so that I have no fear of flogging. But, even if I
was able to stand flogging, all the difference it would make to me,
would be to make me keep a sharper eye after the 'coppers.' Small game
would not then tempt me so much. I should look after larger stakes, go
in at heavier jobs, and calculate well my chances of escape before
going to work. Once I had made up my mind to commit a crime, and saw
the coast clear, the chance of all the floggings in the world would not
deter me. I'll find you fellows in the prison to-day who will take a
good round flogging for a pound of tobacco! now do you think that the
mere chance of the lash would hinder these men from attempting to get
hold of a few hundred pounds' worth of jewellery? It's not likely.
Thieves weren't frightened into honesty by the gallows, nor would they
be now, if they were to be cut into mince-meat. Thousands might be led
into honest ways if suitable work was found for them, but it would
require to be very different work from that of the 'navvy,' and then
many of them have to be _learned_ to work before they could make a
living at all."

"Then you don't think flogging did you any good at all?"

"Certainly it did not; and what's more, you will never find a man doing
much good after being flogged. It either makes him an invalid, or a
desperado. It may make him quiet under authority, but it ensures the
very opposite when he is free."

This prisoner was a more than usually clever and intelligent type of a
numerous class of convicts--not the most difficult class to cure, but
the next to it, perhaps. Unlike the city-bred professional thief, he
had been taught to work, and such work as he could perform was no
punishment to him. Unlike the professional, he goes out of the prison
hesitating, wavering, as to his future course: willing to take work if
suitable; determined to avoid the workhouse; easily tempted to steal,
resolved to do so rather than starve; but, on the whole, anxious to
make a comfortable livelihood. He had one son, and I remember well how
glad he was when some benevolent person wrote to him to say that he had
been bound an apprentice to a respectable trade. He is now dead.
Another of my companions was of a somewhat different class, and a much
more difficult subject to deal with. He told me that he was fifty-seven
years of age. I asked him how long he had been a prisoner, not adding
his sentences together, but how long he had actually been in prison.

"Thirt