1..ELE FUTURE OF ROGUERY.
WE do not see much reason for the extreme interest taken by the public in the Lambri trial, which was remark- able chiefly for the enormous publicity and importance granted by the London Press to an affair of a very ordinary kind. The story told by the witnesses was a kind of vulgarised "Gil Blas,"—" Gil Bias" as it might have been if Smollett or the author of "Jack Sheppard" had rewritten it. It was notamusing, though it was crammed with bizarre incident. It was right enough of Mr. Labouchere, if he had sufficient certainty as to his facts and evidence to prove them, to denounce "Lambri Pasha;" though one cannot avoid thinking, if Lambri had hap- pened to 'be innocent, but unable to prove it, how terrible and how unpunishable a cruelty such a denunciation would be ; but it was not the kind of light-doing which establishes much claim upon the world. The Times is doing it every month. Scarcely a week passes without the leading journal publishing some letter or paragraph which entitles it to be prosecuted for libel, and smashes up some impostor or other who is preying on the public, getting subscriptions for fire- escapes, or asking aid, because he has been burnt out, or de- manding money of executors on behalf of unknown and emi- grant relatives of a wealthy deceased. We do not know that the interest of Society in a case alters its moral aspect very much, and believe the factitious importance given to the affair to be decidedly demoralising. The single point to be proved was whether Truth had evidence for its statements ; and that is the point, too, when the Blankshire Gazette denounces William Sikeson, the local getter-up of fraudulent handicaps, and the trial is reported in ten lines. The appetite for social scandal is not a good one, and feeding it is. not one whit better because in one case; in the opinion of the jury, the journal which published the charge which supplied such a quantity of food was entirely in the right. Let it be pronounced in the right, and the thing dismissed in ten lines.
There is exaggeration in the mere fact of such immense space being giving to such a case, and so there is in the amount of moral reprobation bestowed upon the state of society the case reveals. It is a very bad state of society, thoroughly bad and vicious ; but it is not a new state at all. There always has been in every great capital, since the days of Petronius, a social fringe to "society," which some people confound with " society."
• itself, in which respectables, semi-respectables, and dis-respect- • ables all get mixed up together; and it is here the adventurer makes his appearance, and plunders, or fails to plunder. The international adventurer was less known in London, perhaps two generations ago, because London was very insular, and the possession of ready-money was nearly confined to men who dis- liked foreigners ; but he was known in every other country, and a good deal more favoured than he is now. He aspired to the society of Princes, sold information from another world; as well as "straight tips" for this, dealt in philtres as well as marked cards, and not unfrequently became a political character. Even in England the social bandit was perfectly well known, used to discover country squires who liked high play too well to be par- ticular about their company, and had an art, which he has ap- parently partly lost now-a-days, of running away with heiresses. How Old is Count Fathom, and when was the "Vicar of Wake- field" published? Or, if we are restricted to our grand- . fathers' times, how many adventurers caused scandals of all kinds under the Regency ? The only real change is that the wealthy section of the community has become so much larger, that if we define society as the class which has money, and leisure, and a diseased appetite for distraction, the old society appears like a mere clique beside it. The Upper Two Thousand have become the Upper Ten, and the Upper Ten the Upper Twenty, and the Upper Twenty have found a dozen sacri vates; whose interest in human affairs is confined to their doings, sayings, follies, eccentricities, and. vices. That the vatei are doing mischief by interesting multitudes in a world either frivolous or bad—for the good side of the idle world is too dull to attract their notice—we have often and strongly contended, but the .fault is mainly theirs. The world itself is what it was always, only very much bigger, and, when it comes before the police-courts at all events, a little more vulgar and contemptible. Smollett might have got hints from the narratives told in "Lambri v. Labouchere."
One wonders, in reading such a case, whether there is much of a future before rogues, of whom so many were mentioned in it. The country papers seem to think so, and are severe on the relaxations of etiquette, in the way of intro- ductions and the like, which now-a-days smooth the en- trance of roguery into " good " society ; but it may be doubted whether they are right. There is more money about than there was, and some of it is, no doubt, in very foolish hands ; and there are more rogues than there were, all manner of countries, from Russia to Japan, advancing to the degree of civilisation at which the social rogue developes, and pushing themselves forward into the general comity of nations. We have no doubt there is a Japanese somewhere who would beat any European alive in manipulating cards, as mach as Ah Sin beat Mr. William Nye and his partner, and that the Caucasian will one day be found to be a very feeble amateur in the great profession of Roguery. He has not the fine observation of the servile races, and he has lingering scruples, shown in his occasional payment of losses, and his adherence -to his comrades, whom the Asiatic would sell first of all. That is, no doubt, so far, a distinct addition to the prospective chances of the cheats. The reservoir of potential roguery is enlarging, till some day universal rascaldom may turn out a Napoleon among swindlers, or a Bismarck among fergers, or a Cavour among card-sharpers, a criminal of the money-seeking type who is a high genius in his art. But except that chance—which is not a grand one, for the forte of genius of that calibre lies in its power of using men, and your rogue does not want men, and could do nothing with an army if he had one, except swear at it for needing commissariat—we do not see that the general prospects of roguery are much improved by the progress of the age. Science has done something for the cnxni- nal, though not much, but next to nothing for the rogue. There is dynamite for the plunderer of railways, and chloroform for the highwayman, and gun-cotton for the burglar to blow open the locks of safes, and biting acids for the forger warranted to efface all inks ; but loaded dice have been picked out of the rooms in Herculaneum, and the Chinese knew the thimble-rig trick before Europe had learned the Arabic numeration. The " Greek " of Antioch.or Alexandria probably knew as much or more of his trade than the keenest pro- fessional of Paris or Constantinople. Science gives no help in marking cards—for Captain H. Smart's story, in one of his novels, of a man cheating by help of immensely magnifying spec- tacles, though clever, must be all nonsense ; as glasses so strong would have made sound eyes incapable of seeing anything—or doctoring running horses, or any other of the commoner social swindles, and in regard to the more subtle kinds of fraud, modern arrangements can hardly prove very helpful. The immense de- velopment of international intercourse has two sides to it. While a foreigner may be more easily believed not to be a rogue—which was the old English presumption about every foreigner with a handle to his name—foreign police can be more easily consulted, and are much more ready with information. The railway helps pursuit even more than escape. The telegraph may warn a confederate, but it will also set distant detectives in motion. The endless publicity of the minute advertises everybody, and therefore the pseudo-millionaire of the day ; but it advertises suspicions too, and inquiries by the police. Im- postors, we fancy, are more easily detected than they were by those who care to detect them, while the fraternity esta- blished among all who deal in money makes the ultimate object of all roguery, which is always money in portable forme, much more difficult of attainment. The De Bourbel scheme, which the Times exposed, would not even have been concocted• in tho presence of the electric telegraph. An hour after the first false bill had been cashed, every exchange bank in Europe would have been upon its guard. The almost entire disappearance of that antique crime, the abduction of heiresses, is clear evidence to the effect of modern contrivances and modern laws upon very daring and very subtle villains. The cluinces .of escape from country. to country or of impunity from the unin- formed condition of opinion are distinctly diminished, while the police, if not sharper, are infinitely better organised. Besides, the object of fraud is cash, and cash only, and though society is probably no cleverer than it was in most respects, education im-
proving rather man's knowledge than man's powers of observa- tion, it is decidedly keener in the protection of its money. It may be ready to accept Honduras Bonds, but it does not like parting with money without an equivalent which at least appears to be worth the sum. The gross of green spectacles is no bait in 1880. Men are cheated every day, and will be till the world cools, but we fancy that in the process of the suns the cheating takes more time and more skill and more readi-
ness to run great risks ; and that is not a change pleasant to rogues, who must always have brains, but seldom possess them of the first class. Very few of them can lay working plans without confederates, and confederacy means betrayal. The difference established is very well illustrated in a story which is not very new, but has been repeated again this week, a prop08 of the arrest of an old coiner. The most successful of living coiners must be a man who makes 4' IC'ew York sovereigns,"—base sovereigns which ring right, and taste right, and weigh right, and look right in all ways, except a trifling excess of thickness. The maker of those sovereigns, who, as the story goes, frightened the Bank of England, where some of them passed muster, has never been discovered, and his coin ought seemingly to be carried to the rogue's credit side. Yes, but his success was due to his putting two-thirds of solid gold into his sovereign. He pocketed only a difference of six shillings on each coin he could change, and allowing for his machinery and his bribes, could hardly have made a half-crown by each piece. Modern sharpness had helped him to a base coin with a high degree of undetectableness, but then modern sharp- ness had compelled him to sacrifiee so much of his profit in order to be secure, that his crime was profitless, except upon a scale and with appliances which would make discovery and punish- ment next to certain. Modern society is bad enough, but we do not feel sure that it gives the rogue—that is, the criminal who stops short of violence—new opportunities of any consider- able value. His best chances lie in the passion for gambling,— that is, for making money quickly without work. That is ruining thousands every year, hut we do not know that it is stronger than in Law's time, or in Charles Fox's time, or in 1815, when the whole cosmopolitan society gambled without shame ; while the opinion against it, and the power of opinion to make itself executive, are both in- creasing in strength. The passion for gambling is nothing like the passion for drink in force, and it is quite possible that within twenty years the civilised world, which is now discussing and trying all manner of remedies—with success, people say, in Norway—may have hit upon an effective mode of dealing even with that.
Previous page
