Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/570

 556 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY now regulates them all, and prisoners awaiting trial are sep- arated from those who have been found guilty. The Govern- ment convict prisons, where sentences of penal servitude are carried out, belong to a different category, and are under a different direction and distinct rules. The " hulks " have been abandoned as a receptacle for convicts, and transportation to the Australian colonies has ceased since 1867. Its evils had long been intolerable to our colonists. The four or five thou- sand persons who were sent out on an average, at the begin- ning of the reign, as convicts to New South Wales alone, were not absorbed in the population, but, to borrow the language of Lord John Russell, " formed a large and vicious separate class." The future of the convict depended on the character for humanity of the master to whom he was assigned, and flogging by colonial magistrates was a common and recog- nised punishment. Modifications of the system were tried between 1840 and 1850, but failed. At last, in 1853, penal servitude in England was substituted in the case of all crimes for which fourteen years' transportation had been previously a possible sentence, and in 1857 was legalised in every case. Since the year 1867 no convict has been sent to Australia. Reformatories and industrial schools are institutions that belong wholly to the present reign, and will hereafter be reckoned among not the least of its humane inventions. A lawyer may perhaps be excused for mingling with his retrospect of a period some names that appear bound up with the honour of his profession. The pubMc service is greater tharl the men who serve it, and no judge, fortunately, is indis- pensable to the law, any more than a single wave is indispen- sable to the sea. Of the living, this is not the time nor place to speak. But as regards the dead, no generation can complain of judicial mediocrity that has seen upon the woolsack, Cot- tenham, Lyndhurst, St. Leonards, Cranworth, Chelmsford, Westbury, Cairns; at the Rolls, Langdale, Romilly, and Jessel; among its Lords Justices, Knight Bruce, Turner, Melhsh, James, Giff ard, Thesiger ; in its Court of Chancery, Wigram, Kindersley, Stuart, Hatherley, Wickens; in its Queen's Bench, Denman, Campbell, Cockburn, Williams, Wightman, Coleridge, Patteson, Crompton, Lush; at the