Chapter VIII.

"We travel through a desert, and our feet Have measured a fair space, have left behind A thousand dangers and a thousand snares. ... ... The past temptations No more shall vex us." Watts.

"'Tis beauty all, and grateful song around, Joined to the low of kine, and numerous bleat Of flocks thick-nibbling through the clovered vale." Thomson.

A few weeks after this catastrophe, the whole band was tried and condemned to various degrees of punishment and correction. Nothing had been proven against Marcel and Polycarpe further than that they had been found among recognized thieves, and were by that fact alone suspicious characters in the eyes of the law. The answers elicited from Marcel on his examination had excited the compassion of the tribunal, and the president declared his intention of giving him the opportunity of redeeming the past and of becoming an honest man. Polycarpe Poquet, also, had been judged leniently; his frank, generous nature had been discovered amidst all the vice that overshadowed it.

Very beautiful and touching were the words in which the worthy president announced to the two boys that he acquitted them because he believed that they had acted without discernment, but that, fearing for their future, he should send them to a house of correction where they would be detained until they had each reached the age of twenty-one. He reminded them that at least six years lay before them to reform and elevate themselves. {353} He promised them that every means should be given to them to improve, and that they should be taught a trade or profession, and thus enabled by their own labor to gain their living and become respectable citizens. Obedience and industry would be expected from them, he said; and he entreated them to have pity on themselves, and to aid by their own exertions the efforts of those who sincerely desired their welfare, both temporal and eternal.

Marcel's tears flowed plentifully while the good magistrate thus addressed them; he had never before heard such things, and he wept as much from gratitude as from fear.

Imprisonment for six years seemed terrible; but if those six years were to give him the very thing for which he yearned--a different life from that he had hitherto led, in which all was fear and pain!

As for Polycarpe, he was more silent than usual, but he seemed neither afraid nor sorry. He felt the influence of virtue and truth, however, and the president's discourse made more impression on him than he cared to confess even to Marcel; for in minds rendered obtuse by vicious habits a good feeling or impulse is generally considered as a weakness, and resisted or concealed.

The boys were conducted back to the depot of the prefecture as soon as the president had finished speaking to them, there to await their removal to the House of Correction that should be appointed by the authorities.

In 1839, a few noble-hearted, philanthropic men conceived the idea of founding at Mettray, near the beautiful town of Tours, in almost the heart of France, a colony of young convicts, to whom should be given a moral and religious training, and the blessings of a home. These benevolent men had studied with profound attention the admirable penitentiary system of the United States of America; compared with it, the system of correction as practised in the state prisons of France had struck them as singularly ineffective and quite inadequate to attain the end and aim of all punishment, the eradication of vice, and the awakening of a desire to practise industry and honesty. The published reports of these prisons had even proved that, far from the morality of the unfortunate children detained there being improved, these unhappy victims did actually become more confirmed in their perversity by their sojourn in the house of correction. Though restrained by the prison discipline, they were not actually taught; for it is not intimidation that can teach a fallen nature how to rise, nor inculcate the love of honor and virtue. The helter-skelter way of these houses was fatal to their utility. Young offenders, guilty of comparatively slight offences, were associated with scoundrels versed in every mystery of crime. The burglar and the highway robber, the coiner and the assassin, became the companions of the child so apt to learn, so ready to receive any impression whether of good or evil. Want of space was pleaded in extenuation of this great, this fundamental error in the work of reformation; and thus justice and social good were sacrificed to considerations of economy!

The system of detention, too, as applied to children, did not render it obligatory on the administration of the prison to continue its care of the child after he had quitted the walls where he had passed the last five or six years of his young life. On the day of his liberation, the rule was to give him a few clothes and a part of the products of his labor during his detention, and then all was ended between him and those who were supposed to have been his teachers and protectors. {354} Thus thrown all at once into a world from which he had been sequestered for years, without any family traditions of industry and probity to guide and uphold him, the unhappy youth found it impossible to gain a footing among the honest and respectable, and was soon irretrievably lost.

All the errors, all the consequences of this system, were then to be avoided in the new colony of Mettray; and guided by sound sense and a deep love of their kind, the founders of this admirable establishment undertook the task of endowing the erring children confided to them by the state with family affections and habits, with the love of order, and with health. Their minds and hearts were to be cultivated, and they were to be given the desire and the means of gaining their living by honest labor. It was to the agricultural colony of Mettray that Marcel and Polycarpe were sent, a few days after their examination before the tribunal; and they made the journey thither in the company of thirty or forty other unfortunate boys of their own age. What language can express the delight that filled the bosom of the poor orphan when his eyes first rested on the home that a merciful Providence had at last given him! Most lovely was the wide landscape that spread before him; for fertile Touraine is indeed the garden of beautiful France. The bright waters of the magnificent river Loire were there to be seen winding amidst green fields, its shores bordered by strange habitations hollowed in the rocks, or fringed with waving trees. There were the houses of the Mettray colonists on the side of a rising ground, the tapering steeple of their chapel showing itself from the middle of the group like a giant finger pointing the way to heaven. On the bank of the little stream that passed close to the settlement on its way to the great river stood a windmill, turning its sails right merrily. Plantations of mulberry-trees, beautifully kept gardens and orchards, and wheat-fields nearly ripe for the harvest, surrounded the colony; oxen grazing or pulling heavily-laden carts, sheep browsing with tinking bells, young colonists smiling, bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, directing, helping, working in every way and with a will; all the sights and sounds of husbandry, and among the leaves a whispering breeze, and the warm air perfumed with the scent of newly-mown hay, and over all the bright blue, sunny sky. Such was the landscape that met the eyes of the pale-faced, sin-degraded children of Paris. Such was the home that a few true men with loving hearts and living sympathies had provided for the victims of poverty and crime! Here were they to learn, by the all-powerful lessons of religion and healthful labor, how to become honest, useful citizens; here were they to acquire self-respect, love of country and of their fellow-men.

Oh! blessings on the Christian men who founded the colony of Mettray! Their names are inscribed on the walls of the chapel; but those walls will crumble away in time, their names will be forgotten, but the good they have done will never decay or pass away, and "_Verily they shall have their reward!_"

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