Law And Order
Another feature of English life in the eighteen century upon which
foreigners commented critically was the penal code, the list of punishments
imposed for breaches of the law. It was notably savage, and by the standards of
a later age absurd as well as barbaric. The absence of an effective police force
led the authorities to try to deter law-breakers by harsher penalties, even for
relatively trivial offences. So by 1800 some two hundred crimes were punishable
by death. They included (besides treason, murder, and attempted murder) forgery,
horse-stealing, sheep-stealing, picking pockets, stealing five shillings (25p)
from a shop, damaging Westminster Bridge, and impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner.
To impose the capital penalty for trivial offences was simply to tempt the
offenders to commit murder if they were caught in the act. In fact, in many
cases juries refused to convict; and in many more the death-sentence was never
carried out, but was commuted to transportation or other lesser punishment. The
law was in practice more humane than it appeared to be. But this, as reformers
pointed out , only showed how absurd the penal code was.
Transportation,
the most usual alternative to the death penalty, had begun in the seventeenth
century, when prisoners were sent in batches to Barbados and other American
colonies to spend a term of years as "indentured servants" of plantation owners.
It provided cheap labour for the colonists, and it was less expensive than
maintaining prisons at home. In the later years of the eighteenth century it
became for various reasons more difficult to send convicts to America, and
Australia, whose coasts had just been explored by Captain Cook, was used
instead. In 1787 the first cargo of prisoners, 717 in all, of whom 183 were
women, was sent to Botany Bay, and convicts continued to be transported to New
South Wales until 1840 and to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) until 1852. Although
many of the convicts made good in Australia, transportation was a grim business.
Conditions on the long voyage, much of it in the tropics, were so bad that it
was not uncommon for one in five to die; in Australia their work was often to
clear the bush, toiling in chains in the heat of the southern
sun.