The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 136: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

114 THE COURT OF LONDON more comprehensive consideration of the subject; and it struck him that if some means of reformation and redemption were applied to those unhappy wretches who, under the influence of pinching penury, have committed a first offence, a large proportion might be rescued from total ruin and re- claimed as honest members of society. For he asked him- self how it was possible that the miserable youth or the desperate man, when sent adrift from a felons’ gaol at the expiration of the term of imprisonment, could strike into the path of rectitude, turn at once to honest toil, and eat. the bread of a meritorious industry. No, it was impossible. From the prison-gates do those beings come forth as destitute as when they committed the crime which sent them thither, clothed in rags, friendless, with the brand of Cain upon their brows, and compelled to feel all the anguish, misery, and pinching want inseparable to their outcast state, with the only alternative of thieving again to amendit. For the tyrannical government and the barbarian laws of this oppressed and wretched country have studied only how to punish, persecute, crush, scourge, and trample down, but never to save, reclaim, rescue, and raise up. There are ten thousand enactments by which a poor man may be hanged, transported, or imprisoned, but not one by which he may have the slightest chance of being reformed. So much for the blessings of ignorant aristocratic institutions. 3 From all this it appeared to Arthur Eaton that an estab- lishment should be founded for the reception and tempo- rary employment of those misdemeanants and felons whom the gaol is daily vomiting back again into that society which discards them as outcasts, an establishment where these friendless wretches might have immediate work given them, in return for which they would receive food | and lodging until a sufficient period elapsed to test the sincerity of their penitence and place them in that frame of mind when some humane masters and employers might no longer hesitate to admit them on their land or in their workshops. | Acting upon these philanthropic views, the Honourable Arthur Eaton lost no time in purchasing a considerable piece of ground in the district which is now known as Pen- tonville, but which consisted of open fields at the period. whereof we are writing; and on that tract did he speedily (C(O) a - ec re a (C(O) MG 6)(0)()