1828.] General Increase of Crime. 343 



increase or commission of crime was to be found in the distress or priva- 

 tion to which the labouring classes are exposed, we should find ihejirst 

 offences in the way of theft, generally committed by deserving, careful, 

 industrious people people carried out of moral and active habits, by the 

 distress, or necessity, which drives them to steal. In the agricultural 

 districts, a day labourer, sober in his habits and economical of his means, 

 or at least fairly attentive to his duties in society, would be detected 

 stealing sheep, or in robbing a poultry yard, for the sake of supporting 

 his family, who are absolutely in need. With a case of this kind, it is 

 never difficult to deal, however painful it may be to meet with it. The 

 interposition of the law is prevented by some act of private benevolence. 

 Justice is due to the people who are destined to be robbed, as well as to 

 the select few who are robbers : there never is a case of real distress, in 

 which the instant inclination of the offended party is not to relieve 

 rather than to pursue. But every farmer or country resident knows 

 that the persons to whom he looks for breaking into his barn, or robbing 

 his stable, are people of a very different description from these. They 

 are the idle, the drunken, the insolent, and the wandering : the pot- 

 house soakers: the sleepers and skittle-players by day, and poachers 

 and black-fishers by night. They are the trampers, beggars, gipsies, who 

 roam from fair to fair, and from market to market, with fifty ways of live- 

 lihood, but all idle, and thievish, and contraband. They are the women 

 of the village, who find prostitution easier than labour : the men who 

 are heard roaring along the roads, and damaging fences and gates for 

 sport or malice at night : who are poor enough, and wretched ; but 

 quite sure never to want so much excuse for theft as the being 

 " out of employ ;" because their habits are such that no employer will 

 retain them Every neighbourhood, which affords any convenience 

 for plunder, has its nest of these caterpillars. Sometimes a severe 

 session, and an unphilosophical judge, clear out the covey ; and then a 

 year or so may pass before another assembles. In every rural district, 

 when a robbery has been committed especially within twenty miles of 

 town the probable parties can be pointed out though their detection 

 is difficult immediately. They are people known distinctly to the 

 vicinity as thieves ; generally carrying on some petty commerce upon 

 their own account. Your " pieman," and small ambulant huckster of 

 every description of ware, consumes a great deal of geese and turkies in 

 the parish where he resides : bargemen on canals, higglers, and hay and 

 straw carters, from their convenience of carriage, monopolize a still 

 larger share of traffic in the property of their neighbours. It is true that 

 these people in a certain sense of the word are " poor :" that is, their 

 houses are desolate, and themselves and their families half naked. But 

 their expenditure exceeds often exceeds ten times over that of the 

 active and industrious labourer ; and it has the prodigious advantage of 

 being attained comparatively without effort into the bargain. 



But, when we come to the metropolis where the best field for judging 

 of motive is for the amount of crime there, measured against the extent 

 of territory, is, as compared with the country, in the proportion of about 

 fifty to one how the idea of attributing the great mass of offence against 

 property to " distress/' ever could enter the mind of a sane person, it 

 seems difficult to conceive ! The thieves of London are bred out of 

 labourers, or out of the children of labouring mechanics we take here 

 the lowest class of them in point of emolument whose earnings are from 



