One month's imprisonment, with hard labour, provided the mendicant with some "crusts" and "mugs of milk" at the cost of the county. The delinquent did not, I believe, resume his solicitations within our district. The office sergeant who escorted him, with some other prisoners, to Kilmainham, told the clerk at Kingstown on the following morning, that Mr. Bryan stigmatized my decision as "most uncharitable and disgusting."
I did not find mendicancy so persistent in any part of the police district as in Kingstown. If a vagrant was brought up and punished for begging in Rathmines or the Pembroke township, or if the detection occurred at Inchicore, or in the more respectable parts of the city, it was not at all probable that the beggar would be soon found again in the same locality. The Kingstown vagrants, as soon as they were discharged from Kilmainham, generally started off to return and resume their solicitations at the piers and jetty, or about the streets and terraces, which were more devoted to healthful recreation than to professional or commercial affairs. I have no doubt that mendicants from distant places receive more at Kingstown or Bray, from visitors whom they recognize, or who recognize them, than would be given to them if both parties were at home. A lady with whom I was personally acquainted, and whose family residence was near Carlow, has several times, in my presence, given sixpences to beggars who belonged to her own neighbourhood, and I have heard her tell them that Kingstown was a better and more lucky place for them than ever they would find Carlow to be. I shall close my observations on street begging, by deliberately stating from my personal and official experience, that not one penny can be given to any mendicant on our thoroughfares in real, efficient, and merited charity. I would now warn my readers against another kind of begging, which avails itself of very systematic and elaborate means, and sometimes displays considerable educational acquirements, namely, written applications to charitable individuals to alleviate dire distress or succour unmerited misfortune. I know that this system is extensively practised in London, and I have heard that it is reviving in Dublin. I use the term "reviving," because it was completely crushed here in 1844 by the intelligence and activity of the detective division. At that time it was discovered that a confederacy of impostors had been formed in Bridgefoot Street, and that the members of this nefarious association were levying contributions on all in whose dispositions they had ascertained charity and credulity to be united. Forty-one of them were arrested and brought before me, and I committed them for trial on charges of "conspiring to defraud, obtaining money under false pretences, and forgery at common law." They were, however, consigned to Newgate, exactly at the time when the State prosecutions against O'Connell had been commenced; and it was the received opinion in police quarters that they owed their escape—for they were not prosecuted—to a feeling on the part of the attorney-general of that period, that all his attention was demanded in bringing down the eagle, and that none of his energies could be spared to scatter a flock of kites. But they were not relinquished by the detectives, and were brought in detail under the castigation of the law until the confederacy was broken up. Their begging letters and petitions were addressed to all whom they considered likely to yield the slightest attention to their requests. These productions were termed in their slang "Slums." One impostor represented that she was a clergyman's widow, with four female children, the eldest only eleven years of age; that her pious, exemplary, and most affectionate partner had died of malignant fever, contracted whilst whispering the words of Christian consolation to the departing sinner, and imparting the joyful assurance, that the life flickering away, the socket glimmer of a mere earthly light, would be rekindled in a lamp of everlasting duration and unvarying brilliancy. That resigned to her suffering, and adoring the hand from which she had experienced chastening, she was not forbidden to hope that the blessed spirit of charity would be manifested in her relief, and in shielding her helpless, artless babes from the privations of distress in their infancy, and from the still more fearful danger of being, in advanced youth, exposed to the snares of sin and its depraving consequences. A contribution, however small, addressed to Mrs. ——, at No. — Bridgefoot Street, Dublin, would, it was respectfully hoped, be accorded by Lord ——, or Mr. or Mrs. ——, whose well-known, though unostentatious benevolence, must plead the poor widow's apology for such an intrusion. Another was an unfortunate man, who for many years had earned a respectable livelihood as a commercial agent, and supported a numerous and interesting family by his industry and intelligence, but having unfortunately been in the County of Tipperary, when a contested election was in progress, he unguardedly expressed a wish for the success of the Conservative candidate, and although not a voter, he was set upon by a horde of savage ruffians, and beaten so as to produce paralysis of his lower extremities, and that now nothing remained for him but to entreat the humane consideration of one who could not, if the public testimony of his, or her generous disposition, was to be credited, refuse to sympathize with a parent whose helplessness compelled him to witness, with unavailing anguish, the poignant miseries of the offspring he had hoped, by his honest exertions, to have supported and reared, without submitting to the galling necessity of soliciting that aid which nothing but the most absolute destitution could reconcile him to implore. A military lady announced herself as the widow of color-sergeant Robert Maffett, who having served faithfully for twenty-three years, the four last having been in India, had been severely wounded in a decisive battle in Scinde, and when invalided and pensioned, was unfortunately drowned at Blackwall, in consequence of the boat which was conveying him ashore being accidentally upset. That she and her eight poor orphans had no resource on reaching her native city, where she found that all her relations had died or emigrated, and where she was friendless and alone, but to throw herself upon the charitable feelings of one whose character emboldened her to hope that the humble appeal of the soldier's widow, for herself and her poor orphans, would not be unavailing. These and a thousand other slums were manufactured in Bridgefoot Street, alias Dirty Lane, not an unsuitable name for the locale of such proceedings, and they were invariably accompanied by lists of subscriptions, and magisterial or municipal attestations, admirably got up in the first style of forgery. In the first case to which I have adverted, the "hapless widow" succeeded in getting five pounds from the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland (Pennefather). In the instance of the "military widow," Lady Blakeney was lightened of three pounds. Another slum was circulated by a scoundrel who represented himself to be the son of a gentleman in the south of Ireland, of an old family, and of the pristine faith; that he had been educated at Louvain, had an ardent wish to become a Catholic clergyman, and that one of the most distinguished dignitaries of that church was inclined to ordain him, but his father had died in debt, without leaving him the means of providing even the most humble outfit for such a vocation. One of his missives produced the effect of relieving an alderman's lady of five pounds sterling, which the excellent and worthy matron piously suggested might be useful in providing the embryo priest with vestments.
This confederacy was not confined to Dublin. Its branches extended through Leinster, Connaught, Munster, and in almost every important town in England its connections were established. It is, however, very curious that the Scots and our Northern countrymen were left comparatively free from its attacks. Why? Is it because the rascally crew conceived the natives of Scotland and Ulster to be more cautious or less benevolent than their respective Southern neighbours? The reader may judge for himself; but swindlers are not, in general, very wrong in their estimate of character or disposition.
The head-quarters of the society were in an obscure country town in an inland county of Ireland, and there the materiel of the association was seized, according to my recollection, in April, 1844. There was found at the source of their system, a chest of very elegant manufacture, and containing, in compartments, admirably executed counterfeits of the public seals of Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Sligo, Drogheda, Dublin, Liverpool, Bristol, Hamburg, Havre, and New York. These were used to seal forged certificates and attestations, which were transmitted for use to more populous places; but the seals were cunningly kept in a remote, and for a long time, an unsuspected locality.
CHAPTER XI. CARRIAGE COURT CASES—DUBLIN CARMEN.
When I assumed, by an arrangement with my colleagues, the regulation of the public vehicles, and the disposal of complaints in the Carriage Court at the Head office, announced my inflexible determination to cancel the license of any driver who was proved to have been drunk while in charge of his vehicle on the public thoroughfare required the fullest proof of the offence, to whom I awarded the highest punishment. I am happy to say that such cases were by no means frequent, but there were some, and they generally occurred at funerals. A Rathfarnham carman was summoned before me and was convicted, not only on the clearest evidence, but by his own admission. He was about my own age, and I remembered that when I was about eighteen years old, I was one day swimming in a quarry-hole at Kimmage, where the water was at least twenty feet deep, and was suddenly seized with very severe cramps in my left leg. I kept myself afloat and shouted for help, but I was unable to make for the bank, when a young fellow who had been swimming, and was dressing himself, hastily threw off his clothes, plunged into the water, and pushed me before him to the side of the quarry. He saved my life, and I now beheld him in the person of the convicted carman. I related the circumstance from the magisterial bench, and then cancelled his licence, and remarked to those who were assembled, that when I treated the preserver of my life so strictly, others could not expect the slightest lenity at my hands if they transgressed in the same way. The poor fellow left the court in great dejection, and when my duties for the day were over, I dropped in to my friend Colonel Browne, the Commissioner of Police, and mentioned the circumstance to him. He said, "You cancelled his licence, but I can give him a new one, and he shall get it to-morrow." The licence was accordingly renewed, without causing me the slightest dissatisfaction.
Most of my readers are aware that the Richmond Bridewell, which is now the common gaol of the City of Dublin, is situated near Harold's Cross; and that on its front is inscribed, "Cease to do evil. Learn to do well." A carman named Doyle, who lived at Blackrock, was summoned before me on charges of violent conduct, abusive language, and extortion. He was a man of very good character, and the complainant was a person of the worst reputation, who had been convicted of several misdemeanors of a very disgraceful nature. Frauds and falsehoods were attributed to him as habitual and inveterate practices. He was sworn, and then he described Doyle as having been most abusive and insulting in his language, as having threatened to kick him unless he paid much more than the rightful fare, and as having extorted an extra shilling by such means. The defendant denied the charges totally, and declared that the accusation was false and malicious. He then asked me to have Inspector O'Connor and Sergeant Power called and examined as to the complainant's character, and whether he was deserving of being believed on his oath. From my own personal knowledge of the complainant's reputation, I willingly acceded to the demand, and desired that the required witnesses should be called from the upper court, where they were both attending. Whilst we were waiting their appearance, Doyle made a speech; it was very brief, and I took it down verbatim; he said:—
"Your worship, if I get any punishment on this man's oath, it will be a wrong judgment. The Recorder knows him well, and he wouldn't sintence a flea to be kilt for back-biting upon his evidence. He has took out all his degrees in the Harold's Cross college; and if, instead of sending me to the Cease to do evil hotel, you had himself brought there, the door would open for him of its own accord, for there is not a gaol in Ireland that would refuse him. He swore hard against me, but thanks be to God, he did not swear that I was an honest man, for there is nobody whose character could stand under the weight of his commendation."
On the evidence of O'Connor and Power, I dismissed the charge, and subsequently spoke of the case, and repeated Doyle's speech in festive society. When Boucicault produced his interesting Irish drama of Arra-na-pogue at the Theatre Royal, I was one of his gratified audience, and was greatly surprised at hearing the speech which had been originally delivered before me in the Carriage Court by the Blackrock carman, addressed to the court-martial by Shawn-na-poste, to induce a disbelief of the informer by whom he was accused. I subsequently ascertained that it had been given to Boucicault by one who could fully appreciate its originality and strength, my gifted friend, Dr. Tisdall.