of rent, and pay it regularly, for the sake of keeping together. The aspect of this quarter is low, foul and dingy. Obscurity of language and conduct is of course common to all parts of it, but it is not as a rule a riotous neighbourhood. Thieves do not rob each other, and they have a wholesome fear of making rows, lest it should bring the police into their notorious territory. These haunts are not only the refuges and abiding places of criminals, but they are the training colleges for young thieves. Apart from the crimes which arise, I might say almost naturally from passion or poverty—apart also from the mere relaxation of moral culture, caused by the daily exhibition of apparent success in crime, it is known that an organized corruption is carried on by the adult thieves among the lads of London.” It is by laying hands on these children, and providing them with employment, the pleasurable exercise of which shall of itself convince them how infinitely superior as a “policy” honesty is to be preferred to that which consigned their father to Portland, that we may do more good than by the concoction of as many legislative enactments as have had birth since Magna Charta. Of the children who are not the progeny of thieves, but who somehow find their way into the criminal ranks, it is undoubtedly true that pernicious literature, more than once alluded to in these pages, does much to influence them towards evil courses. This is a belief that is justified, not alone by observation and inference, but by the confession of juvenile prisoners themselves. It is a fact that at least fifty per cent. of the young thieves lodged in gaol, when questioned on the subject, affect that it was the shining example furnished by such gallows heroes as “Dick Turpin” and “Blueskin,” that first beguiled them from the path of rectitude, and that a large proportion of their ill-gotten gains was expended in the purchase of such delectable biographies.