=Source.=--In the _Edinburgh Review_, 1823, by the Rev. Sydney
Smith.
Men are governed by words, and under the infamous term convict,
are comprehended crimes of the most different degrees and species
of guilt. One man is transported for stealing three hams and a pot
of sausages; and in the next berth to him on board the transport
is a young surgeon, who has been engaged in the mutiny at the
Nore; the third man is for extorting money; the fourth was in a
respectable situation of life at the time of the Irish Rebellion,
and was so ill-read in History as to imagine that Ireland had been
ill-treated by England, and so bad a reasoner as to suppose, that
nine Catholics ought not to pay tithes to one Protestant. Then
comes a man who set his house on fire, to cheat the Phœnix Office;
and, lastly, that most glaring of all human villains, a poacher,
driven from Europe, wife and child, by thirty lords of manors, at
the Quarter Sessions, for killing a partridge. Now, all these are
crimes no doubt--particularly the last; but they are surely crimes
of very different degrees of intensity, to which different degrees
of contempt and horror are attached--and from which those who have
committed them may, by subsequent morality, emancipate themselves,
with different degrees of difficulty, and with more or less of
success. A warrant granted by a reformed bacon-stealer would be
absurd; but there is hardly any reason why a foolish hot-brained
young blockhead, who chose to favour the mutineers at the Nore when
he was sixteen years of age, may not make a very loyal subject,
when he is forty years of age, and has cast his Jacobine teeth,
and fallen into the practical jobbing and loyal baseness which so
commonly developes itself about that period of life.
It is to be believed that a governor, placed over a land of
convicts, and capable of guarding his limbs from any sudden
collision with odometrous stones, or vertical posts of direction,
should make no distinction between the simple convict and the
double and treble convict--the man of three juries, who has three
times appeared at the Bailey, _trilarcenous_--three times driven
over the seas.