to one applies with a
considerable degree of accuracy to all. We shall, therefore, define a
destitute person as a person who is without house or home, who has no
work, who is able and willing to work but can get none, and has
nothing but starvation staring him in the face. Is any serious amount
of crime due to the desperation of people in a position such as this?
In order to answer this question it is necessary, in the first place,
to ask what kind of crime such persons will be most likely to commit.
It is most improbable that they will be crimes against the person,
such as homicide or assault; it will not be drunkenness, because, on
the assumption of their destitution, they will possess no money to
spend. In short, the offences a person in a state of destitution is
most likely to commit are begging and theft. What proportion of the
total volume of crime is due to these two offense? This is the first
question we shall have to answer. The second is, to what extent are
begging and theft the results of destitution? An adequate elucidation
of these two points will supply a satisfactory explanation of the part
played by destitution in the production of crime.

The total number of cases tried in England and Wales either summarily
or on indictment during the year 1887-88 amounted to 726,698. Out of
this total eight per cent. were cases of offences against property
excluding cases of malicious damage, and seven per cent. consisted of
offences against the Vagrancy Acts. Putting these two classes of
offences together we arrive at the result that out of a total number
of crimes of all kinds committed in England and Wales, 15 per cent.
may conceivably be due to destitution. This is a very serious
percentage, and if it actually represented the number of persons who
commit crime from sheer want of the elementary necessaries of life,
the confession would have to be made that the economic condition of
the country was deplorable. But is it a fact that destitution in the
sense we have been using the word is the cause of all these offences?
This is the next question we have to solve, and the answer springing
from it will reveal the true position of the case.

Let us deal first with offences against property. As has just been
pointed out these constitute eight per cent. of the annual amount of
crime. But according to inquiries which I have made, one half of the
annual number of offenders against property, so far from being in a
state of