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He was ably assisted in the work of extortion by the crew of parasites who were in the habit of drinking and laughing with him. The office of these men was to drive hard bargains with convicts under the strong terrors of death, and with parents trembling for the lives of children. A portion of the spoil was abandoned by Jeffreys to his agents.
The great object for which the settlement was founded, was to afford a place where ships might repair, and to supply those going round Cape Horn, or returning home that way, with fresh provisions. It is also under contemplation to make it a penal settlement, for which it is in many respects particularly adapted, if sufficient employment for the convicts can be found.
All, however, was not yet over; for, as though labouring under a strange delusion, four of the prisoners actually made oath that they had never been arraigned, tried, convicted, or sentenced at all, either in Canada or elsewhere! Upon this four more writs of habeas corpus issued, commanding the unhappy Mr Batcheldor to bring the four deluded convicts before the Barons of the Exchequer.
The great road winding over it bore the mark of the convicts, and other traces of their solid workmanship were to be found in occasional buildings within a radius of twenty miles; but their day had passed as that of the bullock-dray and mail-coach, superseded by the haughty "passenger-mail" and giant two-engined "goods" trains, while for quicker communication with the city than these afforded, the West depended upon the telegraph wires.
He had yet to learn that whoever says, 'All these have I kept, thereby convicts himself of understanding neither them nor himself. Still he was not at rest, although he had, as he fancied, kept them all. His last question is a plaintive, honest acknowledgment of the hungry void within, which no round of outward obediences can ever fill.
These, too, he convicts of injustice, and requires of them that they also should make restitution, but to the State. An exception to this, however, he allows.
With prisons under its own control the Government could deal with the somewhat vexed question of convict labor, so far as its convicts were concerned, according to a plan of its own adoption, and with due regard to the rights and interests of our laboring citizens, instead of sometimes aiding in the operation of a system which causes among them irritation and discontent.
Another series of reports showed a man who, beginning as a reactionary of an extreme type, advocating the most ruthless measures toward convicts, finally felt the pressure of the wave of prison reform which is gathering force just now, and adjusted his reports and addresses so as to make himself appear as a leading apostle of the new ideas.
It was, I think, this practice of 'administering admonition' to convicts after he had had them sentenced to a severe flogging that first gave my mother such an utter abhorrence of the man, together with his habit of confining his sermons to the prisoners to the one subject their own criminal natures and the terrors of hell-fire everlasting.
Jacques Collin's last escape, one of his finest inventions for he had got out disguised as a gendarme leading Theodore Calvi as he was, a convict called before the commissary of police had been effected in the seaport of Rochefort, where the convicts die by dozens, and where, it was hoped, these two dangerous rascals would have ended their days.
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