He was on my doorstep again that evening. "Come to see you again, Holmes, my boy. Lend us half a crown!" I declined. "Ha!" he said, "you would lend it me soon enough if you knew what a lark I have had. I can't help laughing. Why, I have been to old ---- and offered to give him back his fur coat for a quid." And the rascal roared at the thought of it. "What did he say to you?" "Well, he rather hurt my feelings, for his language was not polite." "I suppose you have not restored it?" "What do you think?"
But Downy got his five years within a few weeks. He removed a big marble clock from the bar of a public-house, and got away with it, too, in broad daylight; but Fate tripped him at last, and he got his well-earned five years. As he is still under forty years of age, I have no doubt but that in prison his talent will be developed. Not that he has much to learn, but even Downy may gather a few wrinkles when given proper opportunities.
Now, Downy represents a very numerous class of men and women, though few of them have his cool assurance and originality, but, like him, live to a large extent by thieving and general dishonesty. These people can seldom furnish _bona-fide_ addresses, or give any proof that they have been doing honest work. Yet they go on from year to year, in and out of prison, undergoing small sentences--first a few days, then a few weeks, followed by a few months, then committal to trial, when sentences of one or two years are passed upon them. Some of them, though their lives are devoted to criminality, never arrive at the dignity of penal servitude.
With due respect, there is, I submit, even now room for improvement with regard to the infliction of sentences. A large amount of latitude must be allowed, for judges and magistrates ought not, must not, be automatic; a certain amount of liberty must be granted to them. But when that latitude includes the right and the power to give fourteen years' penal servitude to a young man of twenty-two for a trumpery offence, and that his first offence; when it includes the right and the power to practically discharge a clever and dangerous woman who has lived by fraud, and whose frauds brought untold suffering upon innocent and aged victims--when this latitude allows cool and calculating rogues to continue interminably their lives of roguery, alternated with very small and insufficient sentences, it is evident that the liberty and latitude allowed require in some way to be circumscribed.