W. Benson and four confederates were on Monday found guilty
of forging cheques in order to further a scheme for plundering a French lady, Madame de Goncourt, of /10,000. They appointed her agent of a non-existent person, Mr. Andrew Montgomery, whom they described as a kind of Monte Christ° of the betting world, and sent her false cheques to tempt her to invest her own money, which she did to the amount of 210,000. This they appropriated, but they were tried for an offence they thought they had not committed, namely, forgery, their cheques being drawn on a non-existent bank. The judge, however, held that the cheques-were "instruments made with intent to defraud," and sentenced the prisoners, when found guilty, with unusual severity. Benson, who had been convicted before, received fifteen years penal servitude, three others ten years, and the fifth man eighteen months' hard labour. It is always necessary to punish the crimea which are profitable, and therefore tempting, with severity,, and in Benson's case there were circumstances oft aggravation,, but the sentence on three of the other criminals, who were merely his tools, strikes observers as unusually heavy. They would not have bad half so much for an ordinary swindle, and-tbat was what they were really guilty of, though the amonntrobtained was so unusually large. There was nothing in them or their proceedings to constitute a new danger to society. On the contrary, they are described to us as shallow swindlers ; and their device, as we have been at some pains to show else- where, was not even clever. It rested entirely on the assumption that, some one possessed of money, yet unable to see through their timid fictions, would take heavy cheques as cash without showingthem to a banker.
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