Leviathan Read Online Free PDF

circumstances the progress of vice is almost as certain and rapid as that of physical contagion. In slums like St Giles lived ‘the poorest of the poor, the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately huddled together’. Those who hadn’t drowned in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounded them sank daily deeper, progressively losing their power to resist ‘the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings’. Engels wondered that there was not much more crime emanating from these human waste dumps.
    Popular mythology would not have Sydney founded by such people. Rather, goes the fairytale, the city fathers were honest starving farmers and hapless Irishmen down on their luck and forced to steal to feed their sooty-faced urchins. Unfortunately, not everyone was exiled for making off with a loaf of bread or a guvnor’s silk hanky. The common British trait, shared by all classes, of sneering at Australians’ criminal origins has a solid basis in fact. Many of those transported to the colony were serial offenders, the natural end product of an undeclared class war which raged across the landscape of Britain like a giant threshing machine, chewing up and spitting out hundreds of thousands of lives to feed a fantasy of the propertied classes: that crime was a moral contagion which could be cut from the flesh of the lower orders and cast away to rot on the hot, fatal shore of the antipodes. The main point of transportation, as Robert Hughes put it, was not what happened to the criminals once they were there , but that they would no longer be here . It was a delusion based on the false premise that crime had no external causes such as grinding poverty, starvation and despair. Instead it sprang in every case from the contaminated soul as an act of free will.
    In truth criminality, like greatness, was a contingent affair. Some were born to it, some achieved it, and the rest had it thrust rudely upon them. The forlorn extremes of the latter in no way detracted from the lusty embrace of lawlessness by the former. Mayhew met bands of thieves who were proud of their profession and took imprisonment as a sign of achievement; rather foolishly, given the savage nature of the legal system at the time. Eighteenth century English justice encompassed punishment cut from the cloth of the DarkAges, including amputating hands, slicing off ears, slitting nostrils, branding and whipping, often served up as an entrée to the state’s main course of vengeance, death by hanging. The law itself was confused, stitched together from a patchwork of ancient Roman doctrine, a great unwritten mass of mediaeval common law, and the formal codified statutes dating from the reign of Edward I at the end of the thirteenth century. The result was an ambiguous and contradictory body of laws with barbaric ambitions and arbitrary effects. Many judges and juries actually used this to mitigate the cruelties of the system. Charges of many First Fleet convicts were worded so as to attract the lesser penalty of transportation instead of execution.
    None of which seemed to affect the thinking of those criminals who still revelled in their own infamy. Interviewing a large party of thieves, Mayhew found they cheered each other on as each replied to questions about how many times he had been jailed. One junior desperado, who claimed to have been locked up twenty-nine times in his nineteen short but action-packed years, drew a long thunderous standing ovation from dozens of his mates. A seaman ordered to draw up a list of the occupations of the convict ship Recovery ’s transportees in 1819 reported back to the surgeon-superintendent that three quarters of their charges claimed to be nothing more than thieves. Scratching his head, and providing an insight into the accuracy of convict records, he asked whether he should just list them as ‘labourers’, one of the most common job