The Sun.
London, England, 1848-10-30 00:00:00

atrtinna .

LONDON, MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 1848.

Excuses for theft are, without question, calculated
to render society lax in its moral character. And
hence it has always been that the virtues of Lace
daimon have shone with a spurious lustre amidst the
beautiful sobriety of the Hellenes. When the Spar-
tan youth, hiding the stolen fox under his chlamys,
allowed his vitals to be devoured without a groan
rather than reveal the fact of his larceny, it is impos-
sible not to regard the robber with an admiration
very materially modified by disgust. The incident is
as revolting as that recounted by the Greek historians
of the Helots being soddened to a state of intoxica-
tion by wine in order to render them
repulsive examples of the effects of drunken-
ne.s. Wherever, in short, virtue has been incul-
cated through a vicious medium, or rice ennobled by
a geeble colouring of morality, the effect has in-
variably been to deteriorate the character of those
among whom such noxious principles have been
propagated.
One excuse, however, there unquestionably is for
theft, or rather, we should say, one decided palliation.
It is a palliation, too, such as no moralist whatsoever
will have the hardihood to deny. We mean, of
course, the excuse or palliation of hunger. When a
man dressed with a slang affectation of fashion—his
coat a paletot, his cravat a Joinville-tie, his
bat gossamer, his rings mosaic, his cane Malacca—
steals your purse or your snuff-box while seated next
you in an omnibus, you are certainly prone to regard
him as more culpable than the unfortunate wretch
who has just been driven unrelieved from the porch of
the workhouse, and has incontinently purloined a
penny loaf from the next baker's. And the culpabi-
lity of the latter is still further diminished if, in proof
of his destitution, he is found to be devouring the bread
when captured by the policeman ; while the just ma-
gistrate is disposed to mitigate the punishment if the
offender is shown to be no idle vagabond, but an
honest and industrious labourer, thrown out of em-
ployment by illness, by calamity, by stagnation of
trade, or by any one of those countless casualties to
which the poor are at different intervals subjected.
An occurrence of precisely this character will be
found recounted in another part of this evening's im-
pression, in a paragraph relating to the petty ses-
sion of Buckinghamshire. It will be perceived from
this paragraph that a railway labourer, deprived of
work in consequence of the temporary suspension
of the local railway, pulled two growing
turnips in a field belonging to a farmer
of Steeple Claydon. The poor fellow was munching
one of those crude vegetables when taken into cus-
tody on Friday. On Saturday he was tried before
the Buckinghamshire pet session, and—for this
miserable theft of two growing turnips, a theft per-
petrated under the influence of extreme hunger—the
man was sentenced to twenty-one days imprisonment
in the Aylesbury gaol, in default of payment of two
shillings and of thirteen shillings and sixpence ex-
penses ! Really one would imagine that the growing
turnips of Steeple Claydon were as precious as
the esculents growing in the magic garden of
ALADDIN. Or, at the least, that there was a pro-
portionate penalty to the idle lopping, or tearing up
by the roots, of a sappling ash. In Attica, according
,to I,
lIUCYDIDES (or, as Mr. GROTE and his admirer,
the schoolmaster of Pisistratus Caxton, would have us