sts. We should
never have allowed smart young pickpockets to compete with poor
sempstresses, whose ranks are already overcrowded. There will always be
plenty of honest people descending in the social scale to do underpaid
work, and there are thousands of petty thieves who are not fit for any
other. So that there is a greater need for elevating the clever
professional thief to the position of a skilled artisan.

The city bred thief class are far from being dunces or "flats," and it
is not possible to make them common labourers. Many of them may very
fitly be compared to the idle and dissipated "swells" of the middle and
higher classes. If we took a "fast" young nobleman, for instance, and
put him to some office agreeable to himself, so that he conceived a
decided liking to harness, it would do him a deal more good in the way
of reforming him than a course of lectures on the seventh commandment!
And assuming that by so doing he enticed other "swells" to buckle on
official armour, it might interfere with the prospects of some who had
never been "fast," but on the whole, society would benefit by the
change. I maintain that that would be the correct method to adopt with
some of those thieves who are totally irreclaimable by our present
system of prison discipline. With regard to the casual and petty
thieves, their case is somewhat different. Many of them could not be
raised above the lowest class of common labourers, but by adopting a
system of individualization, that is studying each man's natural
abilities, we could always arrive at the best results. It might be
advanced as a third objection, that it would be impossible to make
thieves pay their expenses in prison, and a fine in addition. Under our
present system I admit it would be very difficult, but in the penal
workshops, into which I would turn all our prisoners, this objection
would not hold good. The prisoner would then be stimulated to labour at
paying work agreeable to his tastes and suitable to his abilities, and
the cost of his maintenance would be less than it is at present. Those
who really could not earn a living in the penal workhouses, and those
who would not earn their living, I would transfer to the prison for
criminal incurables. I would not have any first offenders against
property in prison, I would punish them as ticket-of-leave men. In the
penal workshops I would only have persistent thieves. In the convict
prisons only great offenders against the pe