To be caught is the foolish part of the business. "You are a lot of fools to get in here, myself included," is one of the prison inscriptions noted by Mr. Horsley. "Had God wished me to be different, He would have made me different," said Goethe. In the same spirit is the philosophy of crime set forth by a man known to Lombroso: "If God has given to us the instinct to steal, He has given to others the instinct to imprison us; the world is an amusing theatre!" It is rare, however, for the criminal to take so lofty a standpoint as this; more usually he bases the justification for his own existence on the vices of respectable society--"the ignorance and cupidity of the public," as one prisoner expressed it--that he is shrewd enough to perceive; "it is a game of rogue catch rogue," a convict told Mr. Davitt. A youthful French brigand in the days of Charles IX., as he impassively ascended the scaffold, declared that he was innocent, because he had never robbed poor people but only princes and lords, the greatest robbers in the world. "We are poor rogues, and so hanged, while others, no less guilty in another way, escape," pleaded Captain Bartholomew Roberts's fifty-two pirates, executed at the beginning of the eighteenth century. "Law for the rich but none for the poor," is a modern English prison inscription which would probably have expressed its writer's meaning better if it had been transposed. _Quels gredins les honnêtes gens!_
An Italian criminal wrote in a book of "Moral Maxims" by Tommaseo: "When you have read this book become a priest or a master; if not it will be of no use to you. There are fine maxims in this book, but maxims are no good in this world, where the god of gold reigns alone. He who has money is brave and virtuous; all the maxims of Tommaseo are of no use to him who has none; he will still be treated with contempt." A Milanese thief said to Lombroso: "I do not rob; I merely take from the rich their superfluities; and, besides, do not advocates and merchants rob? Why accuse me rather than them?" "Knowing," wrote the murderer Raynal, "that three-fourths of the social virtues are cowardly vices, I thought that an open assault on a rich man would be less ignoble than the cautious combinations of fraud." J. G. Wainewright, when in prison, said to a visitor: "Sir, you city men enter upon your speculations and take the chances of them. Some of your speculations succeed, and some fail. Mine happen to have failed." An Italian thief, one Rosati, said: "I am proud of my deeds; I have never taken small sums; to attack such large sums I consider a speculation rather than a theft." Another Italian thief said that there were two kinds of justice in the world: natural justice, that which he himself practised when he shared the proceeds of his thefts with the poor; and artificial justice, that which is protected by social laws. The criminal is firmly convinced that his imprisonment is a sign that the country is going to the dogs. A prison inscription quoted by Lombroso runs: "I am imprisoned for stealing half-a-dozen eggs; Ministers who rob millions every day are honoured. Poor Italy!" "We are necessary," a brigand chief said proudly to his judges; "God has sent us on the earth to punish the avaricious and the rich. We are a kind of divine scourge. And for the rest, without us what would you judges do?"