Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/428

418[April 3, 1869] criminals, habitual criminals; they have no idea whatever of honest industry, but scorn and contempt of it. Allowed to go on stealing, they will steal until they are discovered. Then they will be locked up, and when they receive their licences, or their sentences expire, they will go through exactly the same course again. These are the wretched creatures twice and thrice convicted, in whose behalf our kindliness and our pity are invoked. These are the injured innocents on whose behalf heartrending appeals are made to our merciful consideration. Why, in the name of all that is absurdly conventional, should we wait to lock up Thomas Smith and Louisa Lyons until we absolutely detect them in the commission of new crime? Why should we not keep them from fresh mischief if they cannot show us that they have really become reputable members of society? It is one thing to smooth the path back to the world for the convict whose crime may have been the result of sudden temptation, and an exceptional act in his life. It is a very different thing to allow a morbid sentimentality to come in the way of the suppression of scoundrels who make robbery a trade, and criminality an occupation.

It is said that "a convicted person under these arrangements would be mere vermin all his life, with every man's hand against him, and his hand against every man." Whereas the Act, it must be remembered, applies only to a particular class of convicted persons; two convictions at least are necessary to bring any criminal within its provisions. Even then the constable has no power himself; he can only take the suspected person before the proper authorities, by whom proper evidence will be required before the penal clauses of the Act can be put in force. As matters now stand, the professed criminal's hand is undoubtedly against every man, but it unfortunately happens that every man's hand is not against him. Lord Kimberley proposes to put the two sides on an equality.

There is but one other objection urged against the bill, and that is one which is a very old rusty weapon against any measure involving an increase of police responsibility and supervision. The odious foreign spy system! Think of the professional spies that will be let loose on the country! Consider the invasion of our private lives—the private lives of such of us as are not felons—which will be the natural and inevitable consequence of setting the police to work to watch a few felons! Now, the professional spies—an ill-natured euphemism for police constables—who will be let loose on the country, will have nothing whatever to do with the private lives of any of us who are not felons; and more, they will even have nothing to do with the private lives of such of us as are felons, if we have only been once convicted. No one will suffer but the habitual professional criminal, and that he should suffer until he learns that his profession is on the whole a decidedly wearing and uncomfortable one, is a most desirable thing. As to his claim to be at large between his crimes, after he has become a professional criminal, he is the common enemy, and it is forfeit and gone.

broad thoroughfare of the sky not being much impeded by traffic westward, the crow makes a straight swift flight of it from Plymouth to Liskeard—"the palace on a hill," as the Celts called it.

This small town, embedded among the rocky downs of Caradon and the Bodmin moors, was the centre of much hard fighting in the civil wars, when the gay Cavaliers of Cornwall met the stony-faced Puritans of Plymouth on Bradoc Downs, between Liskeard and Lostwithiel. Sir Ralph Hopton—"the soldiers' darling," whom Clarendon afterwards described as the only man never spoken ill of in the Prince's council—was in the field, with Sir John Berkley as commissary-general, and Colonel Ashburnham, as major-general of foot. All Cornwall was theirs, from that grim ship-shattering rock the Shark's Fin to the very earthworks of Saltash, on whose terraces the Puritan sentinels paced, looking gloomily westward for the first sword flash of the enemy. The Parliament resolved to stamp this fire out before the western prairie caught. Rapidly, like clouds rolling together for a storm, grim forces gathered from subjugated Dorset, Somerset, and Devon, and moved westward like a rising deluge. Ruthen, the Scotch governor of Plymouth, led the Parliament forces over the Tamar, to charge the king's men, who were sounding their bugles and beating their drums at Bodmin. Sir Ralph, gallant with lace and feather, wishing to show the psalm-singers that Royalist gentlemen could fear God as well as honour the king, had public prayers read by the army chaplains at the head of every squadron. The Puritans from the high ground muttered that "the Cavalier babe-eaters were at mass." Sir Ralph, "winging his foot with horse and dragoons," advanced, full of fight, within musket-shot of the enemy, and, seeing the Puritan cannon had not yet come up from Liskeard, pushed forward two iron minion drakes, very light guns, under cover of small parties of horse. The first two shots striking full among the Puritan pikemen, and coming from they knew not what hidden batteries, to which their tardy guns could not reply, struck a panic into Ruthen's men; they began to fall back, and, seeing that, the Cavaliers bore hotly forward, pikes down, and drove the Roundheads towards Liskeard. The Cornish men, famous at hedge skirmishing, drove out the enemy's musketeers from behind the loose stone walls and hedges, where they had been thrown back in reserve to protect Ruthen's retreat. Soon the fierce and alert attack of the Cornish men broke the Roundhead ranks, their pikes wavered and scattered, their colours drooped, their fire relaxed, and they fled towards Devonshire, leaving twelve hundred and fifty sullen men prisoners, and nearly all their