awful place; the worst street in the district.  The inhabitants are mostly of the lowest class, and seem to lack all idea of cleanliness or decency ....  The children are rarely brought up to any kind of work, but loaf about, and, no doubt, form the nucleus for future generations of thieves and other bad characters.”  In this street alone there are between 160 and 170 children; these children do not require to go to lodging-houses to be contaminated; they breathe a polluted moral atmosphere from birth upwards, and it is more than probable that a considerable proportion of them will help to recruit the army of crime.  It is not destitution which will force them into this course, but their up-bringing and surroundings.

In addition to homeless boys who steal from destitution, there are, as I have said, a number of decrepit old men who do the same.  There is a period in a workman’s life when he becomes too feeble to do an average day’s work.  When this period arrives employers of labour often discharge him in order to make way for younger and more vigorous men.  If his home, as sometimes happens, is broken up by the death of his wife, his existence becomes a very lonely and precarious one.  An odd job now and again is all he can get to do, and even these jobs are often hard to find.  His sons and daughters are too heavily encumbered with large families to be capable of rendering any effective assistance, and the Union looms gloomily in the distance as the only prospect before the worn-out worker.  But it sometimes happens that he will not face that prospect.  He will rather steal and run the risk of imprisonment.  And so it comes to pass that for a year or two before finally reconciling himself to the Union, the aged workman will lead a wandering, criminal life on a petty scale; he becomes an item in the statistics of offenders against property.

Habitual drunkards form another class who sometimes steal from destitution.  The well-known irregularity of these men’s habits prevents them, in a multitude of cases, from getting work, and unfortunately, they cannot keep it when they do get it.  Employers cannot depend on them; as soon as they earn a few shillings they disappear from the workshop till the money is spent on drink.  It is at such times that they are arrested for being drunk and disorderly.  As they can never pay a fine they have to go to prison, but long before their sentence has expired they have lost their job, and must look out for something else.  If such men do not find work many of them are not ashamed to steal, and it is only when trade is at flood-tide that they can be sure of employment, no matter how irregular their habits may be.  At other times they are the first to be discharged and the last to be engaged.  It is not really destitution, but intemperance which turns them into thieves.  That they are destitute when arrested is perfectly true, but we must go behind the immediate fact of their destitution in order to arrive at the true causes of their crimes.  When this is done it is found that the stress of economic conditions has very little to do with making these unhappy beings what they are; on the contrary, it is in periods of prosperity that they sink to the lowest depths.