Both These Classes
We Keep Idle Or At Unproductive Labour, And Each Criminal Costs
Us Annually In Our Prisons More Than The Wages Of An Honest
Agricultural Labourer.
We allow over a hundred thousand persons
known to have no means of subsistence but by crime, to remain at
large and prey upon the community, and many thousand children to
grow up before our eyes in ignorance and vice, to supply trained
criminals for the next generation.
This, in a country which
boasts of its rapid increase in wealth, of its enormous commerce
and gigantic manufactures, of its mechanical skill and scientific
knowledge, of its high civilization and its pure Christianity, - I
can but term a state of social barbarism. We also boast of our
love of justice, and that the law protects rich and. poor alike,
yet we retain money fines as a punishment, and male the very
first steps to obtain justice a. matter of expense-in both cases
a barbarous injustice, or denial of justice to the poor. Again,
our laws render it possible, that, by mere neglect of a legal
form, and contrary to his own wish and intention, a man's
property may all go to a stranger, and his own children be left
destitute. Such cases have happened through the operation of the
laws of inheritance of landed property; and that such unnatural
injustice is possible among us, shows that we are in a state of
social barbarism. Ono more example to justify my use of the term,
and I have done. We permit absolute possession of the soil of our
country, with no legal rights of existence on the soil, to the
vast majority who do not possess it. A great landholder may
legally convert his whole property into a forest or a hunting-
ground, and expel every human being who has hitherto lived upon
it. In a thickly-populated country like England, where every acre
has its owner and its occupier, this is a power of legally
destroying his fellow-creatures; and that such a power should
exist, and be exercised by individuals, in however small a
degree, indicates that, as regards true social science, we are
still in a state of barbarism.
End of The Malay Archipelago by Alfred R. Wallace
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