“Not cured yet?” said I.
“No,” replied he, “and never will. You have spoiled a good job at Dalkeith with your d——d dodging.”
“Are you a member of a Dalkeith society, too, Lang?” I retorted, good-naturedly.
“Something better,” said he; “I might have had £10 in my pocket before morning, if you hadn’t come between me and my game.”
We began our walk homewards. I didn’t require to take hold of him. We had measured our powers, and he knew he had no more chance in flight than in personal conflict, and he walked quietly enough. I would put my handcuffs to use, however, at the Gibbet Toll, to provide against the dangers of alleys favourable to a bolt. I remember I tried him on the soft parts, in regard to the society-box, reminding him that he was robbing the widow and the fatherless.
“Humph! what have I to do with the widow and the fatherless? I am an orphan myself, and there is a difference besides, for your widow and fatherless have friends, because they have characters, and I don’t know but they are better cared for than I, who have neither the one nor the other. I am bound to a trade, as that trade is bound to me, and I must live or die by it. So there’s no use for your blarney about widows and orphans. All you have to do is to take me up, and get me condemned and imprisoned, and I will be the same man when I come out.”
No doubt he would; and why should I have doubted, who scarcely, in all my experience, could hold out my finger and say, “There’s a man whom I have mended, and he is grateful to me for having been hard with him?” No wonder I am weary of my efforts at penal reformation.
I believe the nine months’ imprisonment awarded to these three desperate fellows only steeled them to dare the committal of crimes deserving transportation for as many years. How true it is, that the current of vice and criminality proceeds, both in its ebb and flow, on a “sliding scale.”
The Miniature.
IT is not often that I have had to deal with irregular criminals, by which I mean those that are not moulded and hardened in infancy and early youth, but who, from some inherent weakness of nature have, by the force of example, or the spur of unlawful gratifications, been precipitated—sometimes against the silent admonitions of their better genius—into a breach of the laws. I have said already that those whom Mr Moxey used to call “abnormals” are comparatively few, and it is not difficult to see how it should happen that their cases are the most painful exhibitions of misery that can be witnessed in this—to most, I fear—very miserable world. In the normals the heart is all in one way. Seldom is there any conscience stirring to produce the terrors of retribution; nay, the conscience is often completely reversed, so that the struggle of pain or anxiety, if it exists, is between the impulse of selfishness and the check imposed by the restraining laws. If a regular thief is sorry for anything, it is for being detected before he has enjoyed the fruit of his ingenuity or violence. There are only two powers in opposition—self, and the world. God is not feared, simply because He is never thought of; religion has no sanction, because it is not known. In the irregulars again, their heart is divided between God and the devil. Yes, that’s my blunt way of putting it. And we may naturally look for some misery, I think, where the poor sensitive mind of the human creature is made the theatre of a contest between such powers.