour" (such as it is) "among thieves,"-would lead on to some sort of government; and it doubtless would, for extermination would be the result if the principles of evil had unchecked sway. But of all despotisms or republics the world has yet seen, I suppose this would be incomparably the worst ; in which truth and justice would be recognised only so far as they

were reluctantly felt to be necessary to the very existence of the body politic, a striking homage, by the way, even that, to the moral constitution of the universe; for it proves that even when men have discarded virtue itself, they must still wear the semblance of it. But still, what dreadful excesses, within the limits of "thieves' honour," would evil passions give birth to! Who can imagine the horrors of a community of lust, cruelty, cunning, greed, blasphemy, a community in which hope and shame would be dead; where the heaviest woe of all would be that very tyranny -that "Right of Might "—which yet would be the only thing which could keep such a society from extinction; where he of the Red Right-hand might be king; the makers of law those who had been most famed for breaking it; in which a murderer might be chancellor, and every judge a felon !

But most probably there could be no stable government even of this horrible kind; a succession of brief anarchies would form the crimson annals, diversified only by the momentary pre-eminence of some superior fiend," Beelzebub, the prince of the devils, casting out devils." In short, the picture is too dreadful to dwell on humanity shudders at the thought of it; so we must give up this promising speculation; we have no business thus to antedate Hell. Yes-Hell. For to be evil, and to be abandoned to evil; to live in the midst of those whose countenances reflect only evil passions, stamped with cruelty, lust, cunning, malice; and to feel (most dreadful of all) that their countenances are but the mirrors of our own; that we are free to "work all manner of evil” against one another, which the utmost selfishness, armed with cunning, unchecked by conscience, and checked only by fear, can inflict; what, after all, is that but hell? Did you ever read Sir James Mackintosh's description of the feelings with which he once found himself standing alone amongst the felons of Newgate, on a casual visit of compassion to that prison? As he saw around him the multiplied images of depravity, -every variety of expression of hatred, malignity, cruelty, lust, cunning, -he confesses to a feeling of the most sickening horror and dread. It must have been hardly better than standing alone in the serpents' house in

the Zoological Gardens, without any thing between the reptiles and the spectator, and-the doors locked!

But to return. If, I say, it were not for humanity, such a "habitation of dragons" as I have supposed would, surely, be the true thing to deter men from crime, and maintain in them a wholesome fear of coming into such a place of torment. How would its very mystery of veiled horrors strike the imagination; that land of silence of which no tongue could tell any thing,on which the foot of innocence had never trod, from which that of guilt never returned; that land for ever divided from the living world, as much as if the grave had already closed on its weary inhabitants! Who can tell what wholesome affrighting myths-what salutary appalling tales-would shape themselves out of the hints and whispers of those who had only gazed on the melancholy isle! How would the voyagers who but sailed in view of the "unblessed land” transfer even to its physical features the gloomy associations of their fancy, and exaggerate whatever ruggedness nature had given it, tenfold! How, as they looked at it with hushed breath, would their own feelings deepen its mysterious silence, and paint it to imagination in darker colours than those of reality! How would it thrill the mind with horror to find officers of the watchful cruisers reporting that on such a dark night they had heard loud shrieks at Murder Cove; on another, had seen fires blazing far inland as if some bloody raid was going forward; that sometimes old greybeards and children, with their throats cut,-mere lumber, to be got rid of by these thrifty colonists, came floating by!

Ah, by the way, how are we to provide for the babies of that horrible community? for babies. some at least-there will be; though I apprehend Mr. Malthus need not be in any alarm about excess of population. Alas! this argument alone, if there were no other derived from humanity, would be enough to frighten us from this hopeful scheme: unless, by the way, men were sent to one island and women to another, which I fear would but complete the horror of both; or unless none but ladies well stricken in years and crime were deemed eligible for such select society; or