While such principles are deemed the basis of moral law, it is impossible to calculate on any other than the most destructive results, as no other can be reasonably expected from a demoralized population, amongst whom honesty and decency are in perpetual violation. Can any reprobation, then, be thought too severe, of that unmanly, ungenerous conduct, which, by fostering vice in the advocacy of self-example, would render a future generation more immoral than the past, and lead to complete anarchy of all the rational powers of the mind? It has been well observed by a late anonymous writer, that “whoever weakens in society the veneration for morality, is a traitor to his country; and whoever diminishes the influence of religion in the world, as a rule of daily conduct, is a traitor to his God.”—The language is as forcible as the truth is incontrovertible.
The assertion, however, on which so much stress is laid,—that the women from Newgate behave worse than those from other prisons,—is deserving of some examination. If we reflect on the state of society in London, and how infinitely more numerous are the opportunities to crime and its consequences than elsewhere; the dissoluteness which always exists in a crowded metropolis; and the daring depravity that there marks the gradations of offence; if we carefully survey the life of “a regular London female thief who has passed through every stage of guilt, who has spent her youth in prostitution, and her maturer age in theft and knavery; whose every friend and connexion are accomplices;” one of those who are “the refuse of the capital; that is, the very worst description of criminals, committed for the very worst excesses of crime; women who had been frequent inmates of a prison, and with whom thieving was ‘their daily bread:’” if these circumstances, I say, are duly considered, they must be admitted, by every unprejudiced individual, to form grounds of difficulty in the endeavours to reclaim offenders from their wickedness in such a society, beyond, greatly beyond the less hardened habits of provincial iniquity; and should it even appear that the former behave much worse than the latter on board a ship, it can afford very little cause for ill-judging malignity to triumph. Could aught else, even then, be shown, but that the time those unfortunate women were under the guidance of the Ladies’ Committee was too short for the completion of their benevolent purpose? Is it reasonable to expect that long-rooted habits of idleness and vice, impressed on the mind from the first dawning of perception, can be broken through, and the salutary work of reformation perfected in the few weeks or months they may have been favoured with those pious attentions? But should it be proved that the conduct of the women from Newgate is at least as good, if not better than what is exhibited by those from the country prisons, to what cause shall be ascribed an alteration so rapid, and so little to be expected;—an alteration amounting to almost an entire change of natural disposition? It is impossible for scepticism, or prejudice itself, to assign any other cause than the influence of moral precept so kindly and unceasingly inculcated by the Committee.
