on which the subsistence of his family depended. He might be half starved for want of food and clothing and fuel. He might be compelled to mingle with the vilest of mankind, and, in self-defence, to adopt their habits, their language and their sentiments; he might become a villain by actual compulsion. His health might be impaired or ruined by filth and contagion; and as for his morals, purity itself could not continue pure, if exposed for any length of time to the society with which he must associate. His trial might be long protracted; he might be imprisoned on suspicion, and pine in jail while his family was starving out of it, without any opportunity of removing that suspicion, and this for a whole year; if acquitted, he might be dismissed from jail without a shilling in his pocket, and without the means of returning home; if convicted, beyond the sentence awarded by the law, he might be exposed to the most intolerable hardships, and these might amount to no less than the destruction of his life now, and his soul for ever.
Contrast this condition of prisoners in London—many of them accused persons only—with the life of convicted felons in the 'Botany Bay penal settlement,' where all that was asked from the criminal was that he should make a fresh start, work, and refrain from thieving.
Unfortunately, however, among the convicts were men so sadly ignorant, so hideously vicious, so brutally low, that only those who know the crimes of great
