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learn what can be done to save our country from evils already severely 

 felt, and in prospect overshadowing our future with a dark cloud* 

 With these preliminary observations, we shall lay before our readers 

 such a slight abstract of Miss Carpenter's work, with illustrative 

 extracts, as the space at our disposal will permit, earnestly recom- 

 mending them to study it in its details, and that not from mere 

 curiosity, but with a view of practically understanding a subject in 

 relation to which they may hope to serve their country and their 

 fellow-creatures. "We must begin with a few paragraphs from the 

 commencement of the book : 



"'Our Convicts I' They are a part of our society ! They belong to ourselves ! 

 They are not only subjects with us of the same great British empire on which the 

 sun never sets, but they belong to the san'is British Isles, the same small centre of 

 civilization, the same heart of the world's life, the same Island, small in geographi. 

 cal extent, infinitely great in its influence on the nations, — whence must go forth 

 laws, principle?, examples, which will guide for better or for worse the whole 

 world 1 



"Fain would we say that these convicts are not ours; that they have cut them- 

 selves off from us; that they have excommunicated themselves from civilized 

 society by their own acts; that they no longer belong to us. The very name of 

 "Convicts" excites in the mind an idea of moral corruption which would make 

 one shrink from such beings with a natural repulsion, which would lead one to 

 wish only that like the lepers of old they should dwell apart in caves and il<'sert 

 places, warning off the incautious passenger with the cry " unclean, unclean.'' 

 We might desire to rid ourselves of them by sending them off to some remote 

 region, where Nature herself should guard thera with her impregr^able walls of 

 ice, scantily yielding them bare subsistence from a barren, grudging soil ; — or to 

 some spot where they should be cut off from the civilized world by the mighty 

 ocean, — and where their fiend-like passions should be vented upon each other, not 

 on peaceable and harmless members of society. Many would fain thus separate 

 themselves from Convicts ; would gladly thus rid themselves of the awful i-espon- 

 sibility which lies in the words — " Our Convicts J' 



'* But they cannot! These Convicts are men, are women, who were born 

 among us, reared to manhood and to womanhood among us. We have mingled 

 with them in the ordinary walks of life, we may even have eaten at the same 

 board with them, and until the law put its fatal mark upon them, so thiit they 

 were henceforth to be known as Convicts, we did not see anything in their outward 

 appearance, whereby, in their various grades of society, we should hiive distin- 

 guished them from other men and women. But now this very logal enntence 

 which makes us wish to separate them entirely from ourselves, only binds them 

 closer to us. They were free agents while they were pursuing their mipchievous 

 calling, while they were transgressing the laws of God and of man, and we did 

 not separate ourselves from them ; had they been then branded by the indii^nation 

 of society in England, they might have gone to other parts of the en)pire, and 



