The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits | Page 6

fear, is the sheet-anchor of the law. He who is not
afraid of being pointed at as a thief, will not mind a month's hard labour.
He who is prepared to take the life of another, is already reckless of his
own. But every one makes a sorry figure in the pillory; and the being
launched from the New Drop lowers a man in his own opinion. The
lawless and violent spirit, who is hurried by headstrong self-will to
break the laws, does not like to have the ground of pride and obstinacy
struck from under his feet. This is what gives the swells of the
metropolis such a dread of the _tread-mill_--it makes them ridiculous.
It must be confessed, that this very circumstance renders the reform of
criminals nearly hopeless. It is the apprehension of being stigmatized
by public opinion, the fear of what will be thought and said of them,
that deters men from the violation of the laws, while their character
remains unimpeached; but honour once lost, all is lost. The man can
never be himself again! A citizen is like a soldier, a part of a machine,
who submits to certain hardships, privations, and dangers, not for his
own ease, pleasure, profit, or even conscience, but--for shame. What is
it that keeps the machine together in either case? Not punishment or
discipline, but sympathy. The soldier mounts the breach or stands in the
trenches, the peasant hedges and ditches, or the mechanic plies his
ceaseless task, because the one will not be called a coward, the other a
_rogue_: but let the one turn deserter and the other vagabond, and there
is an end of him. The grinding law of necessity, which is no other than
a name, a breath, loses its force; he is no longer sustained by the good
opinion of others, and he drops out of his place in society, a useless
clog! Mr. Bentham takes a culprit, and puts him into what he calls a
Panopticon, that is, a sort of circular prison, with open cells, like a
glass bee-hive. He sits in the middle, and sees all the other does. He
gives him work to do, and lectures him if he does not do it. He takes
liquor from him, and society, and liberty; but he feeds and clothes him,

and keeps him out of mischief; and when he has convinced him, by
force and reason together, that this life is for his good, he turns him out
upon the world a reformed man, and as confident of the success of his
handy-work, as the shoemaker of that which he has just taken off the
last, or the Parisian barber in Sterne, of the buckle of his wig. "Dip it in
the ocean," said the perruquier, "and it will stand!" But we doubt the
durability of our projector's patchwork. Will our convert to the great
principle of Utility work when he is from under Mr. Bentham's eye,
because he was forced to work when under it? Will he keep sober,
because he has been kept from liquor so long? Will he not return to
loose company, because he has had the pleasure of sitting vis-a-vis with
a philosopher of late? Will he not steal, now that his hands are untied?
Will he not take the road, now that it is free to him? Will he not call his
benefactor all the names he can set his tongue to, the moment his back
is turned? All this is more than to be feared. The charm of criminal life,
like that of savage life, consists in liberty, in hardship, in danger, and in
the contempt of death, in one word, in extraordinary excitement; and he
who has tasted of it, will no more return to regular habits of life, than a
man will take to water after drinking brandy, or than a wild beast will
give over hunting its prey. Miracles never cease, to be sure; but they are
not to be had wholesale, or to order. Mr. Owen, who is another of these
proprietors and patentees of reform, has lately got an American savage
with him, whom he carries about in great triumph and complacency, as
an antithesis to his New View of Society, and as winding up his
reasoning to what it mainly wanted, an epigrammatic point. Does the
benevolent visionary of the Lanark cotton-mills really think this
natural man will act as a foil to his _artificial man_? Does he for a
moment imagine that his Address to the higher and middle classes,
with all its advantages of fiction, makes any thing like so interesting a
romance as _Hunter's Captivity among the North American Indians?_
Has he any thing to shew, in all the apparatus of New Lanark and its
desolate