APPLICABILITY OF OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 433 



already quoted, " try to realise the idea of a vast army of criminals, 

 amounting in round numbers to one hundred and five thousand, 

 living in the midst of us, and reinforced by youthful recruits at the 

 rate of five-and-twenty thousand a-year ; and contrast this with the 

 meagre and inadequate means employed to restrain and diminish 

 such a formidable array of vice and social degradation. 



" The cost of maintaining our army of thieves is startling. Twenty- 

 five pounds a-year being taken as the lowest sum upon which a frugal 

 and industrious couple, with one or two children, can subsist, — and 

 double that sum, or fifty pounds a year, being assumed as the lowest 

 amount of the income of a thief, who is the reverse of frugal, — it 

 follows that the thieves of Grreat Britain levy black mail upon the 

 public to the extent of s65,250,000 a-year ; being equal to a tax of 

 four shillings a-year on every man, woman, and child in the kingdom. 

 But this estimate is probably far below the average, individual cases 

 being noted in the prison reports, of thieves earning from £300 to 

 £500 per annum for a succession of years. 



" This estimate takes no account of the cost of maintaining criminals 

 in gaol. But the money expense is the least of the evil. It has 

 been stated on good authority that every thief corrupts at least ten 

 boys, and thus multiplies his own malignant influence tenfold. So 

 true is it that ' one sinner destroys much good.' " 



And yet this same writer sneers at the driving system of Prussia, 

 as lie calls it, and " cannot imagine that as a general principle it is 

 desirable to fill the Common Schools by direct compulsion," although 

 at the same time he acknowledges that the absence of all intellectual 

 and moral training is to be regarded as the principal source of juvenile 

 delinquency ! The popular tendency towards remedial rather than 

 preventive measures is illustrated by the following characteristic 

 anecdote, related by Mr. John Roberton, in an escellent paper read 

 before the Manchester Statistical Society, last year, on certain legal- 

 ized forms of temptation to crime : — " This reminds me," says Mr. 

 Roberton, " of what used to be told of a town in Lincolnshire, noto- 

 rious for ague. The better class of people, who lived in the higher 

 town, and enjoyed good health themselves, were ever ready to supply 

 Peruvian bark and ague-drops to sufPerers from the fever, but they 

 never thought of draining the neighboring marsh. Now, an engineer 

 happened to visit the place, and, hearing of the ague, pointed out to 



