stering a
thrashing--just to re-assert his authority--which, however, the poor woman
received with equanimity, remarking that it was only his way. He
recommenced his lounging life, working occasionally when money was to be
easily earned--for the convict stain does not prevent a man getting
agricultural employment--and spending the money in liquor. When tolerably
sober he is, in a sense, harmless; if intoxicated, his companions give him
the road to himself.

Now there is nothing exceptionally characteristic of the agricultural
labourer in the career of such a man. Members of other classes of the
working community are often sent to penal servitude, and sometimes men of
education and social position. But it is characteristic of agricultural
life that a man with the stigma of penal servitude can return and
encounter no overpowering prejudice against him. There are work and wages,
for him if he likes to take them. No one throws his former guilt in his
face. He may not be offered a place of confidence, nor be trusted with
money, as the upper labourers--carters for instance--sometimes are. But
the means of subsistence are open to him, and he will not be driven by the
memory of one crime to commit another.

There is no school of crime in the country. Children are not brought up
from the earliest age to beg and steal, to utter loquacious falsehood, or
entrap the benevolent with sham suffering. Hoary thieves do not keep
academies for the instruction of little fingers in the art of theft. The
science of burglary is unstudied. Though farmhouses are often situate in
the most lonely places a case of burglary rarely occurs, and if it does,
is still more rarely traced to a local resident. In such houses there is
sometimes a good deal of old silver plate, accumulated in the course of
generations--a fact that must be perfectly well known to the labouring
class, through the women indoor-servants. Yet such attempts are quite
exceptional. So, too, are robberies from the person with violence. Serious
crime is, indeed, comparatively scarce. The cases that come before the
Petty Sessions are, for the most part, drunkenness, quarreling, neglect or
absenteeism from work, affiliation, petty theft, and so on.

The fact speaks well for the rural population; it speaks very badly for
such characters as the one that has been described. If he will not turn
into the path of honest labour, that is his own fault. The injury he does
is this, that he encou