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Science a Preservative from Crime 
1853, 24 February 
  
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Google Books 
 
LL/34990 
  
Published in "True Briton: A Weekly Magazine of Amusement and Instruction", Volume 1, New Series, No.34, February 24, 1853, p.552.
 
Science a Preservative from Crime
 
Science seems to be setting itself dead against crime and criminals. Railways gave a death-blow to the romantic railing of the highway robber. How is a ruffian to cry "stop!" to an express train "your money or your life'' to a man shooting past him in the wake of a chariot of fire? Your electric telegraph, again, has rendered it next to impossible for the Jack Sheppards and Dick Turpins of the time to escape pursuit, even after they may have secured their booty. What chance has "Black Bess," when pursuit follows her on the wings of the lightning? In vain the thief, the forger, or the shedder of blood, leaps into the fleetest train, while the " hue and cry" goes after him, like Milton's angel, on a ray of light, to meet him face to face at every point of his flight and run him down at last into the prison cell. The latest application of the powers which science lends to society for its better protection Is, the use of the daguerreotype. Many are the uses of a record of crime, and there are obvious advantages in a Judge knowing whether the culprit before him is an old or a new offender against the laws. But every one familiar with courts of justice knows how often it is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain this essential circumstance. Of course, every prisoner according to his own story is in court for "the first time." He has a new name, a different dress, perhaps an unaccustomed brogue or accent. Crime Is infinitely Protean. The sharpest officers of police, the most experienced turnkeys, are sometimes at fault: so that, while first offenders are now and then sentenced as hardened criminals, fellows who have run through the whole gamut of crime escape on the strength of their previous character! The Minister of Justice in Switzerland, with a view to remedying this difficulty and injustice, has ordered the several heads of police and prison departments in that country to take sun portraits of mendicants and vagabonds. This is the beginning of a new system certainly. Formerly it was the custom to brand criminals with hot irons and this is still the custom in the East so that all men might know them. But our age is wiser and more humane. Branding has quite gone out of fashion, at least in Western Europe, and now science is about to restore to society that safeguard against lawless spirits which some years ago society herself voluntarily threw away in the interest of the humanities. 
 
 
  
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