CRINOLINE FOR CRIMINALS.
Among the million objections to the use of the wide petticoats not the least well-founded is the fact, that they are used for purposes of shoplifting. This has many times been proved at the bar of the police courts, and we wonder that more notice has not been attracted to it. For ourselves, the fact is so impressed upon our mind, that when we ever come in contact with a Crinoline which seems more than usually wide, we immediately put down the wearers as a pickpocket, and prepare ourselves at once to see her taken up. Viewing Crinoline, indeed, as an incentive to bad conduct, we forbid our wife and daughters to wear it when our shopping, for fear that it may tempt them to commit some act of theft. A wide petticoat is so convenient a hiding-place for stowing away almost any amount of stolen goods, that we cannot be surprised at finding it so used, and for the mere sake of keeping them from roguery, the fewer women have it at their fingers’ ends the better. Some ladies have a monomania for thievery, and then they go on a day’s shopping can hardly keep their hands off what does not belong to them. Having a commodious receptacle in reach, wherein they may deposit whatever they may sack, they are naturally tempted to indulge in their propensity, by the chances being lessened that they will be found out.
As an instance of how largely the large petticoats are used in acts of petty larceny, we may mention a small fact which has come within our knowledge, and which it may be to the interest of shopkeepers to know. Concealed beneath the skirts of a fashionably dressed female were, the other day, discovered by a vigilant detective the following choice proofs of her propensity to plunder; viz., twenty-three shawls, eleven dozen handkerchiefs, sixteen pairs of boots (fifteen of them made up with the military heel), a case of eau-de-Cologne, a ditto of black hair-dye, thirty pairs of stays, twenty-six chemises, five dozen cambric handkerchiefs, and eleven ditto silk, nineteen muslin collars and four-aud-forty crochet ones, a dressing-case, five hair brushes (three of them made with tortoiseshell and two with ivory gilt backs), a pair of curling irons, eight bonnets without trimmings and nine-and-twenty with them, a hundred rolls of ribbon, half a hundred weight of worsted, ten dozen white kid-gloves and twenty dozen coloured ones, forty balls of cotton, nine-and-ninety skeins of silk, a gridiron, two coal-scuttles, three packets of ham sandwiches, twenty-five mince-pies, half a leg of mutton, six boxes of French plums, ten ditto of bonbons, nine pates de foie gras, a dozen cakes of chocolate and nine of portable hare soup, a warming-pan, five bracelets, a brace of large brass birdcages, sixteen bowls of gold fish, half a score of lapdogs, fourteen dozen lever watches, and an eight-day kitchen clock.
After this discovery, who will venture to deny that Crinoline with shoplifters is comparable to charity, inasmuch as it may cover a multitude of sins.
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