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By day the place was quiet, but with evening it became tumultuous. Père la Chaise, happily, did not lose his head; he found means to satisfy all, to smooth down quarrels without calling in the police, to get rid of drunkards, and to make delinquents pay up. My father knew the place, and never failed to pay it a visit when he went to New Orleans.
"Well, I expect when a fellow gets hauled up for murder it's asking a good deal of his friends to stand by him! Do you know, Marsh, I'm getting an increased respect for the law; it puts the delinquents to such a hell of a lot of trouble. It's a good thing to let alone! I'm thinking mighty seriously of cutting out the games up at my rooms; what would you think of my turning respectable, Marsh?
The same great assembly elected the village magistrates and decided upon all important matters both of peace and war. At the full of the moon it was usually convoked. The nobles and the popular delegates arrived at irregular intervals, for it was an inconvenience arising from their liberty, that two or three days were often lost in waiting for the delinquents.
Let me put it briefly; prison, and prison only, is the one and only place for afflicted youth when it happens to break one or the other of our laws. We have numerous institutions, half penal and half educative, that exist absolutely for the purpose of receiving homeless, wayward or criminally inclined youthful delinquents.
I have seen such delinquents use every sort of effort to put a stop to or escape from the punishment they had brought upon themselves. In vain: the lecture would continue with a placid uninterruptibility which it was amusing to witness.
But the lesson would be in great part lost, if there were to be seen in this lapse only the personal element of the delinquents, and not the widespread decline of professional tone. Undoubtedly, of course, it is true that the personal equation, as always, made itself felt, but here as intensifying an evil which had its principal source elsewhere. Hawke carried Nelson's maxim into effect.
The vindictive spirit which the Parliament had shown against the Royalists and the Church disappeared in the terms exacted by the New Model; and the Army contented itself with the banishment of seven leading "delinquents," a general Act of Oblivion for the rest, the withdrawal of all coercive power from the clergy, the control of Parliament over the military and naval forces for ten years, and its nomination of the great officers of State.
I was present at some of these melancholy ceremonies, and desired different delinquents to bring with them some pieces of the wood, or a small branch, or some leaves of this wonderful tree. I have also given them silk cords, desiring them to measure its thickness.
That the burgomasters should look well to the public interest not oppressing the poor nor indulging the rich not tasking their ingenuity to devise new laws, but faithfully enforcing those which were already made rather bending their attention to prevent evil than to punish it; ever recollecting that civil magistrates should consider themselves more as guardians of public morals than ratcatchers, employed to entrap public delinquents.
There were four principal sources of revenue; the customs, the excise, the sale of fee-farm rents, of the lands of the crown, and of those belonging to the bishops, deans, and chapters, and the sequestration and forfeiture of the estates of papists and delinquents.
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