Yet this monstrosity exists. [Footnote: Translator's Note.--How singular that, as this new edition of the _sensational romancist's_ work is issued, the Imperial Parliament should have a bill to redress this very oversight before it.]
And a liberated criminal can, in this circumstance as in others, deny, with right and reason, the impartiality of the institutions in the name of which he is condemned. Is it necessary to say what there is in this dangerous to society, to justify such attacks?
What will be the influence, the moral authority, of those laws whose application is absolutely subordinate to a question of money? Ought not civil justice, like criminal justice, to be accessible to all?
When people are too poor to be able to invoke the benefits of a law eminently preservative and tutelary, ought not society to assure the application, through respect for the honor and repose of families?
But let us leave this woman, who will remain all her life the victim of a brutal and perverted husband, because she is too poor to obtain a matrimonial separation by law. Let us speak of Jeanne Duport's brother. This man left a den of corruption to enter the world again; he has paid the penalty of his crime by expiation. What precautions has society taken to prevent his falling back into crime? None.
Has any one, with charitable foresight, rendered possible his return to well-doing, in order to be able to punish, as one should punish, in a becoming manner, if he shows himself incorrigible? No.
The contagious influence of your jails is so well known, and so justly dreaded, that he who comes out from them is everywhere an object of scorn, aversion, and alarm. Were he twenty times an honest man, he would scarcely find occupation anywhere. And what is more: the penalty of a ticket-of-leave banishes him to small localities, where his past life must be well known; and here he will have no means of exercising the exceptionable employment often imposed on the prisoners by the contractors of the maisons centrales. If the liberated convict has the courage to resist temptation, he abandons himself to some of those murderous occupations of which we have spoken, to the preparation of certain chemical productions, by which one in ten perishes; or, if he has the strength, he goes to get out stone in the forest of Fontainebleau, an employment which he survives, average time, six years! The condition of a liberated convict is, then, much worse, more painful, more difficult, than it was before his first criminal action: he lives surrounded by shackles and dangers; he is obliged to brave repulses and disdain--often the deepest misery. And if he succumbs to all these frightful temptations to criminality, and commits a second crime, you show yourself ten times more severe toward him than for his first fault. That is unjust; for it is almost always the necessity you impose on him which conducts him to a second crime. Yes; for it is shown that, instead of correcting him, your penitentiary system depraves. Instead of ameliorating, it makes worse; instead of curing slight moral affections, it renders them incurable. Your aggravation of punishment, applied without pity to the backslider, is, then, iniquitous, barbarous, since this backsliding is, thus to express it, a forced consequence of your penal institutions. The terrible punishment which awaits this _double guilt_ would be just and excusable if your prisons improved the morals, purified the prisoners, and if, at the expiration of the sentence, good conduct was, if not easy, at least generally possible. If any one is surprised at these contradictions of the law, what would he be when he compares certain penalties to certain crimes--either on account of their inevitable consequences, or on account of the disproportion which exists in their punishment? The conversation of the prisoner whom the bailiff came to see will offer to us one of these afflicting contrasts.