THE LONG ARM OF THE LAW.
IT is of course impossible to discuss the Whitaker Wright case freely. He has been arrested, and though the rule of silence about pending cases presses a little hardly upon journalists, especially when such cases are being discussed in Parliament, still it is in principle a good rule, and ought to be strictly obeyed. We may, however, be permitted to remark that Mr. Wright's arrest will prove a useful warning to the City. Among the multitudes who are there racing and fighting for wealth there must be many whose secret thought is that they will play fair as long as they can, but that if they are " forced ' to overstep the line which separates speculation from swindling, they can at the worst evade unpleasant consequences by flight to a foreign land. Such thoughts are dangerous, and the arrest will check them, for whether justified or not, it shows that such flight is every year becoming more difficult. As intercommunication becomes easier the nations of the world are forced to lay aside some of their jealousies, and, for one thing, to regard criminals, like pirates, as objects for international restraint. There is now scarcely a country of the world which is not bound by treaty to extradite, that is, to surrender, foreign criminals when demanded by their own Governments. Moreover, those Governments are armed with new weapons. It is not only that swift steamers, and electric cables, and photography, and M. Bertillon's ideas have enormously increased the power of civilised policemen. Owing partly to the growing dislike for " undesirable" visitors, and partly to the increased solidarity of international commercial interests, the old jealousy of such demands tends to dis- appear, and even in the absence of treaties the protection of an alleged criminal has come to be regarded as some- thing of a diplomatic betise. Why,' thinks the Foreign Secretary, ' should I annoy that Power, with which we have endless relations, by sheltering a murderer, or a forger, or even a swindler, from a trial which will probably be fair. Let the accused stand his trial. My own people do not want him sheltered, and the sheltering brings odium on my office.'
The world has, in fact, to use Gibbon's celebrated ex- pression, become a " safe and dreary prison " for those who break the law, and especially for,those who by break- ing it hope to accumulate wealth. Such men never attempt to reach the few savage lands that remain " unprotected " by any of the Great Powers. They dread them as deeply as ever a Roman dreaded the barbarians, and think the chance of imprisonment bearable in com- parison with the chance of being clubbed, and the certainty of never getting anything nice to eat, or of speaking to any one who understands what they say. A Jabez Balfour probably never thinks of the " missionary lands " as refuges, or if he does, rejects the idea with an instinctive shudder. Australian criminals, we believe, sometimes fly to"the islands," but the European criminal would prefer suicide to the life of a suspected white man in Melanesia. What, then, is he to. do? He dreads the barbarians, the civilised States are closed to him, and of the three remaining alternatives, one is shut off by a cause the world sometimes forgets, the second by his own " conscience," or variant of conscience, and the third by a disability from which very few men are free. It has been suggested that a very rich levanter might float about in his own yacht for many months till pursuit had died away ; but that is a dream of imaginative novelists. The ocean is very well policed indeed.. Every vessel that floats upon it is known, and on the slightest ground of suspicion investigation is certain,—investigation backed by irresistible physical force. Besides, the levanter does not want a whole crew for accomplices or blackmailers. Many years ago we suggested, during the great hunt after Muller, that an obscure respectable London street would of all refuges be the safest for a criminal, and in spite of the result in that case, we think so still ; but the fugitive who has been rich rarely thinks so. He exaggerates the importance of his own personality, and thinks, as Madame Humbert thought, that at home he is sure to be recog- nised even among multitudes. The third device, an " impenetrable " disguise, is, if we may believe Charles Dickens and Sir A. Conan Doyle, the most effective of all ; but the capacity for protracted histrionics is given to few, and those few are usually too intelligent to need its exercise in order to defy the law. There are men in the Secret Service of all Governments who could baffle any police, but then they are " on the side of the angels." Great actors, though not always moral persons, are not often great criminals, and a permanent change of physical appearance, such as would constitute a really " impene- trable " disguise, though conceivable to the anatomist, is not, we believe, recorded in the annals of European crime.
The way of criminals, and especially of pecuniary criminals, is therefore hard, and we fancy that as time advances it will become harder yet. The nations grow im- patient of seeing the claim to asylum abused, and foreign criminals dumped. down upon their shores. The light of publicity is becoming an electric light, from which nothing can be bidden. The very rage for gossip which sometimes now interferes with the fairness of a trial is against the fugitive from justice. There is too, we notice, one very healthy change in public sentiment : a visible absence of sympathy for a great defaulter. The tendency of society is to hate those who frighten it, and at a time when the holders of industrial securities have been multiplied a thousandfold, society regards the man who spoils those securities with an ever-growing loathing. There was a time, legend says, when in Texas it was safe to kill a man " at sight," but a horse-thief was invariably lynched ; and even now a seaman in the King's Navy might as well mutiny as steal his comrade's clothes. A perception of the diabolical callousness of that kind of offender, who ruins a hundred families and breaks up a hundred homes in order that he himself may enjoy champagne and a soft life, has penetrated the public mind, and there is a desire that such a one should be caught and should. suffer. This feeling is said to be the great cause of a phenomenon noted in Germany and Austria for the last three years, the extreme readiness with which defaulters resort to suicide. They cannot face the universal rage caused by a widespread loss. It is true the sort of kindness apparently felt in Paris for Madame Humbert seems to tell against this theory ; but we doubt if the kindness does not closely resemble the admiration for a rat in a pit, which bites till it frightens a dog three times its own size. The general sentiment is as we have stated, and it is well that it should be so, for of all the foes of enterprise the man who makes of enterprise a burglar's tool is the most dangerous and deadly. Nothing can be accomplished in the new conditions of the world's business without associations of investors, and who will become investors if the managers of such associations are secret robbers, and their trustees men who calculate in their hearts their ultimate chances of successful flight ? Punishment will not produce probity, but it will produce a great fear of swindling under pretence of making profits, and. to make punishment secure the whole world must be united in refusing asylum to the criminal. Men will face any amount of risk, but they shrink before even light penalties when they are inevitable. Sheep-stealing ceased when the capital penalty was abolished, not because death was less dreaded than imprisonment, but because when the penalty became proportioned to the offence verdicts were assured and pardons were never granted.
We need hardly add that, when we dwell upon the uselessness of all efforts to escape arrest at the present day we by no means wish to assert that Mr. Whitaker Wright endeavoured to do so. He tells us he did not, and it is possible that he may be able to prove his asser- tion. Again, we make no suggestion that he was in fact guilty of the offences of which he is accused, or that he necessarily belongs to the categories of men we have named as being unable to escape arrest. His case is under trial, and is not within our view to-day. We write solely on the general aspects of the impossibility of escaping arrest in modern times, and not of the particular instance.
Previous page
