Читать книгу The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh - James Tucker - Страница 3

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I AM, on the whole, after consideration, of opinion that this remarkable volume of memoirs may be accepted as authentic. It records the life of a criminal who was convicted at the London Sessions for the crime of burglary just one hundred years ago, and provides material for reflection to all who have an interest in the evolution of the penal code. It is a book which might be read with profit by those ultrahumanitarian persons who would remove almost entirely the punitive quality from the legal means which society adopts for the disciplining of its recalcitrant members.

There is a powerful, because vociferous, minority of citizens who would abandon the death penalty utterly, even for the crimes of murder, high treason, piracy and the causing of disaffection among His Majesty’s forces. They are among the revolutionaries of law, and their activities must be restrained if the law of England is to remain the pattern of justice which it has been, and is still admitted to be, throughout the world.

This man, Ralph Rashleigh, had the advantage of a decent upbringing, but, out of weakness of character, adopted what seemed the easier life of crime at an early age. After one short term of imprisonment for uttering spurious coins, he began to practise bolder and more profitable crimes, though never adopting violence towards any person in effecting his depredations.

He was a mild-natured man, with no worse criminal instincts than those necessary to become a successful thief and burglar.

The crime for which he was finally tried was not a very desperate venture, consisting merely of feloniously entering a private house and robbing the butler’s pantry of the silver which was stored there. Such, it would be thought in these days, was not a crime for which a man deserved to die by hanging, but this was the sentence first pronounced against Ralph Rashleigh.

The capital sentence was commuted to transportation for life, and something of what it meant of hardship and suffering is recounted in the pages of this stark narrative.

One hundred years ago, and less, sentences of this severity were passed as a matter of course upon all who committed crimes against property. The theft of a spoon, a handkerchief, any trifling object, was punishable by death, or transportation for periods of seven or more years. It was not until 1861 that to hang a man for theft was completely abolished, but most cases of theft had by then ceased to be capital offences. In that year a series of statutes consolidating and amending the criminal law was passed, though not without considerable opposition from responsible authorities. There must therefore be alive at this time many people during whose lifetime men were actually sentenced to death for petty thefts, and whose contemporaries of childhood were transported as juveniles for such crimes. The Sessions Papers of the period give many cases of boys of fifteen and sixteen who were sentenced to long terms of transportation for such petty thefts.

The system of penal transportation which was in operation at the time when the hero of this chronicle was sent out to New South Wales was a development of what had been in operation for centuries. The Barbados and the West Indies had long before the beginning of last century been used as working asylums for criminals and prisoners of war; and, with the discovery of Australia, it was intelligible, though never defensible, that labour should be supplied in this manner for the opening and clearing of the country. It may be recalled that Cromwell had no compunction about shipping Irish and other prisoners of war to Jamaica to help in the conquest of that fever-infested island; and that, further, he despatched thousands of Irish girls and women to become wives to his transportees.

The living conditions of pioneers in any new and untamed country must always be harsh and meagre, and while, in these softer times, we may shudder at the extremities of hardship and misery endured by the convicts described in this book, it must be kept in mind that their conditions were hardly more onerous than those of the free population.

Australia in the eighteen-twenties and eighteen-thirties was largely unexplored, and the white population were still severely taxed to win the bare means of existence from its soil. That the forced labour of the convict population was only made productive by the use of the lash and other harsh punishment was natural, but the position of a well-behaved man was not much worse than that of a seaman in the navy or a deck-hand on a clipper. Flogging had been for centuries a method of punishment in both the services, and the use of the belaying-pin on shipboard was regarded as not only normal but justifiable. We need not, therefore, fling ourselves into overmuch emotion over the sufferings of the convicts of New South Wales as they are recorded in this book.

The transportation of criminals under which Ralph Rashleigh served his sentence worked admirably on the whole. The men could serve their term, obtain their freedom, receive a grant of land, and establish themselves as farmers and squatters, to live a healthier and more useful life than ever they would have done in the homeland. On the other side of the sheet is the record of gangs of outlaws and bushrangers, of whose practices this book contains a comprehensive survey. These men were rebels or criminals by nature; desperate as their story is, it is not worse than that of the wild men in any new country. To name but one instance, there have been, within the memory of the present generation, gangs of desperate gunmen in the United States of America whose activities matched in lawlessness those of the gangs of Australian bushrangers.

The evolution of a civilized society is a slow and painful process; the harshness of the laws under which it develops is seldom greater than is dictated by the needs of the community for its protection and peace. There is no just cause to feel shame that such experiences as are here recorded could befall Britishers. One may, perhaps, regard the disappearance of the transportation system, and all that it connoted of human suffering, with relief and satisfaction; but in an historical sense it can be said that the wisdom and justification of that system lay in the incontrovertible fact that it worked well.

Birkenhead