Knots Untied; Or, Ways and By-ways in the Hidden Life of American Detectives

by George S. McWatters

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.