Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/567

 16. BOWEN: THE VICTORIAN PERIOD 553 boxes and cases broken or abstracted. Along different lines of canal receivers of stolen goods set up regular establish- ments, and entire families in the neighbourhood lived on the receipt of the plunder. Silk, wine, spirits, flour, malt, gro- ceries of every description disappeared wholesale. In the Enfield district, upwards of thirty gentlemen in the year 1838, during a period of twelve months, had their stables opened and large quantities of property carried away. Foot- pads lurked in the vicinity of the great manufacturing centres of the north ; robbery with violence, murder itself, went often unpunished. Gangs from towns drifted into the country for the purposes of crime ; the towns, in their turn, suffered from the bad characters who took up their residence in the country, with no apparent anxiety to avoid the presence of the parish constable. Vagrants perambulated the kingdom, living on their wits, and even the cottagers' dwellings were rifled while the inmates were working in the fields. The farmer who kept no private watchman, or who did not live within the radius of an association, was liable to lose great quantities of agricul- tural produce. If he lived near a town like Leeds, he hesitated before returning home after dark from the market or the fair, unless he was in the company of friends. The local constable was sometimes too stupid, sometimes too busy, often too timid, to attend to information given him. It was due to the same cause that wreckers at this date haunted the dangerous and desolate places on the coast. Rural crime, in fact, went unprevented, undetected, unprosecuted. The returns of pros- ecutions and convictions, to which the statesman and the philanthropist in our time have recourse az aff^ording some clue to the prevalence or absence of crime, told absolutely nothing, for they bore no relation at all to the good conduct of the locality. Men abstained from prosecuting when there was no certainty of redress, and the absence of criminal sta- tistics resulted frequently from the undisturbed immunity of the offenders. In two instances towards the beginning of the reign, in neighbourhoods where crime was remarkably preva- lent, her Majesty's judges were presented with white kid gloves at the assizes, as emblematic of the purity of the district.