ught, and certainly often without any scruple, commit offences
against the public or against corporations or societies or companies,
which they would themselves deem it impossible for them to commit
against individuals. And yet the character of the acts is exactly the
same. Take smuggling. A man smuggles cigars or tobacco to an amount by
which he saves himself twenty shillings, and defrauds the state to the
same extent. This is simply an act of theft, only that the object of the
theft is the community at large and not an individual. So far as the
mischief or wrongfulness of the act goes, apart from the intention of
the agent, he might as well put his hands into the pocket of one of his
fellow-passengers and extract the same amount of money. The twenty
shillings which, by evading payment of the duty, he has appropriated to
his own uses, has been taken from the rest of the tax-payers, and he has
simply shifted on to them the obligation which properly attached to
himself. Sooner or later they must make up the deficit. If many men were
to act in the same way, the burden of the honest tax-payer would be
largely increased, and, if the practice became general, the state would
have to resort to some other mode of taxation or collect its
customs-revenue at a most disproportionate cost. Thus, a little
reflexion shows that smuggling is really theft, and I cannot but think
that it would be to the moral as well as the material advantage of the
community if it were called by that name, and were visited with the same
punishment as petty larceny. Exactly the same remarks, of course, apply
to the evasion of income-tax, or of rates or taxes of any kind, which
are imposed by a legitimate authority. Travelling on a railway without a
ticket or in a higher class or for a greater distance than that for
which the ticket was taken is, similarly, only a thinly disguised case
of theft, and should be treated accordingly. The sale or purchase of
pirated editions of books is another case of the same kind, the persons
from whom the money is stolen being the authors or publishers. Many
paltry acts of pilfering, such as the unauthorised use of
government-paper or franks, or purloining novels or letter-paper from a
club, or plucking flowers in a public garden, fall under the same head
of real, though not always obvious, thefts. There is, of course, a
certain degree of pettiness which makes them insignificant, but there is
always a danger lest men should t