“Bank robbers and pickpockets have been known coolly to admit that the market price for a stolen five-pound note is three pounds ten shillings. Who buys stolen bank notes at this rate? Who melts down the stolen plate? Who wrenches the stolen gems out of their settings? Who sends the unset jewels to Amsterdam and elsewhere?
“If the police are unable to find out the wholesale dealers in stolen property, and trust to chance to make such a haul as they made the other day in the Commercial-road, might it not be expedient to allow the next professional burglar we catch to turn Queen’s evidence against the receivers?
“No terms can be made with a murderer, and Peace must be left to the gallows; but most useful revelations might be obtained from a professional housebreaker permitted to turn approver.
“Such a witness, if his evidence proved trustworthy, should receive—strictly or once in away—a full pardon.
“Convicts sentenced to penal servitude are not apt to be very grateful for a partial remission of their term of durance; and, indeed, in the case of Mr. Harry Benson, the Government, it appears, does not conceive that it is under any obligation at all to the convict for having made an exhibition of the old detective force in its full iniquity.”
In tracing the criminal career of a desperate character like Peace, it is curious to note how prone to wrong-doing he was from his earliest youth. His first theft is thus described:—
An apple of beautiful hue tempted Eve to her first sin, and it is said that fruit of a similar name first induced Peace to commit a serious theft. In the year 1830 he lived close to the orchard of the Rev. Joseph Smith, whose residence was known as the Plantation.
“The rev. gentleman was the pastor of the flock who worshipped at the Nether Chapel in Norfolk-street. But the ‘Plantation’ on Langsett-road had a different prospect to what is now the case.
“Then it was in the country really; on the banks behind the houses were farms and orchards; beneath the house were meadows sloping to the River Don, which was then alive with fish, trout being plentiful in the waters, and at times a salmon or sea-trout strayed into these higher regions from the Ouse.
“The railway connecting Sheffield with Manchester had not made its black streak across the opposite Old Park-hill, and a pleasant place was the residence of the Independent minister of those days.