CHAPTER VIII.
JUVENILE THIEVES.
The Beginning of the Downhill Journey.—Candidates for Newgate Honours.—Black Spots of London.—Life from the Young Robber’s Point of View.—The Seedling Recruits the most difficult to reform.—A doleful Summing-up.—A Phase of the Criminal Question left unnoticed.—Budding Burglars.—Streams which keep at full flood the Black Sea of Crime.—The Promoters of “Gallows Literature.”—Another Shot at a Fortress of the Devil.—“Poison-Literature.”—“Starlight Sall.”—“Panther Bill.”
It is quite true that, counting prostitutes and receivers of stolen goods, there are twenty thousand individuals eating the daily bread of dishonesty within the city of London alone; there are many more than these. And the worst part of the business is, that those that are omitted from the batch form the most painful and repulsive feature of the complete picture. Shocking enough is it to contemplate the white-haired, tottering criminal holding on to the front of the dock because he dare not trust entirely his quaking legs, and with no more to urge in his defence than Fagin had when it came to the last—“an old man, my lord, a very old man;” and we give him our pity ungrudgingly because we are no longer troubled with fears for his hostility as regards the present or the future. It is all over with him or very nearly. The grave yawns for him and we cannot help feeling that after all he has hurt himself much more than he has hurt us, and when we reflect on the awful account he will presently be called on to answer, our animosity shrinks aside, and we would recommend him to mercy if it were possible. No, it is not those who have run the length of their tether of crime that we have to fear, but those who by reason of their tender age are as yet but feeble toddlers on the road that leads to the hulks. It would be instructive as well as of great service if reliable information could be obtained as to the beginning of the down-hill journey by our juvenile criminals. Without doubt it would be found that in a lamentably large number of cases the beginning did not rest in the present possessors at all, but that they were bred and nurtured in it, inheriting it from their parents as certain forms of physical disease are inherited.
In very few instances are they trained to thieving by a father who possibly has gone through all the various phases of criminal punishment, from the simple local oakum shed and treadmill to the far-away stone quarry and mineral mine, and so knows all about it. The said human wolf and enemy of all law and social harmony, his progenitor, does not take his firstborn on his knee as soon as he exhibits symptoms of knowing right from wrong, and do his best to instil into his young mind what as a candidate for Newgate honours the first principles of his life should be.
This would be bad enough, but what really happens is worse. To train one’s own child to paths of rectitude it is necessary to make him aware of the existence of paths of iniquity and wrong, that when inadvertently he approaches the latter, he may recognise and shun them. So on the other hand, if by the devil’s agency a child is to be made bold and confident in the wrong road, the right must be exhibited to him in a light so ridiculous as to make it altogether distasteful to him. Still a comparison is instituted, and matters may so come about that one day he may be brought to re-consider the judiciousness of his choice and perhaps to reverse his previous decision. But if he has received no teaching at all; if in the benighted den in which he is born, and in which his childish intellect dawns, no ray of right and truth ever penetrates, and he grows into the use of his limbs and as much brains as his brutish breeding affords him, and with no other occupation before him than to follow in the footsteps of his father the thief—how much more hopeless is his case?
Does the reader ask, are there such cases? I can answer him in sorrowful confidence, that in London alone they may be reckoned in thousands. In parts of Spitalfields, in Flower and Dean Street, and in Kent Street, and many other streets that might be enumerated, they are the terror of small shopkeepers, and in Cow Cross, with its horrible chinks in the wall that do duty for the entrance of courts and alleys—Bit Alley, Frying Pan Alley, Turk’s Head-court, and Broad Yard, they swarm like mites in rotten cheese. As a rule, the police seldom make the acquaintance of this thievish small fry (if they did, the estimated number of London robbers would be considerably augmented); but occasionally, just as a sprat will make its appearance along with a haul of mackerel, one reads in the police reports of “Timothy Mullins, a very small boy, whose head scarcely reached the bar of the dock;” or of “John Smith, a child of such tender age that the worthy magistrate appeared greatly shocked,” charged with some one of the hundred acts of petty pilfering by means of which the poor little wretches contrive to stave off the pangs of hunger. Where is the use of reasoning with Master Mullins on his evil propensities? The one propensity of his existence is that of the dog—to provide against certain gnawing pains in his belly. If he has another propensity, it is to run away out of dread for consequences, which is dog-like too. All the argument you can array against this little human waif with one idea, will fail to convince him of his guilt; he has his private and deeply-rooted opinion on the matter, you may depend, and if he screws his fists into his eyes, and does his earnest best to make them water—if when in the magisterial presence he contorts his countenance in affected agony, it is merely because he perceives from his worship’s tone that he wishes to agonize him, and is shrewd enough to know that to “give in best,” as he would express it, is the way to get let off easy.
But supposing that he were not overawed by the magisterial presence, and felt free to speak what is foremost in his mind unreservedly as he would speak it to one of his own set. Then he would say, “It is all very fine for you to sit there, you that have not only had a jolly good breakfast, but can afford to sport a silver toothpick to pick your teeth with afterwards, it is all very fine for you to preach to me that I never shall do any good, but one of these days come to something that’s precious bad, if I don’t cut the ways of thieving, and take to honest ways. There’s so many different kinds of honest ways. Yours is a good ’un. I ain’t such a fool as not to know that it’s better to walk in honest ways like them you’ve got into, and to wear gold chains and velvet waistcoats, than to prowl about in ragged corduroys, and dodge the pleeseman, and be a prig: but how am I to get into them sorts of honest ways? Will you give me a hist up to ’em? Will you give me a leg-up—I’m such a little cove, you see—on to the bottom round of the ladder that leads up to ’em? If it ain’t in your line to do so, p’raps you could recommend me to a lady or gentleman that would? No! Then, however am I to get into honest ways? Shall I make a start for ’em soon as I leaves this ere p’lice office, from which you are so werry kind as to discharge me? Shall I let the chances of stealing a turnip off a stall, or a loaf out of a baker’s barrow, go past me, while I keep straight on, looking out for a honest way?—straight on, and straight on, till I gets the hungry staggers (you never had the hungry staggers, Mr. Magistrate), and tumble down on the road? I am not such a fool, thank’e. I don’t see the pull of it. I can do better in dishonest ways. I’m much obliged to YOU. I’m sure of a crust, though a hard ’un, while I stick to the latter, and if I break down, you’ll take care of me for a spell, and fatten me up a bit; but s’pose I go on the hunt after them honest ways you was just now preaching about, and I miss ’em, what am I then? A casual pauper, half starved on a pint of skilly, or ‘a shocking case of destitution,’ and the leading character in a coroner’s inquest!” All this Master Timothy Mullins might urge, and beyond favouring him with an extra month for contempt of court, what could the magistrate do or say?
Swelling the ranks of juvenile thieves we find in large numbers the thief-born. Writing on this subject, a reverend gentleman of wisdom and experience says, “Some are thieves from infancy. Their parents are thieves in most cases; in others, the children are orphans, or have been forsaken by their parents, and in such cases the children generally fall into the hands of the professional thief-trainer. In every low criminal neighbourhood there are numbers of children who never knew their parents, and who are fed and clothed by the old thieves, and made to earn their wages by dishonest practices. When the parent thieves are imprisoned or transported, their children are left to shift for themselves, and so fall into the hands of the thief-trainer. Here, then, is one great source of crime. These children are nurtured in it. They come under no good moral influence; and until the ragged-schools were started, they had no idea of honesty, not to mention morality and religion. Sharpened by hunger, intimidated by severe treatment, and rendered adroit by vigilant training, this class of thieves is perhaps the most numerous, the most daring, the cleverest, and the most difficult to reform. In a moral point of view, these savages are much worse off than the savages of the wilderness, inasmuch as all the advantages of civilization are made to serve their criminal habits. The poor, helpless little children literally grow up into a criminal career, and have no means of knowing that they are wrong; they cannot help themselves, and have strong claims on the compassion of every lover of his species.”
Truly enough these seedling recruits of the criminal population are the most difficult to reform. They are impregnable alike to persuasion and threatening. They have an ingrain conviction that it is you who are wrong, not them. That you are wrong in the first place in appropriating all the good things the world affords, leaving none for them but what they steal; and in the next place, they regard all your endeavours to persuade them to abandon the wretched life of a thief for the equally poor though more creditable existence of the honest lad, as humbug and selfishness. “No good feeling is ever allowed to predominate; all their passions are distorted, all their faculties are perverted. They believe the clergy are all hypocrites, the judges and magistrates tyrants, and honest people their bitterest enemies. Believing these things sincerely, and believing nothing else, their hand is against every man, and the more they are imprisoned the more is their dishonesty strengthened.”
This is, indeed, a doleful summing up of our present position and future prospects as regards so large a percentage of those we build prisons for. It is somewhat difficult to avoid a feeling of exasperation when, as an honest man, and one who finds it at times a sore pinch to pay rates and taxes, one contemplates the ugly, hopeless picture. Still, we should never forget that these are creatures who are criminal not by their own seeking. They are as they were born and bred and nurtured, and the only way of relieving society of the pest they are against it, is to take all the care we may to guard against the ravages of those we have amongst us, and adopt measures for the prevention of their breeding a new generation.