Sir,—Towards the close of the excellent article on the Taylor trial
in your issue for October 31, you say that people never will be,
nor ought to be, persuaded “to treat criminals simply as vermin
which they destroy, and not as men who are to be punished.”
Certainly not, sir! Who ever talked or thought of regarding
criminals “simply” as anything; (or innocent people either, if
there be any)? But regarding criminals complexly and accurately,
they are partly men, partly vermin; what is human in them you must
punish—what is vermicular, abolish. Anything between—if you can
find it—I wish you joy of, and hope you may be able to preserve it
to society. Insane persons, horses, dogs, or cats, become vermin
when they become dangerous. I am sorry for darling Fido, but there
is no question about what is to be done with him.
Yet, I assure you, sir, insanity is a tender point with me. One of
my best friends has just gone mad; and all the rest say I am mad
myself. But, if ever I murder anybody—and, indeed, there are
numbers of people I should like to murder—I won’t say that I ought
to be hanged; for I think nobody but a bishop or a bank director
can ever be rogue enough to deserve hanging; but I particularly,
and with all that is left me of what I imagine to be sound mind,
request that I may be immediately shot.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
J. Ruskin.
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, November 2, (1872).
III. I am very grateful to the friend who sends me the following note
on my criticism of Dickens in last letter:—
“It does not in the least detract from the force of Fors, p. 253,
line 18 (November), that there was a real ‘Miss Flite,’ whom I have
seen, and my father well remembers; and who used to haunt the
Courts in general, and sometimes to address them. She had been
ruined, it was believed; and Dickens must have seen her, for her
picture is like the original. But he knew nothing about her, and
only constructed her after his fashion. She cannot have been any
prototype of the character of Miss Flite. I never heard her real
name. Poor thing! she did not look sweet or kind, but crazed and
spiteful; and unless looks deceived Dickens, he just gave careless,
false witness about her. Her condition seemed to strengthen your
statement in its very gist,—as Law had made her look like Peter
Peebles.
“My father remembers little Miss F., of whom nothing was known. She
always carried papers and a bag, and received occasional charity
from lawyers.
“Gridley’s real name was Ikey;—he haunted Chancery. Another, named
Pitt, in the Exchequer;—broken attorneys, both.”
IV. I have long kept by me an official statement of the condition of
England when I began Fors, and together with it an illustrative column,
printed, without alteration, from the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ of the
previous year. They may now fitly close my four years’ work, of which I
have good hope next year to see some fruit.
Mr. Goschen on the Condition of England.—“The nation is again making
money at an enormous rate, and driving every kind of decently secure
investment up to unprecedented figures. Foreign Stocks, Indian Stocks,
Home Railway Shares, all securities which are beyond the control of
mere speculators and offer above four per cent. were never so dear;
risky loans for millions, like that for Peru, are taken with avidity;
the cup is getting full, and in all human probability some new burst of
speculation is at hand, which may take a beneficial form—for instance,
we could get rid of a hundred millions in making cheap country railways
with immense advantage—but will more probably turn out to be a mere
method of depletion. However it goes, the country is once more getting
rich, and the money is filtering downwards to the actual workers. The
people, as Mr. Goschen showed by unimpugnable figures, are consuming
more sugar, more tea, more beer, spirits, and tobacco, more, in fact,
of every kind of popular luxury, than ever. Their savings have also
increased, while the exports of cotton, of wool, of linen, of iron, of
machinery, have reached a figure wholly beyond precedent. By the
testimony of all manner of men—factory inspectors, poor-law inspectors,
members of great cities—the Lancashire trade, the silk trade, the
flax-spinning trade, the lace trade, and, above all, the iron trade,
are all so flourishing, that the want is not of work to be done, but of
hands to do it. Even the iron shipbuilding trade, which was at so low a
point, is reviving, and the only one believed to be still under serious
depression is the building trade of London, which has, it is believed,
been considerably overdone. So great is the demand for hands in some
parts of the country, that Mr. Goschen believes that internal
emigration would do more to help the people than emigration to America,
while it is certain that no relief which can be afforded by the
departure of a few workpeople is equal to the relief caused by the
revival of any one great trade—relief, we must add, which would be more
rapid and diffused if the trades’ unions, in this one respect at least
false to their central idea of the brotherhood of labour, were not so
jealous of the intrusion of outsiders. There is hardly a trade into
which a countryman of thirty, however clever, can enter at his own
discretion—one of the many social disqualifications which press upon
the agricultural labourer.
“The picture thus drawn by Mr. Goschen, and truly drawn—for the
President of the Poor-Law Board is a man who does not manipulate
figures, but treats them with the reverence of the born statist—is a
very pleasant one, especially to those who believe that wealth is the
foundation of civilization; but yet what a weary load it is that,
according to the same speech, this country is carrying, and must carry!
There are 1,100,000 paupers on the books, and not a tenth of them will
be taken off by any revival whatever, for not a tenth of them are
workers. The rest are children—350,000 of them alone—widows, people
past work, cripples, lunatics, incapables, human drift of one sort or
another, the detritus of commerce and labour, a compost of suffering,
helplessness, and disease. In addition to the burden of the State, in
addition to the burden of the Debt, which we talk of as nothing, but
without which England would be the least-taxed country in the world,
this country has to maintain an army of incapables twice as numerous as
the army of France, to feed, and clothe, and lodge and teach them,—an
army which she cannot disband, and which she seems incompetent even to
diminish. To talk of emigration, of enterprise, even of education, as
reducing this burden, is almost waste of breath; for cripples do not
emigrate, the aged do not benefit by trade, when education is universal
children must still be kept alive.”—The Spectator, June 25, 1870.
V. The following single column of the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ has been
occasionally referred to in past letters:—
“It is proposed to erect a memorial church at Oxford to the late
Archbishop Longley. The cost is estimated at from £15,000 to
£20,000. The subscriptions promised already amount to upwards of
£2,000, and in the list are the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the
Bishops of Oxford, St. Asaph, and Chester.”
“An inquest was held in the Isle of Dogs by Mr. Humphreys, the
coroner, respecting the death of a woman named Catherine Spence,
aged thirty-four, and her infant. She was the wife of a labourer,
who had been almost without employment for two years and a half.
They had pledged all their clothes to buy food, and some time since
part of the furniture had been seized by the brokers for rent. The
house in which they lived was occupied by six families, who paid
the landlord 5s. 9d. for rent. One of the witnesses stated that
‘all the persons in the house were ill off for food, and the
deceased never wanted it more than they did.’ The jury on going to
view the bodies found that the bed on which the woman and child had
died was composed of rags, and there were no bed-clothes upon it. A
small box placed upon a broken chair had served as a table. Upon it
lay a tract entitled ‘The Goodness of God.’ The windows were
broken, and an old iron tray had been fastened up against one and a
board up against another. Two days after his wife’s death the poor
man went mad, and he was taken to the workhouse. He was not taken
to the asylum, for there was no room for him in it—it was crowded
with mad people. Another juror said it was of no use to return a
verdict of death from starvation. It would only cause the distress
in the island to be talked about in newspapers. The jury returned a
verdict that the deceased woman died from exhaustion, privation,
and want of food.”
“The Rev. James Nugent, the Roman Catholic chaplain of the
Liverpool borough gaol, reported to the magistrates that crime is
increasing among young women in Liverpool; and he despairs of
amendment until effective steps are taken to check the open display
of vice which may now be witnessed nightly, and even daily, in the
thoroughfares of the town. Mr. Raffles, the stipendiary magistrate,
confesses that he is at a loss what to do in order to deter women
of the class referred to from offending against the law, as even
committal to the sessions and a long term of imprisonment fail to
produce beneficial effects. Father Nugent also despairs of doing
much good with this class; but he thinks that if they were
subjected to stricter control, and prevented from parading in our
thoroughfares, many girls would be deterred from falling into evil
ways.”
“At the Liverpool borough gaol sessions Mr. Robertson Gladstone
closely interrogated the chaplain (the Rev. Thomas Carter)
respecting his visitation of the prisoners. Mr. Gladstone is of
opinion that sufficient means to make the prisoners impressionable
to religious teaching are not used; whilst the chaplain asserts
that the system which he pursues is based upon a long experience,
extending over twenty-eight years, at the gaol. Mr. Gladstone, who
does not share the chaplain’s belief that the prisoners are
‘generally unimpressionable,’ hinted that some active steps in the
matter would probably be taken.”
“Mr. Fowler, the stipendiary magistrate of Manchester, referring to
Mr. Ernest Jones’ death yesterday, in the course of the proceedings
at the City police-court, said: ‘I wish to say one word, which I
intended to have said yesterday morning, in reference to the taking
from amongst us of a face which has been so familiar in this court;
but I wished to have some other magistrates present in order that I
might, on the part of the bench, and not only as an individual,
express our regret at the unexpected removal from our midst of a
man whose life has been a very remarkable one, whose name will
always be associated in this country in connection with the
half-century he lived in it, and who, whatever his faults—and who
amongst us is free?—possessed the great virtues of undoubted
integrity and honour, and of being thoroughly consistent, never
flinching from that course which he believed to be right, though at
times at the cost of fortune and of freedom.’”
“A Chester tradesman named Meacock, an ex-town councillor, has been
arrested in that city on a charge of forging conveyances of
property upon which he subsequently obtained a mortgage of £2,200.
The lady who owns the property appeared before the magistrates, and
declared that her signature to the conveyance was a forgery. The
prisoner was remanded, and was sent to prison in default of
obtaining the bail which was required.”
“Mr. Hughes, a Liverpool merchant, was summoned before the local
bench for having sent to the London Dock a case, containing
hydrochloric acid, without a distinct label or mark denoting that
the goods were dangerous. A penalty of £10 was imposed.”
“A woman, named Daley, came before the Leeds magistrates, with her
son, a boy six years old, whom she wished to be sent to a
reformatory, as she was unable to control him. She said that one
evening last week he went home, carrying a piece of rope, and said
that he was going to hang himself with it. He added that he had
already attempted to hang himself ‘in the Crown Court, but a little
lass loosed the rope for him, and he fell into a tub of water.’ It
turned out that the mother was living with a man by whom she had
two children, and it was thought by some in court that her object
was merely to relieve herself of the cost and care of the boy; but
the magistrates, thinking that the boy would be better away from
the contaminating influence of the street and of his home,
committed him to the Certified Industrial Schools until he arrives
at sixteen years of age, and ordered his mother to contribute one
shilling per week towards his maintenance.”—Pall Mall Gazette,
January 29, 1869.