I have not the precise
data, but the figures hazarded are not excessive. A sound statistician
would make a more sensational showing; and when he proceeded to cast up
his account for the aggregate of the years since the war, and of the
estimated amounts for the coming fifty years, the bill would look large
even with a hundred million paymasters to foot it.
In that bill, probably the smallest item would be the cost of crime
itself--the actual loss caused to the community by the thieving of
thieves,--of the thieves, that is, who have been convicted and condemned
as such; for there is no way of figuring on how much the undetected
thieves steal. Every time we shake the social body, in this or that
spasm of probing and reform, hundreds drop out, like moths from an
unprotected garment; so that at last we are prone to suspect that the
thief, overt or covert, is more the rule than the exception, and that a
good part of the cash in circulation was more or less dishonestly come
by. But, leaving this aside, the money or values appropriated by thieves
accredited as such and sent to jail, is an amount relatively
inconsiderable, and by no means enough to pay the expenses of their
apprehension, trial, and prison sojourn. It is, then, politically
uneconomical to imprison them.
The reply to this is, of course, that penal slavery is preventive of
crime; that if we did not prosecute malefactors, crime would multiply
and abound, like weeds in a neglected garden.
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