THE AVERAGE STEAL.
To obtain an estimate of this cost, however, the speaker said that $1,600 per year was the amount of money stolen by the average habitual criminal, and it was certainly a conservative estimate; there were at present 100,000 prisoners in confinement, of whom 40 or 50 per cent. were habitual; but this did not represent the cost of drunkenness which, he said, is generally crime in its most debased form, nor the cost of crime which was never detected. Adding up all these items of expense chargeable to crime, the speaker produced the enormous sum of $600,000,000 per year, which, he said, exceeded the value of the cotton or wheat crop. Any help for the future must come by regenerating the people by Christianity.