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. Judges and magistrates are human, and I for one would keep them human, with the power to sympathize and the power to laugh, for these things are altogether good, and to a reasonable extent it is right that these wholesome qualities should exercise some influence; but even these faculties require some restraint, or injustice instead of justice will be done. I am afraid there is some truth in what many discharged prisoners have told me--that the length of sentence depends on the whim of the judge, and that on some days it appears evident that a crumb of undigested cheese impairs the temper and judgment, and adds appreciably to the length of the sentences given.