The Malay Archipelago, Volume 2

This is the lesson I have been taught by my observations of uncivilized man. I now bid my readers—Farewell!

THOSE who believe that our social condition approaches perfection, will think the above word harsh and exaggerated, but it seems to me the only word that can be truly applied to us. We are the richest country in the world, and yet cue-twentieth of our population are parish paupers, and one-thirtieth known criminals. Add to these, the criminals who escape detection; and the poor who live mainly on private charity, (which, according to Dr. Hawkesley, expends seven millions sterling annually is London alone,) and we may be sure that more than ONE-TENTH of our population are actually Paupers and Criminals. 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 make 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. One 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.