One thing, at least, is certain; it would come much _cheaper_ to the country if these budding burglars and pickpockets were caught up, and caged away from the community at large, before their natures became too thoroughly pickled in the brine of rascality. Boy thieves are the most mischievous and wasteful. They will mount a house roof, and for the sake of appropriating the half-a-crown’s worth of lead that forms its gutter, cause such damage as only a builder’s bill of twenty pounds or so will set right. The other day a boy stole a family Bible valued at fifty shillings, and after wrenching off the gilt clasps, threw the book into a sewer; the clasps he sold to a marine store dealer for _twopence halfpenny_! It may be fairly assumed that in the case of boy thieves, who are so completely in the hands of others, that before they can “make” ten shillings in cash, they must as a rule steal to the value of at least four pounds, and sometimes double that sum. But let us put the loss by exchange at its lowest, and say that he gets a fourth of the value of what he steals, before he can earn eighteenpence a day, he must rob to the amount of two guineas a week—a hundred and nine pounds a year! Whatever less sum it costs the State to educate and clothe and teach him, the nation would be in pocket. It would be idle to attempt to trace back to its origin the incentive to crime in the class of small criminals here treated of. Innocent of the meaning of the term “strict integrity,” they are altogether unconscious of offending against it. They may never repent, for they can feel no remorse for having followed the dictates of their nature. No possible good can arise from piecing and patching with creditable stuff the old cloak of sin they were clothed in at their birth, and have worn ever since, till it has become a second skin to them. ‘Before they can be of any real service as members of an honest community, they must be _reformed_ in the strictest sense of the term. Their tainted morality must he laid bare to the very bones, as it were, and its rotten foundation made good from its deepest layer. The arduousness of this task it is hard to overrate; nothing, indeed, can be harder, except it be to weed out from an adult criminal the tough and gnarled roots of sin that grip and clasp about and strangle his better nature. And this should be the child criminal reformer’s comfort and encouragement. It must not be imagined, however, that the growth of juvenile criminality is altogether confined to those regions where it is indigenous to the soil; were it so, our prospects of relief would appear much more hopeful than at present, for, as before stated, all that is necessary would be to sow the baleful ground with the saving salt of sound and wholesome teaching, and the ugly vegetation would cease.