1Compare also the rule of the Twelve Tables, by which an animal which had inflicted mischief might be surrendered in lieu of compensation.
1Compare also the rule of the Twelve Tables, by which an animal which had inflicted mischief might be surrendered in lieu of compensation.
DEOGARH,the name of several towns of British India. (1) A town in the Santal Parganas district of Bengal. Pop. (1901) 8838. It is famous for a group of twenty-two temples dedicated to Siva, the resort of numerous pilgrims. It is connected with the East Indian railway by a steam tramway, 5 m. in length. (2) The headquarters of the Bamra feudatory state in Bengal; 58 m. by road from the Bamra Road station on the Bengal-Nagpur railway. Pop. (1901) 5702. The town, which is well laid out, with parks and gardens, and pleasantly situated in a hollow among hills, rapidly increased in population under the enlightened administration of the raja, Sir Sudhal Rao, K.C.I.E. (b. 1860). It has a state-supported high school affiliated to Calcutta University, with a chemical and physical laboratory. (3) The chief town of the Deogarh estate in the state of Udaipur, Rajputana, about 68 m. N.N.E. of the city of Udaipur. It is walled, and contains a fine palace. Pop. (1901) 5384. The holder of the estate is styledrawat, and is one of the first-class nobles of Mewar. (4) Deogarh Fort, the ancient Devagiri or Deogiri (seeDaulatabad).
DÉOLS,a suburb of the French town of Châteauroux, in the department of Indre. Pop. (1906) 2337. Déols lies to the north of Châteauroux, from which it is separated by the Indre. It preserves a fine Romanesque tower and other remains of the church of a famous Benedictine abbey, the most important in Berry, founded in 917 by Ebbes the Noble, lord of Déols. A gateway flanked by towers survives from the old ramparts of the town. The parish church of St Stephen (15th and 16th centuries) has a Romanesque façade and a crypt containing the ancient Christian tomb of St Ludre and his father St Leocade, who according to tradition were lords of the town in the 4th century. There are also interesting old paintings of the 10th century representing the ancient abbey. The pilgrimage to the tomb of St Ludre gave importance to Déols, which under the name ofVicus Dolensiswas in existence in the Roman period. In 468 the Visigoths defeated the Gauls there, the victory carrying with it the supremacy over the district of Berry. In the middle ages the head of the family of Déols enjoyed the title of prince and held sway over nearly all Lower Berry, of which the town itself was the capital. In the 10th century Raoul of Déols gave his castle to the monks of the abbey and transferred his residence to Châteauroux. For centuries this change did not affect the prosperity of the place, which was maintained by the prestige of its abbey. But the burning of the abbey church by the Protestants during the religious wars and in 1622 the suppression of the abbey by the agency of Henry II., prince of Condé and of Déols, owing to the corruption of the monks, led to its decadence.
DEPARTMENT(Fr.département, fromdépartir, to separate into parts), a division. The word is used of the branches of the administration in a state or municipality; in Great Britain it is applied to the subordinate divisions only of the great offices and boards of state, such as the bankruptcy department of the Board of Trade, but in the United States these subordinate divisions are known as “bureaus,” while “department” is used of the eight chief branches of the executive.
A particular use of the word is that for a territorial division of France, corresponding loosely to an English county. Previous to the French Revolution, the local unit in France was the province, but this division was too closely bound up with the administrative mismanagement of the old régime. Accordingly, at the suggestion of Mirabeau, France was redivided on entirely new lines, the thirty-four provinces being broken up into eighty-three departments (seeFrench Revolution). The idea was to render them as nearly as possible equal to a certain average of size and population, though this was not always adhered to. They derived their names principally from rivers, mountains or other prominent geographical features. Under Napoleon the number was increased to one hundred and thirty, but in 1815 it was reduced to eighty-six. In 1860 three new departments were created out of the newly annexed territory of Savoy and Nice. In 1871 three departments (Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin and Moselle) were lost after the German war. Of the remains of the Haut-Rhin was formed the territory of Belfort, and the fragments of the Moselle were incorporated in the department of Meurthe, which was renamed Meurthe-et-Moselle, making the number at present eighty-seven. For a complete list of the departments seeFrance. Each department is presided over by an officer called a prefect, appointed by the government, and assisted by aprefectorial council (conseil de préfecture). The departments are subdivided into arrondissements, each in charge of a sub-prefect. Arrondissements are again subdivided into cantons, and these into communes, somewhat equivalent to the English parish (seeFrance:Local Government).
DE PERE,a city of Brown county, Wisconsin, U.S.A., on both sides of the Fox river, 6 m. above its mouth, and 109 m. N. of Milwaukee. Pop. (1890) 3625; (1900) 4038, of whom 1025 were foreign-born; (1905, state census) 4523. It is served by the Chicago & North-Western and Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul railways, by interurban electric lines and by lake and river steamboat lines, it being the head of lake navigation on the Fox river. Two bridges here span the Fox, which is from1⁄3m. to ½ m. in width. It is a shipping and transfer point and has paper mills, machine shops, flour mills, sash, door and blind factories, a launch and pleasure-boat factory, and knitting works, cheese factories and dairies, brick yards and grain elevators. There is an excellent water-power. De Pere is the seat of St Norbert’s college (Roman Catholic, 1902) and has a public library. North of the city is located the state reformatory. On the coming of the first European, Jean Nicolet, who visited the place in 1634-1635, De Pere was the site of a polyglot Indian settlement of several thousand attracted by the fishing at the first rapids of the Fox river. Here in 1670 Father Claude Allouez established the mission of St Francis Xavier, the second in what is now Wisconsin. From the nameRapides des Peres, which the French applied to the place, was derived the name De Pere. Here Nicolas Perrot, the first French commandant in the North-West, established his headquarters, and Father Jacques Marquette wrote the journal of his journey to the Mississippi. A few miles south of the city lived for many years Eleazer Williams (c. 1787-1857), the alleged “lost dauphin” Louis XVII. of France and an authority on Indians, especially Iroquois. De Pere was incorporated as a village in 1857, and was chartered as a city in 1883.
DEPEW, CHAUNCEY MITCHELL(1834-), American lawyer and politician, was born in Peekskill, New York, on the 23rd of April 1834, of a Huguenot family (originally Du Puis or De Puy). He graduated at Yale in 1856, entered politics as a Whig—his father had been a Democrat—was admitted to the bar in 1858, was a member of the New York Assembly in 1861-1862, and was secretary of state of New York state in 1864-1865. He refused a nomination to be United States minister to Japan, and through his friendship with Cornelius and William H. Vanderbilt in 1866 became attorney for the New York & Harlem railway, in 1869 was appointed attorney of the newly consolidated New York Central & Hudson river railway, of which he soon became a director, and in 1875 was made general counsel for the entire Vanderbilt system of railways. He became second vice-president of the New York Central & Hudson river in 1869 and was its president in 1885-1898, and in 1898 was made chairman of the board of directors of the Vanderbilt system. In 1872 he joined the Liberal-Republican movement, and was nominated and defeated for the office of lieutenant-governor of New York. In 1888 in the National Republican convention he was a candidate for the presidential nomination, but withdrew his name in favour of Benjamin Harrison, whose offer to him in 1889 of the portfolio of state he refused. In 1899 he was elected United States senator from New York state, and in 1904 was re-elected for the term ending in 1911. His great personal popularity, augmented by his ability as an orator, suffered considerably after 1905, the inquiry into life insurance company methods by a committee of the state legislature resulting in acute criticism of his actions as a director of the Equitable Life Assurance Society and as counsel to Henry B. Hyde and his son. Among his best-known orations are that delivered at the unveiling of the Bartholdi statue of Liberty enlightening the World (1886), an address at the Washington Centennial in New York (1889), and the Columbian oration at the dedication ceremonies of the Chicago World’s Fair (1892).
DEPILATORY(from Lat.depilare, to pull out thepilusor hair), any substance, preparation or process which will remove superfluous hair. For this purpose caustic alkalis, alkaline earths and also orpiment (trisulphide of arsenic) are used, the last being somewhat dangerous. No application is permanent in its effect, as the hair always grows again. The only permanent method, which is, however, painful, slow in operation and likely to leave small scars, is by the use of an electric current for the destruction of the follicles by electrolysis.
DEPORTATION,orTransportation, a system of punishment for crime, of which the essential factor is the removal of the criminal to a penal settlement outside his own country. It is to be distinguished from mereexpulsion(q.v.) from a country, though the term “deportation” is now used in that sense in English law under the Aliens Act 1905 (seeAlien). Strictly, the deportation or transportation system has ceased to exist in England, though the removal or exclusion of undesirable persons from British territory, under various Orders in Council, is possible in places subject to the Foreign Jurisdiction Acts, and in the case of criminals under the Extradition Acts.
Earlier British Transportation System.—At a time when the British statute-book bristled with capital felonies, when the pick-pocket or sheep-stealer was hanged out of hand, when Sir Samuel Romilly, to whose strenuous exertions the amelioration of the penal code is in a great measure due, declared that the laws of England were written in blood, another and less sanguinary penalty came into great favour. The deportation of criminals beyond the seas grew naturally out of the laws which prescribed banishment for certain offences. The Vagrancy Act of Elizabeth’s reign contained in it the germ of transportation, by empowering justices in quarter sessions to banish offenders and order them to be conveyed into such parts beyond the seas as should be assigned by the privy council. Full effect was given to this statute in the next reign, as is proved by a letter of James I.American plantations.dated 1619, in which the king directs “a hundred dissolute persons” to be sent to Virginia. Another act of similar tenor was passed in the reign of Charles II., in which the term “transportation” appears to have been first used. A further and more systematic development of the system of transportation took place in 1617, when an act was passed by which offenders who had escaped the death penalty were handed over to contractors, who engaged to transport them to the American colonies. These contractors were vested with a property in the labour of the convicts for a certain term, generally from seven to fourteen years, and this right they frequently sold. Labour in those early days was scarce in the new settlements; and before the general adoption of negro slavery there was a keen competition for felon hands. An organized system of kidnapping prevailed along the British coasts; young lads were seized and sold into what was practically white slavery in the American plantations. These malpractices were checked, but the legitimate traffic in convict labour continued, until it was ended peremptorily by the revolt of the American colonies and the achievement of their independence in 1776.1
The British legislature, making a virtue of necessity, discovered that transportation to the colonies was bound to be attended by various inconveniences, particularly by depriving the kingdom of many subjects whose labour might be useful to the community; and an act was accordingly passed which provides that convicts sentenced to transportation might be employed at hard labour at home. At the same time the consideration of some scheme for their disposal was entrusted to three eminent public men—Sir William Blackstone, Mr Eden (afterwards Lord Auckland) and John Howard. The result of their labours was an act for the establishment of penitentiary houses, dated 1778. This act is of peculiar importance. It contains the first public enunciation of a general principle of prison treatment, and shows that even at that early date the system since nearly universally adopted was fully understood. The object in view was thus stated. It was hoped “by sobriety, cleanliness and medical assistance, by a regular series of labour, by solitary confinement during the intervals of work and by due religious instruction to preserve and amendthe health of the unhappy offenders, to inure them to habits of industry, to guard them from pernicious company, to accustom them to serious reflection and to teach them both the principles and practice of every Christian and moral duty.” The experience of succeeding years has added little to these the true principles of penal discipline; they form the basis of every species of prison system carried out since the passing of an act of 1779.
No immediate action was taken by the committee appointed. Its members were not in accord as to the choice of site. One was for Islington, another for Limehouse; Howard only stipulated for some healthy place well supplied with water and conveniently situated for supervision. He was strongly of opinion that the penitentiary should be built by convict labour. Howard withdrew from the commission, and new members were appointed, who were on the eve of beginning the first penitentiary when the discoveries of Captain Cook in the South Seas turned the attention of the government towards these new lands. The vast territoriesAustralian penal settlements.of Australasia promised an unlimited field for convict colonization, and for the moment the scheme for penitentiary houses fell to the ground. Public opinion generally preferred the idea of establishing penal settlements at a distance from home. “There was general confidence,” says Merivale in his work on colonization, “in the favourite theory that the best mode of punishing offenders was that which removed them from the scene of offence and temptation, cut them off by a great gulf of space from all their former connexions, and gave them the opportunity of redeeming past crimes by becoming useful members of society.” These views so far prevailed that an expedition consisting of nine transports and two men-of-war, the “first fleet” of Australian annals, sailed in March 1787 for New South Wales. This first fleet reached Botany Bay in January 1788, but passed on and landed at Port Jackson, where it entered and occupied Sydney harbour. From that time forward convicts were sent in constantly increasing numbers from England to the Antipodes. Yet the early settlement at Sydney had not greatly prospered. The infant colony had had a bitter struggle for existence. It had been hoped that the community would raise its own produce and speedily become self-supporting. But the soil was unfruitful; the convicts knew nothing of farming. All lived upon rations sent out from home; and when convoys with relief lingered by the way famine stared all in the face. The colony was long a penal settlement and nothing more, peopled only by two classes, convicts and their masters; criminal bondsmen on the one hand who had forfeited their independence and were bound to labour without wages for the state, on the other officials to guard and exact the due performance of tasks. A few free families were encouraged to emigrate, but they were lost in the mass they were intended to leaven, swamped and outnumbered by the convicts, shiploads of whom continued to pour in year after year. When the influx increased, difficulties as to their employment arose. Free settlers were too few to give work to more than a small proportion. Moreover, a new policy was in the ascendant, initiated by Governor Macquarie, who considered the convicts and their rehabilitation his chief care, and steadily discouraged the immigration of any but those who “came out for their country’s good.” The great bulk of the convict labour thus remained in government hands.
This period marked the first phase in the history of transportation. The penal colony, having triumphed over early dangers and difficulties, was crowded with convicts in a state of semi-freedom, maintained at the public expense and utilized in the development of the latent resources of the country. The methods employed by Governor Macquarie were not, perhaps, invariably the best; the time was hardly ripe as yet for the erection of palatial buildings in Sydney, while the congregation of the workmen in large bodies tended greatly to their demoralization. But some of the works undertaken and carried out were of incalculable service to the young colony; and its early advance in wealth and prosperity was greatly due to the magnificent roads, bridges and other facilities of inter-communication for which it was indebted to Governor Macquarie. As time passed the criminal sewage flowing from the Old World to the New greatly increased in volume under milder and more humane laws. Many now escaped the gallows, and much of the overcrowding of the gaols at home was caused by the gangs of convicts awaiting transhipment to the Antipodes. They were packed off, however, with all convenient despatch, and the numbers on government hands in the colonies multiplied exceedingly, causing increasing embarrassment as to their disposal. Moreover, the expense of the Australian convict establishments was enormous.
Some change in system was inevitable, and the plan of “assignment” was introduced; in other words, that of freely lending the convicts to any who would relieve the authorities of the burdensomeAssignment system.charge. By this time free settlers were arriving in greater number, invited by a different and more liberal policy than that of Governor Macquarie. Inducements were especially offered to persons possessed of capital to assist in the development of the country. Assignment developed rapidly; soon eager competition arose for the convict hands that had been at first so reluctantly taken. Great facilities existed for utilizing them on the wide areas of grazing land and on the new stations in the interior. A pastoral life, without temptations and contaminating influences, was well suited for convicts. As the colony grew richer and more populous, other than agricultural employers became assignees, and numerous enterprises were set on foot. The trades and callings which minister to the needs of all civilized communities were more and more largely pursued. There was plenty of work for skilled convicts in the towns, and the services of the more intelligent were highly prized. It was a great boon to secure gratis the assistance of men specially trained as clerks, book-keepers or handicraftsmen. Hence all manner of intrigues and manœuvres were afoot on the arrival of drafts and there was a scramble for the best hands. Here at once was a palpable flaw in the system of assignment. The lot of the convict was altogether unequal. Some, the dull, unlettered and unskilled, were drafted up country to heavy manual labour at which they remained, while clever expert rogues found pleasant, congenial and often profitable employment in the towns. The contrast was very marked from the first, but it became the more apparent when in due course it was seen that some were still engaged in irksome toil, while others who had come out by the same ship had already attained to affluence and ease. For the latter transportation was no punishment, but often the reverse. It meant too often transfer to a new world under conditions more favourable to success, removed from the keener competition of the old. By adroit management, too, convicts often obtained the command of funds, the product of nefarious transactions at home, which wives or near relatives or unconvicted accomplices presently brought out to them. It was easy for the free new-comers to secure the assignment of their convict friends; and the latter, although still nominally servants and in the background, at once assumed the real control. Another system productive of much evil was the employment of convict clerks in positions of trust in various government offices; convicts did much of the legal work of the colony; a convict was clerk to the attorney general; others were schoolmasters and were entrusted with the education of youth.
Under a system so anomalous and uncertain the main object of transportation as a method of penal discipline and repression was in danger of being quite overlooked. Yet the stateEvils of convict system.could not entirely abdicate its functions, although it surrendered to a great extent the care of criminals to private persons. It had established a code of penalties for the coercion of the ill-conducted, while it kept the worst perforce in its own hands. The master was always at liberty to appeal to the strong arm of the law. A message carried to a neighbouring magistrate, often by the culprit himself, brought down the prompt retribution of the lash. Convicts might be flogged for petty offences, for idleness, drunkenness, turbulence, absconding and so forth. At the out-stations some show of decorum and regularity was observed, although the work done was generally scanty and the convicts were secretly given to all manner of evil courses. The town convicts were worse, because they were far less controlled. They were nominally under thesurveillance and supervision of the police, which amounted to nothing at all. They came and went, and amused themselves after working hours, so that Sydney and all the large towns were hotbeds of vice and immorality. The masters as a rule made no attempt to watch over their charges; many of them were absolutely unfitted to do so, being themselves of low character, “emancipists” frequently, old convicts conditionally pardoned or who had finished their terms. No effort was made to prevent the assignment of convicts to improper persons; every applicant got what he wanted, even though his own character would not bear inspection. All whom the masters could not manage—the incorrigible upon whom the lash and bread and water had been tried in vain—were returned to government charge. These, in short, comprised the whole of the refuse of colonial convictdom. Every man who could not agree with his master, or who was to undergo a penalty greater than flogging or less than capital punishment, came back to government and was disposed of in one of three ways, (1) the road parties, (2) the chain gang, or (3) the penal settlements. (1) In the first case, the convicts might be kept in the vicinity of the towns or marched about the country according to the work in hand; the labour was severe, but, owing to inefficient supervision, never intolerable; the diet was ample and there was no great restraint upon independence within certain wide limits. To the slackness of control over the road parties was directly traceable the frequent escape of desperadoes, who, defying recapture, recruited the gangs of bushrangers which were a constant terror to the whole country. In (2) the chain or iron gangs, as they were sometimes styled, discipline was far more rigorous. It was maintained by the constant presence of a military guard, and when most efficiently organized the gang was governed by a military officer who was also a magistrate. The work was really hard, the custody close—in hulk, stockaded barrack or caravan; the first was at Sydney, the second in the interior, the last when the undertaking required constant change of place. All were locked up from sunset to sunrise; all wore heavy leg irons; and all were liable to immediate flagellation. The convict “scourger” was one of the regular officials attached to every chain gang. (3) The third and ultimate receptacle was the penal settlement, to which no offenders were transferred till all other methods of treatment had failed. These were terrible cesspools of iniquity, so bad that it seemed, to use the words of one who knew them well, that “the heart of a man who went to them was taken from him and he was given that of a beast.” The horrors accumulated at Norfolk Island, Moreton Bay, Port Arthur and Tasman’s Peninsula are almost beyond description. The convicts herded together in them were soon utterly degraded and brutalized; no wonder that reckless despair took possession of them, that death on the gallows for murder purposely committed, or the slow terror from starvation following escape into surrounding wilds was often welcomed as a relief.
The stage which transportation was now reaching and the actual condition of affairs in the Australian colonies about this period do not appear to have been much understood in England. Earnest and thoughtful men might busy themselves with prison discipline at home, and the legislature might watch with peculiar interest the results obtained from the special treatment of a limited number of selected offenders in Millbank penitentiary. But for the great mass of criminality deported to a distant shore no very active concern was shown. The country for a long time seemed satisfied with transportation. Portions of the system might be open to criticism. Thus the Commons committee of 1832 freely condemned the hulks at Woolwich and other arsenals in which a large number of convicts were kept while waiting embarkation. It was reported that the indiscriminate association of prisoners in them produced more vice, profaneness and demoralization than in the ordinary prisons. After dark the wildest orgies went on unchecked—dancing, fighting, gambling, singing and so forth; it was easy to get drink and tobacco and to see friends from outside. The labour hours were short and the tasks light; “altogether the situation of the convict in the hulks,” says the report, “cannot be considered penal; it is a state of restriction, but hardly of punishment.”
But no objection was raised to transportation. It was considered by this same committee “a most valuable expedient in the system of secondary punishment.” They only thought it necessary to suggest that exile should be preceded by a period of severe probationary punishment in England, a proposal which was reiterated later on and actually adopted. It was in the country most closely affected that dissatisfaction first began to find voice. Already in 1832 the most reputable sections of Australian society were beginning to murmur grievously. Transportation had fostered the growth of a strong party—that representing convict views—and these were advocated boldly inAustralian objections.unprincipled prints. This party, constantly recruited from the emancipists and ticket-of-leave holders, gradually grew very numerous, and threatened soon to swamp the honest and untainted parts of the community. As years passed the prevalence of crime, and the universally low tone of morality due to the convict element, became more and more in the ascendant. At length in 1835 Judge Burton made a loud protest, and in a charge to the grand jury of Sydney plainly intimated that transportation must cease. While it existed, he said, the colonies could never rise to their proper position; they could not claim free institutions. This bold but forcible language commanded attention. It was speedily echoed in England, and particularly by Archbishop Whately, who argued that transportation failed in all the leading requisites of any system of secondary punishment. Transportation exercised no salutary terror in offenders; it was no longer exile to an unknown inhospitable region, but to one flowing with milk and honey, whither innumerable friends and associates had gone already. The most glowing descriptions came back of the wealth which any clever fellow might easily amass; stories were told and names mentioned of those who had made ample fortunes in Australia in a few years. As a matter of fact the convicts, or at least large numbers of them, had prospered exceedingly. Some had incomes of twenty, thirty, even forty thousand pounds a year. The deteriorating effects of the system were plainly manifest on the surface from the condition of the colony,—the profligacy of the towns, the scant reprobation of crimes and those who had committed them. Down below, in the openly sanctioned slavery called assignment, in the demoralizing chain gangs and in the inexpressibly horrible penal settlements, were more abundant and more awful proofs of the general wickedness and corruption. Moreover these appalling results were accompanied by colossal expenditure. The cost of the colonial convict establishments, with the passages out, amounted annually to upwards of £300,000; another £100,000 was expended on the military garrisons; and various items brought the whole outlay to about half a million per annum. It may be argued that this was not a heavy price to pay for peopling a continent and laying the foundations of a vast Australasian empire. But that empire could never have expanded to its present dimensions if it had depended on convict immigration alone. There was a point, too, at which all development, all progress, would have come to a full stop had it not been relieved of its stigma as a penal colony.
That point was reached between 1835 and 1840, when a powerful party came into existence in New South Wales, pledged to bring about the abandonment of transportation. A strongly hostile feeling was also gaining ground in England. In 1837Reform movement.a new committee of the House of Commons had made a patient and searching investigation into the merits and demerits of the system and freely condemned it. The government had no choice but to give way; it could not ignore the protests of the colonists, backed up by such an authoritative expression of opinion. In 1840 orders were issued to suspend the deportation of criminals to New South Wales. But what was to become of the convicts? It was impossible to keep them at home. The hulks which might have served had also failed; the faultiness of their internal management had been fully proved. The committee had recommended the erection of more penitentiaries. But the costly experiment of Millbank had been barren of results. The model prison at Pentonville, in process of construction under the pressure of amovement towards prison reform, could offer but limited accommodation. A proposal was put forward to construct convict barracks in the vicinity of the great arsenals; but this, which contained really the germ of the present British penal system, was premature. The government in this dilemma steered a middle course and resolved to adhere to transportation, but under a greatly modified and it was hoped much improved form. The colony of Van Diemen’s Land, younger and less self-reliant than its neighbour, had also endured convict immigration but had made no protest. It was resolved to direct the whole stream of deportation upon Van Diemen’s Land, which was thus constituted one vast colonial prison. The main principle of the new system was one of probation; hence its name. All convicts were to pass through various stages and degrees of punishment according to their conduct and character. Some general depot was needed where the necessary observation could be made, and it was found at Millbank penitentiary. Thence boys were sent to the prison for juveniles at Parkhurst; the most promising subjects among the adults were selected to undergo the experimental discipline of solitude and separation at Pentonville; less hopeful cases went to the hulks; and all adults alike passed on to the Antipodes. Fresh stages awaited the convict on his arrival at Van Diemen’s Land. The first was limited to “lifers” and colonial convicts sentenced a second time. It consisted in detention at one of the penal stations, either Norfolk Island or Tasman’s Peninsula, where the disgraceful conditions already described continued unchanged to the very last. The second stage received the largest number, who were subjected in it to gang labour, working under restraint in various parts of the colony. These probation stations, as they were called, were intended to inculcate habits of industry and subordination; they were provided with supervisors and religious instructors; and had they not been tainted by the vicious virus brought to them by others arriving from the penal stations, they might have answered their purpose for a time. But they became as bad as the worst of the penal settlements and contributed greatly to the breakdown of the whole system. The third stage and the first step towards freedom was the concession of a pass which permitted the convict to be at large under certain conditions to seek work for himself; the fourth was a ticket-of-leave, the possession of which allowed him to come and go much as he pleased; the fifth and last was absolute pardon, with the prospects of rehabilitation.
This scheme seemed admirable on paper; yet it failed completely when put into practice. Colonial resources were quite unable to bear the pressure. Within two or three yearsGradual abandonment.Van Diemen’s Land was inundated with convicts. Sixteen thousand were sent out in four years; the average annual number in the colony was about 30,000, and this when there were only 37,000 free settlers. Half the whole number of convicts remained in government hands and were kept in the probation gangs, engaged upon public works of great utility; but the other half, pass-holders and ticket-of-leave men in a state of semi-freedom, could get little or no employment. The supply greatly exceeded the demand; there were no hirers of labour. Had the colony been as large and as prosperous as its neighbour it could scarcely have absorbed the glut of workmen; but it was really on the verge of bankruptcy—its finances were embarrassed, its trades and industries at a standstill. But not only were the convicts idle; they were utterly depraved. It was soon found that the system which kept large bodies always together had a most pernicious effect upon their moral condition. “The congregation of criminals in large batches without adequate supervision meant simply wholesale, widespread pollution,” as was said at the time. These ever-present and constantly increasing evils forced the government to reconsider its position; and in 1846 transportation to Van Diemen’s Land was temporarily suspended for a couple of years, during which it was hoped some relief might be afforded. The formation of a new convict colony in North Australia had been contemplated; but the project, warmly espoused by Mr Gladstone, then under-secretary of state for the colonies, was presently abandoned; and it now became clear that no resumption of transportation was possible. The measures taken to substitute other methods of secondary punishment are set forth in the articlePrison(q.v.).
France.—France adopted deportation for criminals as far back as 1763, when a penal colony was founded in French Guiana and failed disastrously. An expedition was sent there, composedFrench practice.of the most evil elements of the Paris population and numbering 14,000, all of whom died. The attempt was repeated in 1766 and with the same miserable result. Other failures are recorded, the worst being the scheme of the philanthropist Baron Milius, who in 1823 planned to form a community on the banks of the Mana (French Guiana) by the marriage of exiled convicts and degraded women, which resulted in the most ghastly horrors. The principle of deportation was then formally condemned by publicists and government until suddenly in 1854 it was reintroduced into the French penal code with many high-sounding phrases. Splendid results were to be achieved in the creation of rich colonies afar, and the regeneration of the criminal by new openings in a new land. The only outlet available at the moment beyond the sea was French Guiana, and it was again to be utilized despite its pestilential climate. Thousands were exiled, more than half to find certain death; none of the penal settlements prospered. No return was made by agricultural development, farms and plantations proved a dead loss under the unfavourable conditions of labour enforced in a malarious climate and unkindly soil, and it was acknowledged by French officials that the attempt to establish a penal colony on the equator was utterly futile. Deportation to Guiana was not abandoned, but instead of native-born French exiles, convicts of subject races, Arabs, Anamites and Asiatic blacks, were sent exclusively, with no better success as regards colonization.
In 1864, however, it was possible to divert the stream elsewhere. New Caledonia in the Australian Pacific was annexed to France in 1853. Ten years later it became a new settlement for convict emigrants. A first shipload was disembarked in 1864 at Noumea, and the foundations of the city laid. Prison buildings were the first erected and were planted upon the island of Nou, a small breakwater to the Bay of Noumea. Outwardly all went well under the fostering care of the authorities. The population steadily increased; an average total of 600 in 1867 rose in the following year to 1554. In 1874 the convict population exceeded 5000; in 1880 it had risen to 8000; the total reached 9608 at the end of December 1883. But from that time forward the numbers transported annually fell, for it was found that this South Pacific island, with its fertile soil and fairly temperate climate, by no means intimidated the dangerous classes; and the French administration therefore resumed deportation of French-born whites to Guiana, which was known as notoriously unhealthy and was likely to act as a more positive deterrent. The authorities divided their exiles between the two outlets, choosing New Caledonia for the convicts who gave some promise of regeneration, and sending criminals with the worst antecedents and presumably incorrigible to the settlements on the equator. This was in effect to hand over a fertile colony entirely to criminals. Free immigration to New Caledonia was checked, and the colony became almost exclusively penal. The natural growth of a prosperous colonial community made no advance, and convict labour did little to stimulate it, the public works, essential for development, and construction of roads were neglected; there was no extensive clearance of lands, no steady development of agriculture. From 1898 simple deportation practically ceased, but the islands were full of convicts already sent, and they still received the product of the latest invention in the criminal code known as “relegation,” a punishment directed against the recidivist or incorrigible criminal whom no penal retribution had hitherto touched and whom the French law felt justified in banishing for ever to the “back of beyond.” A certain period of time spent in a hard labour prison preceded relegation, but the convicts on arrival were generally unfitted to assist in colonization. They were for the most part decadent, morally and physically; their labour was of no substantial value tocolonists or themselves, and there was small hope of profitable result when they gained conditional liberation, with a concession of colonial land and a possibility of rehabilitation by their own efforts abroad, for by their sentence they were forbidden to hope for return to France. The punishment of relegation was not long in favour, the number of sentences to it fell year after year, and it has now been practically abandoned.
Other Countries.—Penal exile has been practised by some other countries as a method of secondary punishment. Russia since 1823 has directed a stream of offenders, mainly political, upon Siberia, and at one time the yearly average sent was 18,000. The Siberian exile system, the horrors of which cannot be exaggerated, belongs only in part to penitentiary science, but it was very distinctly punitive and aimed at regeneration of the individual and the development of the soil by new settlements. Although the journey was made mostly on foot and not by sea transport, the principle of deportation (or more exactly of removal) was the essence of the system. The later practice, however, has been exactly similar to transportation as originated by England and afterwards followed by France. The penal colonization of the island of Sakhalin reproduced the preceding methods, and the Russian convicts were conveyed by ships through the Suez Canal to the Far East. Sakhalin was hopefully intended as an outlet for released convicts and their rehabilitation by their own efforts, precisely in the manner tried in Australia and New Caledonia. The result repeated previous experiences. There was land to reclaim, forests to cut down, marshes to drain, everything but a temperate climate and a good will of the felon labourers to create a prosperous colony. But the convicts would not work; a few sought to win the right to occupy a concession of soil, but the bulk were pure vagabonds, wandering to and fro in search of food. The agricultural enterprise was a complete failure. The wrong sites for cultivation were chosen, the labourers were unskilled and they handled very indifferent tools. Want amounting to constant starvation was a constant rule; the rations were insufficient and unwholesome, very little meat eked out with salt fish and with entire absence of vegetables. The general tone of morals was inconceivably low, and a universal passion for alcohol and card-playing prevailed. According to one authority the life of the convicts at Sakhalin was a frightful nightmare, “a mixture of debauchery and innocence mixed with real sufferings and almost inconceivable privations, corrupt in every one of its phases.” The prisons hopelessly ruined all who entered them, all classes were indiscriminately herded together. It is now generally allowed that deportation, as practised, had utterly failed, the chief reasons being the unmanageable numbers sent and the absence of outlets for their employment, even at great cost.
The prisons on Sakhalin have been described as hotbeds of vice; the only classification of prisoners is one based on the length of sentence. Some imperfect attempt is made to separate those waiting trial from the recidivist or hardened offender, but too often the association is indiscriminate. Prison discipline is generally slack and ineffective, the staff of warders, from ill-judged economy, too weak to supervise or control. The officers themselves are of inferior stamp, drunken, untrustworthy, overbearing, much given to “trafficking” with the prisoners, accepting bribes to assist escape, quick to misuse and oppress their charges. Crime of the worst description is common.
Italy has practised deportation in planting various agricultural colonies upon the islands to be found on her coast. They were meant to imitate the intermediate prisons of the Irish system, where prisoners might work out their redemption, when provisionally released. Two were established on the islands of Pianoso and Gorgona, and there were settlements made on Monte Christo and Capraia. They were used also to give effect to the system of enforced residence ordomicilio coatto.
Portugal also has tried deportation to the African colony of Angola on a small scale with some success, and combined it with free emigration. The settlers have been represented as well disposed towards the convicts, gladly obtaining their services or helping them in the matter of security. The convict element is orderly, and, although their treatment is “peu repressive et relativement debonnaire,” few commit offences.
The Andaman Islands have been utilized by the Indian government since the mutiny (1857) for the deportation of heinous criminals (seeAndaman Islands).
Authorities.—Captain A. Phillip, R.N.,The Voyage of Governor Phillip to New South Wales(1790); David Collins,Account of the English Colony of New South Wales(1798); Archbishop Whately,Remarks on Transportation(1834); Herman Merivale,Colonization and Colonies(1841); d’Haussonville,Établissements pénitentiaires en France et aux colonies(1875); George Griffith,In a Prison Land; Cuche,Science et legislation pénitentiaire(1905); Hawes,The Uttermost East(1906).
Authorities.—Captain A. Phillip, R.N.,The Voyage of Governor Phillip to New South Wales(1790); David Collins,Account of the English Colony of New South Wales(1798); Archbishop Whately,Remarks on Transportation(1834); Herman Merivale,Colonization and Colonies(1841); d’Haussonville,Établissements pénitentiaires en France et aux colonies(1875); George Griffith,In a Prison Land; Cuche,Science et legislation pénitentiaire(1905); Hawes,The Uttermost East(1906).
(A. G.)
1See J. C. Ballagh,White Servitude in Virginia(Baltimore, 1895.)
1See J. C. Ballagh,White Servitude in Virginia(Baltimore, 1895.)
DEPOSIT(Lat.depositum, fromdeponere, to lay down, to put in the care of), anything laid down or separated; as in geology, any mass of material accumulated by a natural agency (seeBed), and in chemistry, a precipitate or matter settling from a solution or suspension. In banking, a deposit may mean, generally, a sum of money lodged in a bank without regard to the conditions under which it is held, but more specially money lodged with a bank on “deposit account” and acknowledged by the banker by a “deposit receipt” given to the depositor. It is then not drawn upon by cheque, usually bears interest at a rate varying from time to time, and can only be withdrawn after fixed notice. Deposit is also used in the sense of earnest or security for the performance of a contract. In the law of mortgage the deposit of title-deeds is usual as a security for the repayment of money advanced. Such a deposit operates as an equitable mortgage. In the law of contract, deposit or simple bailment is delivery or bailment of goods in trust to be kept without recompense, and redelivered on demand (seeBailment).
DEPOT(from the Fr.dépôt, Lat.depositum, laid down; the French accent marks are usually dispensed with in English), a place where things may be stored or deposited, such as a furniture or forage depot, the accumulation of military stores, especially in the theatre of operations. In America the word is used of a railway station, whether for passengers or goods; in Great Britain on railways the word, when in use, is applied to goods stations. A particular military application is to a depot, situated as a rule in the centre of the recruiting district of the regiment or other unit, where recruits are received and undergo the necessary preliminary training before joining the active troops. Such depots are maintained in peace time by all armies which have to supply distant or oversea garrisons; in an army raised by compulsory service and quartered in its own country, the regiments are usually stationed in their own districts, and on their taking the field for war leave behind a small nucleus for the formation and training of drafts to be sent out later. These nucleus troops are generally called depot troops.
DEPRETIS, AGOSTINO(1813-1887), Italian statesman, was born at Mezzana Corte, in the province of Stradella on the 31st of January 1813. From early manhood a disciple of Mazzini and affiliated to theGiovane Italia, he took an active part in the Mazzinian conspiracies and was nearly captured by the Austrians while smuggling arms into Milan. Elected deputy in 1848, he joined the Left and founded the journalIl Diritto, but held no official position until appointed governor of Brescia in 1859. In 1860 he went to Sicily on a mission to reconcile the policy of Cavour (who desired the immediate incorporation of the island in the kingdom of Italy) with that of Garibaldi, who wished to postpone the Sicilianplébisciteuntil after the liberation of Naples and Rome. Though appointed pro-dictator of Sicily by Garibaldi, he failed in his attempt. Accepting the portfolio of public works in the Rattazzi cabinet in 1862, he served as intermediary in arranging with Garibaldi the expedition which ended disastrously at Aspromonte. Four years later, on the outbreak of war against Austria, he entered the Ricasoli cabinet as minister of marine, and, by maintaining Admiral Persano in command of the fleet, contributed to the defeat of Lissa. His apologists contend, however, that, as an inexperienced civilian, he could not have made sudden changes in naval arrangements without disorganizing the fleet, and that in view of the impending hostilities he wasobliged to accept the dispositions of his predecessors. Upon the death of Rattazzi in 1873, Depretis became leader of the Left, prepared the advent of his party to power, and was called upon to form the first cabinet of the Left in 1876. Overthrown by Cairoli in March 1878 on the grist-tax question, he succeeded, in the following December, in defeating Cairoli, became again premier, but on the 3rd of July 1879 was once more overturned by Cairoli. In November 1879 he, however, entered the Cairoli cabinet as minister of the interior, and in May 1881 succeeded to the premiership, retaining that office until his death on the 29th of July 1887. During the long interval he recomposed his cabinet four times, first throwing out Zanardelli and Baccarini in order to please the Right, and subsequently bestowing portfolios upon Ricotti, Robilant and other Conservatives, so as to complete the political process known as “trasformismo.” A few weeks before his death he repented of his transformist policy, and again included Crispi and Zanardelli in his cabinet. During his long term of office he abolished the grist tax, extended the suffrage, completed the railway system, aided Mancini in forming the Triple Alliance, and initiated colonial policy by the occupation of Massawa; but, at the same time, he vastly increased indirect taxation, corrupted and destroyed the fibre of parliamentary parties, and, by extravagance in public works, impaired the stability of Italian finance.
DEPTFORD,a south-eastern metropolitan borough of London, England, bounded N. by Bermondsey, E. by the river Thames and Greenwich, S. by Lewisham and W. by Camberwell. Pop. (1901) 110,398. The name is connected with a ford over the Ravensbourne, a stream entering the Thames through Deptford Creek. The borough comprises only the parish of Deptford St Paul, that of Deptford St Nicholas being included in the borough of Greenwich. Deptford is a district of poor streets, inhabited by a large industrial population, employed in engineering and other riverside works. On the river front, extending into the borough of Greenwich, are the royal victualling yard and the site of the old Deptford dockyard. The first supplies the navy with provisions, medicines, furniture, &c., manufactured or stored in the large warehouses here. The dockyard ceased to be used in 1869, and was filled up and converted into a foreign cattle market by the City Corporation. Of public buildings the most noteworthy are St Paul’s church (1730), of classic design; the municipal buildings; and the hospital for master mariners, maintained by the corporation of the Trinity House, which was founded at Deptford, the old hall being pulled down in 1787. Other institutions are the Goldsmiths’ Polytechnic Institute, New Cross; and the South-eastern fever hospital. A mansion known as Sayes Court, taken down in 1729, was the residence of the duke of Sussex in the reign of Elizabeth; it was occupied in the following century by John Evelyn, author ofSylva, and by Peter the Great during his residence in England in 1698. The site of its gardens is occupied by Deptford Park of 11 acres. Another open space is Telegraph Hill (9½ acres). The parliamentary borough of Deptford returns one member. The borough council consists of a mayor, 6 aldermen, and 36 councillors. Area, 1562.7 acres.
DEPUTY(through the Fr. from a Late Lat. use ofdeputare, to cut off, allot;putarehaving the original sense of to trim, prune), one appointed to act or govern instead of another; one who exercises an office in another man’s right, a substitute; in representative government a member of an elected chamber. In general, the powers and duties of a deputy are those of his principal (see alsoRepresentation), but the extent to which he may exercise them is dependent upon the power delegated to him. He may be authorized to exercise the whole of his principal’s office, in which case he is a general deputy, or to act only in some particular matter or service, when he is termed a special deputy. In the United Kingdom various officials are specifically empowered by statute to appoint deputies to act for them under certain circumstances. Thus a clerk of the peace, in case of illness, incapacity or absence, may appoint a fit person to act as his deputy. While judges of the supreme court cannot act by deputy, county court judges and recorders can, in cases of illness or unavoidable absence, appoint deputies. So can registrars of county courts and returning officers at elections.
DE QUINCEY, THOMAS(1785-1859), English author, was born at Greenheys, Manchester, on the 15th of August 1785. He was the fifth child in a family of eight (four sons and four daughters). His father, descended from a Norman family, was a merchant, who left his wife and six children a clear income of £1600 a year. Thomas was from infancy a shy, sensitive child, with a constitutional tendency to dreaming by night and by day; and, under the influence of an elder brother, a lad “whose genius for mischief amounted to inspiration,” who died in his sixteenth year, he spent much of his boyhood in imaginary worlds of their own creating. The amusements and occupations of the whole family, indeed, seem to have been mainly intellectual; and in De Quincey’s case, emphatically, “the child was father to the man.” “My life has been,” he affirms in theConfessions, “on the whole the life of a philosopher; from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been.” From boyhood he was more or less in contact with a polished circle; his education, easy to one of such native aptitude, was sedulously attended to. When he was in his twelfth year the family removed to Bath, where he was sent to the grammar school, at which he remained for about two years; and for a year more he attended another public school at Winkfield, Wiltshire. At thirteen he wrote Greek with ease; at fifteen he not only composed Greek verses in lyric measures, but could converse in Greek fluently and without embarrassment; one of his masters said of him, “that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one.” Towards the close of his fifteenth year he visited Ireland, with a companion of his own age, Lord Westport, the son of Lord Altamont, an Irish peer, and spent there in residence and travel some months of the summer and autumn of the year 1800,—being a spectator at Dublin of “the final ratification of the bill which united Ireland to Great Britain.” On his return to England, his mother having now settled at St John’s Priory, a residence near Chester, De Quincey was sent to the Manchester grammar school, mainly in the hope of securing one of the school exhibitions to help his expenses at Oxford.
Discontented with the mode in which his guardians conducted his education, and with some view apparently of forcing them to send him earlier to college, he left this school after less than a year’s residence—ran away, in short, to his mother’s house. There his mother’s brother, Colonel Thomas Penson, made an arrangement for him to have a weekly allowance, on which he might reside at some country place in Wales, and pursue his studies, presumably till he could go to college. From Wales, however, after brief trial, “suffering grievously from want of books,” he went off as he had done from school, and hid himself from guardians and friends in the world of London. And now, as he says, commenced “that episode, or impassioned parenthesis of my life, which is comprehended inThe Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” This London episode extended over a year or more; his money soon vanished, and he was in the utmost poverty; he obtained shelter for the night in Greek Street, Soho, from a moneylender’s agent, and spent his days wandering in the streets and parks; finally the lad was reconciled to his guardians, and in 1803 was sent to Worcester College, Oxford, being by this time about nineteen. It was in the course of his second year at Oxford that he first tasted opium,—having taken it to allay neuralgic pains. De Quincey’s mother had settled at Weston Lea, near Bath, and on one of his visits to Bath, De Quincey made the acquaintance of Coleridge; he took Mrs Coleridge to Grasmere, where he became personally acquainted with Wordsworth.
After finishing his career of five years at college in 1808 he kept terms at the Middle Temple; but in 1809 visited the Wordsworths at Grasmere, and in the autumn returned to Dove Cottage, which he had taken on a lease. His choice was of course influenced partly by neighbourhood to Wordsworth, whom he early appreciated;—having been, he says, the only manin all Europe who quoted Wordsworth so early as 1802. His friendship with Wordsworth decreased within a few years, and when in 1834 De Quincey published inTait’s Magazinehis reminiscences of the Grasmere circle, the indiscreet references to the Wordsworths contained in the article led to a complete cessation of intercourse. Here also he enjoyed the society and friendship of Coleridge, Southey and especially of Professor Wilson, as in London he had of Charles Lamb and his circle. He continued his classical and other studies, especially exploring the at that time almost unknown region of German literature, and indicating its riches to English readers. Here also, in 1816, he married Margaret Simpson, the “dear M——” of whom a charming glimpse is accorded to the reader of theConfessions; his family came to be five sons and three daughters.
For about a year and a half he edited theWestmoreland Gazette. He left Grasmere for London in the early part of 1820. The Lambs received him with great kindness and introduced him to the proprietors of theLondon Magazine. It was in this journal in 1821 that theConfessionsappeared. De Quincey also contributed toBlackwood, toKnight’s Quarterly Magazine, and later toTait’s Magazine. His connexion withBlackwoodtook him to Edinburgh in 1828, and he lived there for twelve years, contributing from time to time to theEdinburgh Literary Gazette. His wife died in 1837, and the family eventually settled at Lasswade, but from this time De Quincey spent his time in lodgings in various places, staying at one place until the accumulation of papers filled the rooms, when he left them in charge of the landlady and wandered elsewhere. After his wife’s death he gave way for the fourth time in his life to the opium habit, but in 1844 he reduced his daily quantity by a tremendous effort to six grains, and never again yielded. He died in Edinburgh on the 8th of December 1859, and is buried in the West Churchyard.
During nearly fifty years De Quincey lived mainly by his pen. His patrimony seems never to have been entirely exhausted, and his habits and tastes were simple and inexpensive; but he was reckless in the use of money, and had debts and pecuniary difficulties of all sorts. There was, indeed, his associates affirm, an element of romance even in his impecuniosity, as there was in everything about him; and the diplomatic and other devices by which he contrived to keep clear of clamant creditors, while scrupulously fulfilling many obligations, often disarmed animosity, and converted annoyance into amusement. The famousConfessions of an English Opium Eaterwas published in a small volume in 1822, and attracted a very remarkable degree of attention, not simply by its personal disclosures, but by the extraordinary power of its dream-painting. No other literary man of his time, it has been remarked, achieved so high and universal a reputation from such merely fugitive efforts. The only works published separately (not in periodicals) were a novel,Klosterheim(1832), andThe Logic of Political Economy(1844). After his works were brought together, De Quincey’s reputation was not merely maintained, but extended. For range of thought and topic, within the limits of pure literature, no like amount of material of such equality of merit proceeded from any eminent writer of the day. However profuse and discursive, De Quincey is always polished, and generally exact—a scholar, a wit, a man of the world and a philosopher, as well as a genius. He looked upon letters as a noble and responsible calling; in his essay on Oliver Goldsmith he claims for literature the rank not only of a fine art, but of the highest and most potent of fine arts; and as such he himself regarded and practised it. He drew a broad distinction between “the literature ofknowledgeand the literature ofpower,” asserting that the function of the first is toteach, the function of the second tomove,—maintaining that the meanest of authors who moves has pre-eminence over all who merely teach, that the literature of knowledge must perish by supersession, while the literature of power is “triumphant for ever as long as the language exists in which it speaks.” It is to this class of motive literature that De Quincey’s own works essentially belong; it is by virtue of that vital element of power that they have emerged from the rapid oblivion of periodicalism, and live in the minds of later generations. But their power is weakened by their volume.
De Quincey fully defined his own position and claim to distinction in the preface to his collected works. These he divides into three classes:—“first, that class which proposes primarily to amuse the reader,” such as theNarratives, Autobiographic Sketches, &c.; “second, papers which address themselves purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty, or do so primarily,” such as the essays on Essenism, the Caesars, Cicero, &c.; and finally, as athirdclass, “and, in virtue of their aim, as a far higher class of compositions,” he ranks those “modes of impassioned prose ranging under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature,” such as theConfessionsandSuspiria de Profundis. The high claim here asserted has been questioned; and short and isolated examples of eloquent apostrophe, and highly wrought imaginative description, have been cited from Rousseau and other masters of style; but De Quincey’s power of sustaining a fascinating and elevated strain of “impassioned prose” is allowed to be entirely his own. Nor, in regard to his writings as a whole, will a minor general claim which he makes be disallowed, namely, that he “does not write without a thoughtful consideration of his subject,” and also with novelty and freshness of view. “Generally,” he says, “I claim (not arrogantly, but with firmness) the merit of rectification applied to absolute errors, or to injurious limitations of the truth.” Another obvious quality of all his genius is its overflowing fulness of allusion and illustration, recalling his own description of a great philosopher or scholar—“Not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination, bringing together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men’s bones into the unity of breathing life.” It is useless to complain of his having lavished and diffused his talents and acquirements over so vast a variety of often comparatively trivial and passing topics. The world must accept gifts from men of genius as they offer them; circumstance and the hour often rule their form. Those influences, no less than the idiosyncrasy of the man, determined De Quincey to the illumination of such matter for speculation as seemed to lie before him; he was not careful to search out recondite or occult themes, though these he did not neglect,—a student, a scholar and a recluse, he was yet at the same time a man of the world, keenly interested in the movements of men and in the page of history that unrolled itself before him day by day. To the discussion of things new, as readily as of things old, aided by a capacious, retentive and ready memory, which dispensed with reference to printed pages, he brought also the exquisite keenness and subtlety of his highly analytic and imaginative intellect, the illustrative stores of his vast and varied erudition, and that large infusion of common sense which preserved him from becoming at any time a meredoctrinaire, or visionary. If he did not throw himself into any of the great popular controversies or agitations of the day, it was not from any want of sympathy with the struggles of humanity or the progress of the race, but rather because his vocation was to apply to such incidents of his own time, as to like incidents of all history, great philosophical principles and tests of truth and power. In politics, in the party sense of that term, he would probably have been classed as a Liberal Conservative or Conservative Liberal—at one period of his life perhaps the former, and at a later the latter. Originally, as we have seen, his surroundings were aristocratic, in his middle life his associates, notably Wordsworth, Southey and Wilson, were all Tories; but he seems never to have held the extreme and narrow views of that circle. Though a flavour of high breeding runs through his writings, he has no vulgar sneers at the vulgar. As he advanced in years his views became more and more decidedly liberal, but he was always as far removed from Radicalism as from Toryism, and may be described as a philosophical politician, capable of classification under no definite party name or colour. Of political economy he had been an early and earnest student, and projected, if he did not so far proceed with, an elaborate and systematic treatise on the science, of which all that appears, however, are his fragmentaryDialogueson the system of Ricardo, published in theLondon Magazinein 1824, andThe Logic of Political Economy(1844). But politicaland economic problems largely exercised his thoughts, and his historical sketches show that he is constantly alive to their interpenetrating influence. The same may be said of his biographies, notably of his remarkable sketch of Dr Parr. Neither politics nor economics, however, exercised an absorbing influence on his mind,—they were simply provinces in the vast domain of universal speculation through which he ranged “with unconfined wings.” How wide and varied was the region he traversed a glance at the titles of the papers which make up his collected—or more properly, selected—works (for there was much matter of evanescent interest not reprinted) sufficiently shows. Some things in his own line he has done perfectly; he has written many pages of magnificently mixed argument, irony, humour and eloquence, which, for sustained brilliancy, richness, subtle force and purity of style and effect, have simply no parallels; and he is without peer the prince of dreamers. The use of opium no doubt stimulated this remarkable faculty of reproducing in skilfully selected phrase the grotesque and shifting forms of that “cloudland, gorgeous land,” which opens to the sleep-closed eye.
To the appreciation of De Quincey the reader must bring an imaginative faculty somewhat akin to his own—a certain general culture, and large knowledge of books, and men and things. Otherwise much of that slight and delicate allusion that gives point and colour and charm to his writings will be missed; and on this account the full enjoyment and comprehension of De Quincey must always remain a luxury of the literary and intellectual. But his skill in narration, his rare pathos, his wide sympathies, the pomp of his dream-descriptions, the exquisite playfulness of his lighter dissertations, and his abounding though delicate and subtle humour, commend him to a larger class. Though far from being a professed humorist—a character he would have shrunk from—there is no more expert worker in a sort of half-veiled and elaborate humour and irony than De Quincey; but he employs those resources for the most part secondarily. Only in one instance has he given himself up to them unreservedly and of set purpose, namely, in the famous “Essay on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts,” published inBlackwood,—an effort which, admired and admirable though it be, is also, it must be allowed, somewhat strained. His style, full and flexible, pure and polished, is peculiarly his own; yet it is not the style of a mannerist,—its charm is, so to speak, latent; the form never obtrudes; the secret is only discoverable by analysis and study. It consists simply in the reader’s assurance of the writer’s complete mastery over all the infinite applicability and resources of the English language. Hence involutions and parentheses, “cycle on epicycle,” evolve themselves into a stately clearness and harmony; and sentences and paragraphs, loaded with suggestion, roll on smoothly and musically, without either fatiguing or cloying—rather, indeed, to the surprise as well as delight of the reader; for De Quincey is always ready to indulge in feats of style, witching the world with that sort of noble horsemanship which is as graceful as it is daring.
It has been complained that, in spite of the apparently full confidences of theConfessionsandAutobiographic Sketches, readers are left in comparative ignorance, biographically speaking, of the man De Quincey. Two passages in hisConfessionsafford sufficient clues to this mystery. In one he describes himself “as framed for love and all gentle affections,” and in another confesses to the “besetting infirmity” of being “too much of an eudaemonist.” “I hanker,” he says, “too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and others; I cannot face misery, whether my own or not, with an eye of sufficient firmness, and am little capable of surmounting present pain for the sake of any recessionary benefit.” His sensitive disposition dictated the ignoring in his writings of traits merely personal to himself, as well as his ever-recurrent resort to opium as a doorway of escape from present ill; and prompted those habits of seclusion, and that apparently capricious abstraction of himself from the society not only of his friends, but of his own family, in which he from time to time persisted. He confessed to occasional accesses of an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinthine shelter of some great city like London or Paris,—there to dwell solitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging. Long indulgence in seclusion, and in habits of study the most lawless possible in respect of regular hours or any considerations of health or comfort,—the habit of working as pleased himself without regard to the divisions of night or day, of times of sleeping or waking, even of the slow procession of the seasons, had latterly so disinclined him to the restraints, however slight, of ordinary social intercourse, that he very seldom submitted to them. On such rare occasions, however, as he did appear, perhaps at some simple meal with a favoured friend, or in later years in his own small but refined domestic circle, he was the most charming of guests, hosts or companions. A short and fragile, but well-proportioned frame; a shapely and compact head; a face beaming with intellectual light, with rare, almost feminine beauty of feature and complexion; a fascinating courtesy of manner; and a fulness, swiftness and elegance of silvery speech,—such was the irresistible “mortal mixture of earth’s mould” that men named De Quincey. He possessed in a high degree what James Russell Lowell called “the grace of perfect breeding, everywhere persuasive, and nowhere emphatic”; and his whole aspect and manner exercised an undefinable attraction over every one, gentle or simple, who came within its influence; for shy as he was, he was never rudely shy, making good his boast that he had always made it his “pride to converse familiarlymore socraticowith all human beings—man, woman and child”—looking on himself as a catholic creature standing in an equal relation to high and low, to educated and uneducated. He would converse with a peasant lad or a servant girl in phrase as choice, and sentences as sweetly turned, as if his interlocutor were his equal both in position and intelligence; yet without a suspicion of pedantry, and with such complete adaptation of style and topic that his talk charmed the humblest as it did the highest that listened to it. His conversation was not a monologue; if he had the larger share, it was simply because his hearers were only too glad that it should be so; he would listen with something like deference to very ordinary talk, as if the mere fact of the speaker being one of the same company entitled him to all consideration and respect. The natural bent of his mind and disposition, and his lifelong devotion to letters, to say nothing of his opium eating, rendered him, it must be allowed, regardless of ordinary obligations in life—domestic and pecuniary—to a degree that would have been culpable in any less singularly constituted mind. It was impossible to deal with or judge De Quincey by ordinary standards—not even his publishers did so. Much no doubt was forgiven him, but all that needed forgiveness is covered by the kindly veil of time, while his merits as a master in English literature are still gratefully acknowledged.1