Raphael on the number of thieves in England.
After this, Raphael having made a remark which showed that he had been in England, the conversation turned incidentally upon English affairs, and Raphael proceeded to tell how once at the table of Cardinal Morton he had expressed his opinions freely upon the social evils of England. He had on this occasion, he said, ventured to condemn the system of the wholesale execution of thieves, who were hanged so fast that there were sometimes twenty on a gibbet.[611] The severity was both unjustly great, and also ineffectual. No punishment, however severe, could deter those from robbing who can find no other means of livelihood.
Then Raphael is made to allude to three causes why the number of thieves was so large:—
1st. There are numbers of wounded and disbanded soldiers who are unable to resume their old employments, and are too old to learn new ones.
2nd. The gentry who live at ease out of the labour of others, keep around them so great a number of idle fellows not brought up to any trade, that often, from the death of their lord or their own illness, numbers of these idle fellows are liable to be thrown upon the world without resources, to steal or starve. Raphael then is made to ridicule the notion that it is needful to maintain this idle class, as some argue, in order to keep up a reserve of men ready for the army, and still more severely to criticise the notion that it is necessary to keep a standing army in time of peace. France, he said, had found to her cost the evil of keeping in readiness these human wild beasts, as also had Rome, Carthage, and Syria, in ancient times.
Raphael on the rage for pasture-farming.
3rd. Raphael pointed out as another cause of the number of thieves—an evil peculiar to England—the rage for sheep-farming, and the ejections consequent upon it. ‘For,’ he said, ‘when some greedy and insatiable fellow, the pest of his county, chooses to enclose several thousand acres of contiguous fields within the circle of one sheepfold, farmers are ejected from their holdings, being got rid of either by fraud or force, or tired out by repeated injuries into parting with their property. In this way it comes to pass that these poor wretches, men, women, husbands, wives, orphans, widows, parents with little children—households greater in number than in wealth, for arable-farming requires many hands—all these emigrate from their native fields without knowing where to go. Their effects are not worth much at best; they are obliged to sell them for almost nothing when they are forced to go. And the produce of the sale being spent, as it soon must be, what resource then is left to them but either to steal, and to be hanged, justly forsooth, for stealing, or to wander about and beg. If they do the latter, they are thrown into prison as idle vagabonds when they would thankfully work if only some one would give them employment. For there is no work for husbandmen when there is no arable-farming. One shepherd and herdsman will suffice for a pasture-farm, which, while under tillage, employed many hands. Corn has in the meantime been made dearer in many places by the same cause. Wool, too, has risen in price, owing to the rot amongst the sheep, and now the little clothmakers are unable to supply themselves with it. For the sheep are falling into few and powerful hands; and these, if they have not a monopoly, have at least an oligopoly, and can keep up the price.
On beer-houses, &c.
‘Add to these causes the increasing luxury and extravagance of the upper classes, and indeed of all classes—the tippling houses, taverns, brothels, and other dens of iniquity, wine and beer houses, and places for gambling. Do not all these, after rapidly exhausting the resources of their devotees, educate them for crime?
Practical remedies suggested.