[Gutenberg 46623] • At War with Society; or, Tales of the Outcasts

IT would not be a hopeful sign of the further triumph of the good principle over the evil if the devil’s agents could shew us many examples where they have beaten us, and been enabled to slide clean off the scale. Since my first volume was published, I have been twitted with cases where we have been at fault. I don’t deny that there are some, and I will give one or two, of which I have something to say. In the meantime, I have consolation, not that I have contributed much to the gratifying result in being able to point to the fact, that, since the year 1849, the Reports of the General Board of Prisons have shewn a gradual and steady decrease of the population of our jails. I am free to confess that this result is only, to a small extent, due to us, and the reason is plain enough. The old rebel has had the advantage of us. We have, until very recently, been acting against him on the principle of those masters and mistresses, who, with a chuckle in their hearts, lay pieces of money in the way of suspected servants to catch them,—something in the Twelvetrees way, only they don’t wish their unwary victims “to die on the spot;” nay, having caught them, they only turn them off to rob and steal elsewhere. Yes, in place of our philanthropists meeting the arch-enemy at the beginning, when he is busy with the young hearts, detecting the first throb of good and turning it to a pulse of evil, we have been obliged to wait until the young sinner was ripe and ready for our hardening mould of punishment. There was no Dr Guthrie there—a good way cleverer than the enemy, I suspect, and capable of checkmating him by nipping the canker in the early bud; and then we have been hampered by our legal governors, who have been, and still are, always telling us we must keep a sharp look out for what they call, in their law jargon, an “overt act,” the meaning of which, I am informed, is, that we must wait until the rogues are able to do some clever thing, sufficient to shew us they have arrived at the age of discretion, and become meritorious subjects for punishment.