Part 51

Looking around him, as a man, he sees that everybody is striving for the same object which he would reach; and however his own sense of right may disturb him in his first mistep from her path, he soon learns that the "common law," the highest morality, in other words, on 'Change, is to "buy at the lowest possible prices, and sell for as much as you can." He becomes extortionate when he can, and rejoices in whatever panic "sends up" his own stocks, for example, although it may ruin a thousand others, and bring desolation to countless homes. He sees, if he lives in New York, that Wall Street is a den of thieves, "respectable" ones; and he finds its counterparts all through the city, down into the lowest haunts of vice, where squalor and want, added to crime, make the last disreputable.

But his mind is logical, and he sees that there is no difference in principle between making a "corner" in Wall Street, and thus robbing a man of fifty shares of a given railroad stock, and the picking of his pocket of those shares in the graceful way in which the _chevaliers d'industrie_ do it. He sees the real estate owner, who has already received in rents, from his tenants, ten times as much money as a certain building cost him, years ago (exclusive, at that, of the legal interest on the original investment), raising the rent as often as he dare, and frequently ejecting, into the merciless world, the family of a poor man who cannot meet the advanced rent, on the one side; and on the other, he witnesses a highway robber snatch a cloak from the shoulders of a man, or a bundle from a lady's arms; or a sneak thief escaping from a hall door with a garment in his hands; and for the life of him he cannot see any real moral difference in the two "sides;" on both are extortion and robbery.

He sees vast monopolies arising, and breaking down small dealers. He sees the merchant princes absorbing the businesses once conducted by smaller traders, and usurping even the trades; so that, now, for example, several hundred dress-makers, once scattered over various parts of the city, and then living in a good degree of independence, are to be found gathered in a herd, if they have employment at all, the merest wages-slaves of some mercantile lord turned manufacturer, too, as well: or, if without employment by some large house, forced by the lower rates which the monopolists charge for their poorly paid-for goods, to live along on starvation wages.

In short, the man sees about him the greed of gain in all its hateful and diabolical phases--and he meditates: "This is the world I am born into; this the field I must win my successes in; there are but comparatively two classes,--the successful and proud, who govern everything, and enjoy everything, and the unsuccessful and the wretched, who have nothing but woes and toils, and who enjoy nothing--but what they have. I must make my choice between the two. I cannot suffer myself to belong to the latter class."

Thus determining, he enters upon the busy scenes of life; and if a merchant, he misrepresents his goods, for he knows that all other merchants do the same; he scruples at no falsity, so that it is not so palpable and clear as to defeat his chief purpose of cheating,--the achievement of profits. He lies to enhance in the purchaser's eyes the real merits of his wares, and he lies to cover up their demerits. He hears that some merchant is trading upon a reputation he has somehow acquired of being an honest dealer. Laughing in his sleeve over this,--for well he knows that an honest man, in the competitive sphere of trade, is too much of a _lusus naturæ_ to have an actual existence,--he casts about to rival the other in this matter of profitable reputation, and learn "how he does it." He finds that his competitor has joined Beecher's, or some other popular church, and gone to teaching Sunday school. He follows suit,--and thus makes religion useful and available in trade.

Taking pains to get his church membership noised about, he now adds sanctimony to his other facial graces, and lies with a more effective air than before. If a merchant in wet goods, he goes a step farther than before in their adulteration; if in dry goods, he puts upon his poorer silks and cottons, etc., the stamps which belong to better ones; and so he lives on and thrives, and builds him a mansion in Fifth Avenue, or some other fashionable quarter, and is a man beloved and respected, and powerful among the people.

Or, may be, he turns politician, makes his way into the city government, sets his active genius to work, and invents numerous jobs to be done at the public expense, and manages to reap a hundred, or several hundred per cent. profit thereon; becomes a money-lord and a chief ruler, and is noted and respected, and for his thefts of millions, perhaps, makes restitution by a large munificent donation to the poor of the city. Or he goes into Wall Street, and robs and swindles there till he gets to be a power, and lords it over sundry railroad and other vast interests, and is a very demigod.

In all he is a representative man; for throughout all the departments of trade and business, from the greatest to the least, all are swindlers, to more or less extent. Nobody better than the detective knows how absurd and ridiculous it is to talk of "honesty in trade," for he is quite as likely to be called upon to ferret out and arrest a forger or a cheat in the respectable ranks of business as he is to entrap a common pickpocket. The detective knows too much to believe in the honesty of any one as a trader. He may be a good-hearted, companionable fellow, generous to his friends, kind to his family, a nobleman by nature, but in trade he is dishonest; not that he would prefer to be so even there, but because business rules and customs make him so. Take the most nearly just man, as a merchant or manufacturer, to be found in the country, and prove to the detective (or any other man well informed as to the crafts of business), if you can, that that trader or manufacturer will not ask for his goods as large a profit as he can get,--always the market price, at least,--and think himself not only not wrong in so doing, but actually right, no matter how the "market price" is made, whether by the withholding from the market of a large amount of a given commodity in order to "raise the price" (which is simply, in other words, to rob the more) or not.

I have never known a half dozen traders in my life who had any moral perceptions on this point. Lying is said to be a fine art in China. Nothing wrong is perceived in it by the Celestials. Just as some people have no ear for music, no sense for the harmony of sounds, so they, the Chinese, seem to have no sense or perception of the beauty of truth. Just so in the business life of our own people; hardly a man of all sees or understands that it is not right for him to receive as great a profit on his goods as he can "honorably get" (i. e., no matter how, so that he gets it,--for the getting is the soul of business life). What is true of the business morality of New York, is true of the trading morality of the whole country. New York is the chief market town, and rules in prices and modes of dealing.

The trader, with lack of conscience; the lawyer, whose interest it is to win his cases at all hazards, and bring his witnesses up to the right point for victory; the broker, who has no conscience (save when not pretending to have any); the manufacturers of flour and other food for the market, who adulterate their goods, or pass upon the community poor ones for good ones (and all do more or less of this); the liquor merchant, who poisons his wines and brandies with strychnine, etc., in order that he may give them a "bead," after having adulterated them as much as he can; the quack-medicine dealers, and the ten thousand other comparatively respectable shams and cheats of society, are all on a plane, in point of principle, with the pickpocket and the sneak thief; while the braver men, who rob whole railroads, etc., at a time, rise to the dignity of highwaymen. And there is still another class of moral worthies, the large manufacturers, who, monopolizing certain great industries, force the poor, through their necessities, into perpetual slavery to them, and render back for their hard labor just enough to keep them from the grave, and make them useful; and these occupy the position of the cruel and heartless slaveholder.

Let not the reader suppose that I blame any of these characters individually. Society's laws and customs make them what they are. They must be so, or must be content to be of the oppressed classes. There are but two great classes in civilization,--the oppressed and the oppressors, the trampled upon and the tramplers. To the latter class belongs the detective. He is dishonest, crafty, unscrupulous, when necessary to be so. He tells black lies when he cannot avoid it; and white lying, at least, is his chief stock in trade. He is the outgrowth of a diseased and corrupted state of things, and is, consequently, morally diseased himself. His very existence is a satire upon society. He is a miserable snake, not in a paradise, but in the social hell. He is a thief, and steals into men's confidences to ruin them. He makes friends in order to reap the profits of betraying them. He is as bad in these days as was his prototype, St. Paul in his, "all things to all men," but like him, he is defensible, in that his rogueries and villanies are practised for other people's "salvation" or security; and, aside from the fact that the detective, in his calling, is often degraded to a sort of watchman or ordinary policeman, to help the big thieves, the merchants, etc., protect themselves from the small thieves, who are not able to keep places of business, and to perform sundry other undignified work, his calling is a very noble one, and a singularly blessed one, inasmuch as it is the only one which I call to mind, by which hypocrisy is elevated into a really useful and beneficent art.

It is true, as I lately saw in a cursory glance at the book notices in some journal, that somebody in Europe has written a work entitled "The Purveyors of Hell," in which, with the keen discrimination of an intelligent and honest man, he inveighs against the secret service and detective system as an immense corrupter of mankind, and aims heavy blows, I suppose, at it. The author, I think, cannot be far from right in his abhorrence of the system, but I am afraid that, like too many other doctors of morals, he uses his scalpel on, and directs his medicines to, the effects, and not the causes, of the evils he would cure.

The detective has one palliative to his conscience which the criminal and thief--be he a regular or irregular one, a business man with a shop, or without one--has not; for he, in his trickeries, his lies, his false seeming, his unscrupulous betrayal of his victims, has ever the consciousness that he is operating as an aid to justice, and that in her cause is it that he commits whatever outrages he may do to truth and fair dealing. His position is paradoxical in a measure. He has the satisfaction of knowing that if he lies and cheats, he is no worse for this, in a business way, than his neighbors, and that his frauds are exercised to protect them in keeping whatever ill-gotten gains they may have in the shape of property, from being stolen from them by some of the rest of his (and their) neighbors; or in the discovery of criminals, such as murderers and assassins, in order that they may be punished, to satisfy the majesty of the law, made by the society which made the criminals. In this sense he is a public benefactor, and better entitled to the honors he wins in society than is, perhaps, any other useful citizen of the governing classes.

Whatever is bad in the detective's career, society has created for him to perform, and compelled him to do it. However unpleasant to himself his business may be, he has the happiness of knowing that in its results it is good,--that is, if it be good to preserve the present order of things; for without the detective the laws, such as they are, could not well be enforced; for so cunning have the crafts of business made our unfortunate criminal classes, that the ordinary officers of the law cannot surprise or entrap them; and, allowed to pursue their business uninterrupted, the pickpockets, counterfeiters, forgers, bank-robbers, and so forth, would soon monopolize the business of the country to the disparagement of the money brokers, grain and cotton exchangers, the land speculators, the usurers, the railroad robbers, the wholesale and retail merchants, the private bankers, etc., who, with less keen talent than the independent pickpocket proper, are obliged to have laws framed to help them in their iniquity, while he operates against the law.

To preserve the weaker of the cormorant classes in their "lawful" pursuits, therefore, the detective is absolutely a necessity in society, and as such should be as much esteemed as any other necessity. Obvious is it, then, that the writer of the work alluded to--"Purveyors of Hell"--is an impractical enthusiast in the cause of abstract right and truth. It would seem that he, poor man, believes in some system of abstract and speculative morality as a governing and directing force in society, without any regard to the customs of trade, etc., which obtain in a civilization, the main end of which is to enable its chief individual participants to "make money" by various means of enticing it out of their neighbors' pockets and filching it from the hands of labor.

This sort of abstract morality, spiritual morality, which is talked from every pulpit in the land to audiences composed, for the main part, of people who, however strict attention they may pay to the talkers, punctuate the sentences of their discourses for them with scheming thoughts of what they are going to do in a business-way the next day--has failed of its desired results often enough, one would think, to confound the talkers. The wonder to me is that the intelligent classes do not, more than they do, look things squarely in the face, and see for themselves how utterly hopeless it is to ever do without the detective in society, so long as our legislators make ten laws for the protection of property to one for man; so long as the "sacredness of property" is a phrase which sanctifies the protection of all ill-gotten gains, if they but be gotten in some regular, or not too irregular, way, even more surely than it covers or protects the products of actual hard labor,--the very things of all that need protection, and the protecting of which, in the hands of those to whom they rightly belong, the laborers, would secure all other rights in society; for surely the defrauding of labor is the radical iniquity of the age (as it has been that of all the historic ages, so far as I can learn), out of which spring all the rest of the corruptions of society.

But the talkers do not care to meddle with reforms which have a wise, radical end in view. They hate things which are radical. They dislike to disturb the "foundations of society." They are wiser than their Master, and have so veiled his philosophy and teachings of a politico-economical kind, that he would not, were he to reappear on earth, here in New York, be able to tell the difference, in point of principle, between a Wall Street broker, owning the chief pew in one of the talkers' temples, and being a principal pillar thereof, from one of those wily rascals whom he saw fit to whip out of the sacred places some eighteen hundred and thirty odd years ago.

In those days the detective was as necessary as now; and it was by his aid, probably, that the society of Jerusalem was enabled to cohere. But the money-makers became so sharp and subtle, and got so well established in the practice of their iniquities in the very Porch of the Temple, that it became necessary for the great Detective and Reformer to come out of Nazareth, and search into their "ways which were dark," and expose them. In fact it would seem that the detective system has the approval of very high authority,--so wise as not to be mistaken as to its fitness to "things as they are," and are ever likely to be till some method is invented to do away with criminals, by making crime unattractive, and labor, honest toil, for what a man has a right to have, and no more, respectable and attractive.

I have hinted that the detective's vocation has much to do with "ways that are dark." So it has; and it might be inferred, perhaps, from what I have said, that his vocation has a bad influence upon his own interior nature. It is certain that it has no great tendency to elevate and refine him; but it would seem that the pursuit of devious ways for a good end has not the corrupting influence which the practice of falsehood for the mere aggrandizement of a man's individual, selfish interests, exercises. Detectives are, for the most part, excellent citizens--very punctilious in observing the laws, themselves, as well as being social regulators to enforce others to respect them, also. Still, whatever the intrinsic moral life or character of the detective may be, his art is a devilish one, and civilization is responsible for it.

The use of the detective to society is not fully understood by the majority of the people, especially in country places; and visitors to a city like New York, or Philadelphia, little consider how much of their peace and security, when there, depend upon the quiet, silent, effective operations of the master detectives. The citizen or stranger, on visiting a great mercantile establishment like Stewart's up-town store, usually but little understands what a system of detection is carried on there, not only for the protection of Mr. Stewart's goods, but the purses of his customers, from the attractive powers of the graceful pickpocket's fingers. But the amount of money which Stewart pays out annually for this sort of protection must be something large. In this way is dispensed to others a portion of the money which he, as a merchant, manages to win for himself from the labor-resources of the country by the jugglery of trade. There seems to be a sort of poetic justice in this. If Mr. Stewart, and the other enormous accumulators of wealth, were not obliged to employ others to help them protect it, there probably would be left to the poor but little else than the liberty to die, and be buried in paupers' graves, at a more early date after birth than is now their wont to reach those hospitable quarters.

But everywhere throughout a great city, in the horse-cars, in Wall Street, in all the great stores, at the churches on Sundays, in the lager-beer gardens, on the steamboats at the wharves, on the ferry-boats, throughout the large manufactories, around various dens of iniquity, at the theatres, etc., the detective is at his work. To-day he perhaps personates one character; to-morrow, another. To-day he is a trader from the West, making purchases among sundry dealers in tobacco, perhaps; and as he glides around their establishments, prizing this or that stock which he is to purchase, 'unless he can do better elsewhere,' he is carefully noting everything; for he is for the time in the employ of the General Government, and it is suspected that the tobacconists are defrauding the Treasury of the taxes, and he is in pursuit of evidence to convict them. Yesterday he hailed from New Hampshire, perhaps, and in the character of a countryman, was getting an insight into arts by which a sharper was fleecing, not only country people, but some of the residents of the city, too, by inveigling them into subscribing for stock in a fabulous gold, or silver, or lead mine, or some great colonizing project, and inducing them to advance ten or twenty per cent. on the nominal par value of the stock as a part of the working capital.

The detective, in the character of the countryman, presenting himself in fancy as my pen traced the lines next above, memory reverts to a notable instance, which I conceive is well worth recording here, wherein a detective friend of mine, in his _rôle_ of a sort of Brother Jonathan, from New Hampshire, caught a bogus gold-mine speculator of New York in a very clever way, and accomplished the restitution of several thousand dollars (which had been advanced as per centage on the stock subscribed for by several different persons). The speculator, who was a man of considerable moneyed means, and therefore "responsible," and thought to be, of course, "reliable," on account of his being a man of property, had, in a very ingenious manner, organized a company to work a supposed gold mine in Virginia. He was president of the "company," and his cousin was secretary. A northern geologist (a professor in a college not over a hundred and fifty miles in a bee line from New York city), was taken by this cousin on to Virginia to examine the mine, and make a report, which was duly done, the professor making a very attractive report. He found considerably more gold to the ton of quartz than is considered among miners "a fair, average yield." The mine was indeed a very valuable one in his opinion, and would have been so in fact, if his conclusions had been drawn from honest premises; but the poor professor had no suspicion that the gold he found in his assay of the quartz, which he actually saw taken from the mine in question, got into his crucible in a mysterious way, and never belonged to the quartz which he had taken so much pains to pulverize.

The president had so deftly drawn up the printed constitution, or articles of incorporation, and by-laws of the company, that he could easily and legally resign his position, and withdraw when he pleased from the association, and carry off all the funds advanced, without fear of legal trouble from his victims. But after a large amount of the stock had been subscribed, and the advanced assessments of twenty per cent. called in (when somewhat over half the nominal stock had been subscribed), one of the victims got his eyes open, and wanted his money back. He saw that it was of no use to complain to the president (I will call the latter Sharp, and my friend the detective, Flat, for short), so he made his case known to a lawyer, who directed him to engage Flat, who, he thought, and thought rightly, would "work up the job safely." Flat managed to get himself into Sharp's acquaintance outside of business hours, as a curious fellow,--a nondescript old bachelor,--from Alton, New Hampshire, owning several farms, and with more money than he knew what to do with.

Of course Sharp needed _him_, and used his best arts to get him to take stock. Flat agreed to call and look into the "darned thing," and if he liked it he'd "go in." He called. Sharp showed him the books. Flat found the amount of stock subscribed just as Sharp told him, and of course was pleased at first, and was about to subscribe, himself--when a "notion struck him."

"See here," said he, "these names is all correct, I guess. I don't know the writin'; but how do I know they ar' all genooine?"

Sharp, in his way, "satisfied" Flat on that head.

"But," said Flat, "has all these fellurs paid up their 'cessments?"

Sharp assured him they had.

"Wa'al, how do I know? I don't see no proof on't here," said Flat, pointing to the subscription stock-book.

Sharp explained; but Flat was thick-headed, and would not understand or believe anything till Sharp should have entered against each man's name the amount of the assessment he had paid, and 'then he would take his pick of 'em, he said, and go and ax 'em right to thar heads,' and ef he found all right, he'd subscribe, and 'go in his full length.'