The purchase of stolen goods is a trade so lucrative, and offers so direct an incentive to crime in others, that, when it is fully brought home, the offender cannot, in the public interest, be too severely dealt with.
If there were no receivers there would be hardly any professional thieves. Their detection, as we have said, is difficult, for the simple reason that a detected and convicted thief knows, as a rule, that he has very little, if anything, to gain by putting such information as he can give at the disposal of the police.
Were pardons or remissions of sentences more frequently granted as the reward of Queen’s evidence, it ought to be perfectly possible to hunt down every professional receiver in the metropolis.
The law finds it at all times difficult to deal with receivers of stolen goods, who, as a rule, contrive somehow or other to baffle and elude its most vigilant and acute officers.
Thieves, however, are less fortunate than receivers: they are frequently brought to the bar of justice, and have to undergo various terms of imprisonment, but it is a most remarkable fact, that in most cases, after the habitual thief has served his time, he invariably returns to his dishonest practices.
It seems almost impossible to effect a reformation in such cases, and punishment is of no avail.
Some men pass two-thirds of their lives in prison, and yet are as hardened and callous as ever.
We do not believe it would have been possible to have effected a reformation in Charles Peace, no matter what mode of treatment had been adopted. He was so radically bad that he was past all cure, and there are at the present time, hundreds and thousands of ruffians preying upon the public, who are equally unreliable.
But Peace was a man of exceptional qualifications. He was steeped up to the very lips in crime, and we shall find it difficult to find a parallel to him either in this or any other country.
Some time since America furnished us with an example of a hardened offender, who in some respects resembled the hero of this work.