ent the proportion of offences
committed by that class; and it does not represent it for the simple
reason that the well-to-do have facilities for escaping imprisonment
which the ill-to-do have not. When a man with a certain command of
means is involved in criminal proceedings, he has always the
assistance of experienced counsel to defend him, he is always able to
secure the attendance of witnesses,[21] if he has any, and should the
offence be of a nature that a fine will condone, he is always able to
escape imprisonment by paying it. It very often happens that poor
people are unable to secure these advantages in a court of justice,
and prison statistics of the different classes, even if we had them,
would, for the reasons we have just mentioned, always give the working
classes more than their fair share of offenders.

[21] A case was tried in London a short time ago which illustrates
the difficulties in the way of poor people, so far as the
attendance of witnesses is concerned. In this case the witness
appeared five successive days in court waiting for the trial to
come on. Not being paid by the defendant, this witness was
unable to appear the sixth day. On that day the case was at
last called, the prisoner had now no witness and was, of course,
convicted.

It has always to be borne in mind in making calculations respecting
the proportion of criminal offenders among the various sections of the
community that there is a population of habitual criminals which forms
a class by itself. Habitual criminals are not to be confounded with
the working or any other class; they are a set of persons who make
crime the object and business of their lives; to commit crime is their
trade; they deliberately scoff at honest ways of earning a living, and
must accordingly be looked upon as a class of a separate and distinct
character from the rest of the community. According to police
estimates this class consists of between 50,000 and 60,000 persons in
England and Wales. Notwithstanding the smallness of its numbers, this
criminal population contributes a proportion amounting to fully 12 per
cent. to the local and convict prisons of England. As this percentage
of the prison population is recruited from wholly criminal ground, it
is important to place it in a distinct and separate category when
forming an estimate of the criminal tendencies of the several branches
of the population. This is what has been do