That the evil is a very great one no one can doubt. It amounts to a positive insecurity of life and property which is disgraceful in the richest, most civilized, most complicated society on earth. At this moment, the number living by depredation and outrage, and known to belong to the criminal class, is estimated to reach in the United Kingdom to 130,000. In this year, 1863, a considerable portion of the respectable inhabitants of London are reduced to carry concealed weapons for their own defence; and this from no groundless apprehensions, but because they _may_ any day be called upon to use them, and often _are_. We annually commit to, and liberate from, our county jails in England and Wales, at least 130,000 offenders, a very large proportion, if not the majority, of whom are habitual pilferers, burglars, or in other ways violators of the law, and recognized preyers upon the industrious and peaceful part of the community. Besides these, we turn loose every year, at the expiration of their sentence of penal servitude, or shortly before its expiration, 3000 convicts, nearly all of whom are professional, finished, hardened offenders, and all of whom, with scarcely any exceptions worth naming, have been confined for crimes in which ruffianism and dishonesty were combined. Of these 3000, at least 2500 on an average are liberated in this country, and almost invariably go back to their evil courses, more vicious, more skillful, more irreclaimable than ever. Many of them have been convicted several times, never dream of adopting an honest mode of life, and could not do so if they wished. In a word, we have among us an army--very active, very well trained, tolerably organized, very resolute, and in part very desperate--of internecine enemies and spoliators, as numerous as the troops of most European kingdoms, and more numerous than the military and police forces in our own country combined. This is the evil we have to deal with. It is an evil, in some degree and in some form, incidental to every large and populous community; but the form and degree depend entirely on our own management. We may reduce it to the minimum which human temptation to wrong and the imperfection of human powers of repression must always leave, a minimum which would be seldom heard of and little felt, and which should be always tending to decrease. Or we may suffer it, as we are in a fair way to do now, to augment and intensify year by year till it reaches the maximum compatible with a comfortable existence and a secure civilization. Now what we affirm is, that, for the height to which it has reached at the present moment, we have only ourselves to thank. For a long time back, in spite of ceaseless warning, and ignoring all the lessons of experience, physiology, and common sense, we have done little to repress crime and much to encourage it. Our plans of dealing with it have been based upon no clear understanding and no settled principle;