criminals, habitual criminals; they have no idea
whatever of honest industry, but scorn and
contempt of it. Allowed to go on stealing,
they will steal until they are discovered.
Then they will be locked up, and when they
receive their licences, or their sentences expire,
they will go through exactly the same course
again. These are the wretched creatures twice
and thrice convicted, in whose behalf our
kindliness and our pity are invoked. These are
the injured innocents on whose behalf
heart-rending appeals are made to our merciful
consideration. Why, in the name of all that is
absurdly conventional, should we wait to lock
up Thomas Smith and Louisa Lyons until we
absolutely detect them in the commission of
new crime? Why should we not keep them
from fresh mischief if they cannot show us that
they have really become reputable members of
society? It is one thing to smooth the path
back to the world for the convict whose crime
may have been the result of sudden temptation,
and an exceptional act in his life. It is a very
different thing to allow a morbid sentimentality
to come in the way of the suppression of
scoundrels who make robbery a trade, and
criminality an occupation.

It is said that "a convicted person under these
arrangements would be mere vermin all his life,
with every man's hand against him, and his hand
against every man." Whereas the Act, it must
be remembered, applies only to a particular class
of convicted persons; two convictions at least
are necessary to bring any criminal within its
provisions. Even then the constable has no
power himself; he can only take the suspected
person before the proper authorities, by whom
proper evidence will be required before the
penal clauses of the Act can be put in force.
As matters now stand, the professed criminal's
hand is undoubtedly against every man, but
it unfortunately happens that every man's hand
is not against him. Lord Kimberley proposes
to put the two sides on an equality.

There is but one other objection urged
against the bill, and that is one which is a very
old rusty weapon against any measure involving
an increase of police responsibility and
supervision. The odious foreign spy system!
Think of the professional spies that will be let
loose on the country! Consider the invasion
of our private lives—the private lives of such
of us as are not felons—which will be the
natural and inevitable consequence of setting
the police to work to watch a few felons!
Now, the professional spies—an ill-natured
euphemism for police constables—who will be
let loose on the country, will have nothing
whatever to do with the private lives of any
of us who are not felons; and more, they will
even have nothing to do with the private lives
of such of us as are felons, if we have only been
once convicted. No one will suffer but the
habitual professional criminal, and that he
should suffer until he learns that his profession
is on the whole a decidedly wearing and
uncomfortable one, is a most desirable thing. As to
his claim to be at large between his crimes,
after he has become a professional criminal, he
is the common enemy, and it is forfeit and
gone.

AS THE CROW FLIES.
PLYMOUTH TO BODMIN.

THE broad thoroughfare of the sky not
being much impeded by traffic westward, the
crow makes a straight swift flight of it from
Plymouth to Liskeard—"the palace on a hill,"
as the Celts called it.

This small town, embedded among the rocky
downs of Caradon and the Bodmin moors, was
the centre of much hard fighting in the civil wars,
when the gay Cavaliers of Cornwall met the
stony-faced Puritans of Plymouth on Bradoc
Downs, between Liskeard and Lostwithiel. Sir
Ralph Hopton—"the soldiers' darling," whom
Clarendon afterwards described as the only man
never spoken ill of in the Prince's council—was
in the field, with Sir John Berkley as
commissary-general, and Colonel Ashburnham, as
major-general of foot. All Cornwall was theirs,
from that grim ship-shattering rock the Shark's
Fin to the very earthworks of Saltash, on whose
terraces the Puritan sentinels paced, looking
gloomily westward for the first sword flash of the
enemy. The Parliament resolved to stamp this
fire out before the western prairie caught.
Rapidly, like clouds rolling together for a storm,
grim forces gathered from subjugated Dorset,
Somerset, and Devon, and moved westward
like a rising deluge. Ruthen, the Scotch
governor of Plymouth, led the Parliament forces
over the Tamar, to charge the king's men,
who were sounding their bugles and beating
their drums at Bodmin. Sir Ralph, gallant with
lace and feather, wishing to show the psalm-
singers that Royalist gentlemen could fear God
as well as honour the king, had public prayers
read by the army chaplains at the head of every
squadron. The Puritans from the high ground
muttered that "the Cavalier babe-eaters were
at mass." Sir Ralph, "winging his foot with
horse and dragoons," advanced, full of fight,
within musket-shot of the enemy, and, seeing
the Puritan cannon had not yet come up from
Liskeard, pushed forward two iron minion
drakes, very light guns, under cover of small
parties of horse. The first two shots striking
full among the Puritan pikemen, and coming
from they knew not what hidden batteries, to
which their tardy guns could not reply, struck
a panic into Ruthen's men; they began to fall
back, and, seeing that, the Cavaliers bore hotly
forward, pikes down, and drove the Roundheads
towards Liskeard. The Cornish men,
famous at hedge skirmishing, drove out the
enemy's musketeers from behind the loose
stone walls and hedges, where they had been
thrown back in reserve to protect Ruthen's
retreat. Soon the fierce and alert attack of the
Cornish men broke the Roundhead ranks, their
pikes wavered and scattered, their colours
drooped, their fire relaxed, and they fled
towards Devonshire, leaving twelve hundred and
fifty sullen men prisoners, and nearly all their