The Express.
London, England, 1851-01-09 00:00:00

THE EXPRESS, THURSDAY EVENING, JANUARY 9, 1851

in detail, it ham none so formidable as to
be insuperable if in " sticking to our prin-
ciples" we will only follow Mr. Osnonnes
'advise, and "Throw away our preiudicea" In
passing under the consideration of the practical men
of Manchester, it will docabtleft be rendered still more
compreheneive, the standard of education to be pro-
vided raised still higher than is even now proposed,
the power of local administration be still farther
carried out; and, when perfected, it will be a worthy
sight to see Manches'er commencing a new half
century by corning to Parliament to tax itself for the
removal of that ignorance with which the detractors
I of its greatness reproach our manufacturing system.

VERT striking are the contrasts of a great city.
In London, for example, one short step will take a
sojourner from scenes of luxury more than Augustan
into depths of misery more deep than those of JOB.
Morality in stalking through the streets is jostled by
licentiousness at every corner; vice seizes the arm
and carries off in triumph the very pupil of virtue ;
crime holds its levee at the very door of the hall of
justice, and immediately over against the temples of

the law.
Last Monday was one of our festivals. Ordinary
people celebrated it u "Twelfth-day;" Puseyites
kept it as an " Holiday of Obligation." A gentle-
man from the country, whom, for distinction sake,
we will symbolise as Mr. lolly Green, was spend-
ing the evening at a friend's in London. He had
enjoyed the magic larrern of the younger branches ;
had danced polkas with all the muelin misses;
had banded ices, and perhaps eomethifig stronger
and more suited to the season, to all the elder
ladies, and ultimately had himself sit down to
a carper at which, as he explicitly declares, the
champagne was the best be ever remembered to have
tasted. Nothing could exceed Mr. Green's joviality.
At a late, or, if you like it better, an early hour in the
smelting, he went down Sir linger de Cawley
with the prettiest girl of the party, and ultimately
let his friend's one of the last, and quite inclined to
find his own way home on foot, despite the remon-
strances of his host, who hospitably warned him as
he saw him safely down the ate ps, that he would do
far better to secure a cab.
The night was fine and Mr. dilly Green's route lay
through Holborn. As he passed along be stopped
occasionally to admire the glimmer of the gas lomps,
which seemed on this particular night to shine with
more than ordinary brightness. Whilst loitering for
• moment under one of these illuminators, he was
accosted by a young lady, whom he took to be thevery
pareonification of Venus, and who, without much
difficulty, induced him to diverge from his route to
pay a visit to her bower. Had the chew agne not
operated pretty strongly, the route to the bower
eight have appeared to our hero anything but
Paphian. It lay up Gray's-inn-lane, and diverged from
out of it into a narrow and, truth to say, a filthy
court, where it appeared that the boner of the Queen
of Love was enshrined in the recesses of a " cellar."
Diving deeper into this cellar, Mr. dilly Green
finds himself in unexpected comoanv. His angelic
vision of the gas-lamp appeared to have numerous
company in her Eien. Two large kitchens were
filled with men, women, and children, smoking and
boozing, and the blaze of two large fires reflected
visages which even to look on might have sobered a
reveller further gone even than Mr. fol'y Green. lie
had scareAy got into the "ken" ere has recovering
senses told him to get out of it. But easier said than
done. He had namely reached the top of the cellar-
steps ere he was pinned by two men who had has-
teoed after him front below; one of whom embraced

him cordially, whilst the other dived into the recesses
of his pockets. Luckily for Mr. Green, two police-
men, who bad seen him descend, were on the watch
for him on his exit. The light of a lantern turned
full upon the party caused opera ions upon Mr.
Green's pockets to be momentarily suspended, and,
before he could look about him, he found his assail-
ants in custody, and he and they together in full
march to the police-station, where he was freed to
assume the character of prosecutor.
What was this kitchen to which Mr. Green was
taken? The following account of it is given in the
police report:—

Mr. Cosh* said he had heard I great deal about the
kitchen in For-court, and Inquired what sort of a place it waa ?
Tyler replied that it was a house rented by a person from
the superior landlord, and wu appropriated for the accom.
moda,ion of thieves, cadgers, prostitutes, rere., who paid 21.
and 3d. a night for a bed. The parties slept indiscrimi-
nately in the tame apartment—men, women end children.
Tkere were two large kitchens, in which tite motley group
coutregatal ; and, on rotibt ries being commiitcd, the thi-ves
inveriatly repaired to the kitchen to dispose of the produce of

their deireditione.
Mr. Combe—ls the piece lit up
Tyler—Yee, your worship, it ie lit up with gas. Two
large fires are kept up is large ranges in the kitchens all day
and night.
Mr. Combs asked how many could be
kitchen t
Tiler—Abut 200, your worship. It is never difficult to
apprehend thieves at toe kitchen after the robberies were

in the

eiereoitted.
Two points are suggested by this account of the
thieves' haunt :—first, how it comes that such places
are permitted to exist ;--second, the wretched nature
of the trade the criminal population of the country
follow.
There could be little difficulty in putting a stop to
such a place as the Thieves' Kitchen, in Fox-court.
A magistrate could cause the plac3 to be shut up any
day, or if he felt difficulty about putting the law in
operation against snob a place, the police could still
more effectually close it, by deterring people from
going there. But this is not the policy of the police.
The truth is, that those places of general resort for
thieves are useful to them. They have spies in every
t one of them. It is from those who attend
them that they get their information. If these
" kens" were closed they wouli be at a loss for many
• scent which they are now able to obtain without dit-
ficulty. The frequout and much-abased police phrase
" from information I received," would, if thoroughly
probed, be found, nine times out of ten, to refer to
something that emanated from the "Thieves'
Kitchen." Is a great offence--a successful burglary,
for example—committed in the town, " the informa-
tion I received" canvinces the police officer that
Bobit and Smasher and Crack were " in it," because
they all met at the "ken" early that night, or were
all absent from it, as the case may be. On this ac-
count it is that such places as the "Thieves' Kitchen"
are permitted to exist, the police thinking that detec-
tion is better than prevention; and acting on that prin-
ciple as becomes people who make their living by it.
Whether this be right or wrong, it is not, however,
our present purpose to inquire. We prefer turning to
another feature in the case—the thieves' mode of life.
Certainly the description given by " Tyler " of the
Thieves' Kitchen in Fox-court anything but impresses
one with a notion that the thieves' pursuit is success-
ful, or that their life is pleasant or agreeable. Very
differenefor example, is the account of "the kitchen"
from the notion of the haunt of the " Forty Thieves,"
which we are apt to derive from early reading and a
little stage experience. No entrance here from a
dense wood, where policemen never penetrated—no
steeds standing ready saddled in their stalls for the
special accommodation of the squadron—no chests
full of gold ready to be dispersed by " the Captain "
among the most deserving of his comrades. On
the contrary : An entrance watched from every
owner ; a squalid cellar, where a couple of
hundred men, women, and children, are all huddled
together at twopence a night—these, and worse than
these, are the realities of thieves' existence. In
another police report on Tuesday, there was an account
of a thieves' den which bad been discovered by the
police " in consequence of information they received,"
under one of the closed arches of the South Western
Railway station. It was a horrible bole into which
about twenty boys, who composed a gang of petty
depredators in Lambeth, found their way through a
sort of large rat-hole, and where they slept it seems
on straw laid upon the ground, and subsisted upon
the small pleader of the neighbourhood. A ladicroas
account is given of the consternation of these misera-
ble, when the officer discovered their den and threw
the light of his bull's-eye lantern in among them.
They are described in the police report to have been
a ragged and miserable lot of boys," and though
their whereabouts had been previously unknown, all
of them, according to the police, had been long fend-
liar as thieves or thieves' companions.
Such, thee, is the wretched life of the thief. But
a fact which seems important in connexion with this
subject is the consideration of what becomes doll the
property which is stoles ? We hear of gangs of
thieves tolerated by the police in their "kitchens"—
we hear of knots of dirty boys arrested and com-
mitted to the House of Correction, as trespauers upon
the property of the Smith Western Railway—but we

bear little or nothing of the arrest of the FAorne of
the thieves' society—the employers of these criminals
—the wretches who profit by their breeches of the
law. It is a singular and rather a suspicions thing
that " the information we received" is so rarely
found to extend to the whereabouts of the
valuables that are stolen. There was the
plate robbery the other day in the Strand :
the police failed to get a clue to a single article that
Wltslost! There was another robbery of the same
sort a day or two ago at Liverpool—what has become
of all the jewels, and trinkets, and watches that were
stolen on that occasion ? It may be all very well to
keep up Thieves' Kitchens for purposes of detection,
but would it not be tar better to try and get at the
root of the evil ?
One thing, however, is clear from all these facts.
A thief's lot is no enviable one. He has a bard time
of it : be is always in peril either of detection or
betrayal : he is no sooner a skilled practitioner,
than he becomes a marked man: he cannot
move wit! out some one at Lie heels, and
when he makes a "hit" the profit goes not to
him, but to those who relieve him of articles he cannot
himself possess without auspicion,and whose silence
it is cheap for him to pay any price to purchase.
At a very remarkable meeting of thieves last year,
which was attended by Lord ASHLEY and others, and
of which some particulars found their way into the
public prints, we remember ice being stated that the
thieves present, one and all, declared that if only a
chance were open to them of leading an honest life
they would infinitely prefer the hardest employment
that could be given to them to the life of hardships,
of peril, and of misery to which their unlawful avoca-
tions exposed them.
We beleve that could the statistics of crime be
taken, it would be found, among males, that in nine
cases out of ten they were led to theft by want. And
the real difficulty is, to decide, not how thieves are to
be punished (which is all the police and legislature
seem to care about), but how thieves are to be pre-
vented from becoming thieves, and how they may be
reclaimed where there Is a reasonable prospect of re-
claiming them.