FRAUDS CARRIED ON THROUGH THE MAILS.
Sad Perversion of Talent—Increase of Roguery—Professional Men suffer—Young America at the "Bar"—Papers from Liverpool—The Trick successful—A legal Document—Owning up—A careless Magistrate—Letters from the Un-duped.
Victimizing the Clergy—A lithograph Letter—Metropolitan Sermons—An up-town Church—A Book of Travels—Natural Reflections—Wholesome Advice.
The Seed Mania—Strong Inducements—Barnes' Notes—"First rate Notice"—Farmer Johnson—Wethersfield outdone—Joab missing.
"Gift Enterprise"—List of Prizes—The Trap well baited—Evading the Police—The Scrub Race.
An incalculable amount of talent is perverted to dishonest purposes, thereby becoming a gift worse than useless to its possessors, and a fruitful source of evil to the community. Such misemployed ability is like the "staff of life," turned by a magic worse than Egyptian, into the serpent of death. And the brilliancy which surrounds the successful development of some deep-laid plan of knavery—the admiration which it involuntarily excites, in the mind even of those who abhor the deed, and condemn the cunning designer, render such misdirected powers doubly dangerous, by exciting in the weak-minded and evil-disposed a desire to emulate such wonderful achievements, and to become notorious, if they cannot make themselves famous.
It cannot be denied that a considerable degree of talent is requisite to insure success, even in a course of knavery; and by success I mean nothing more than that longer or shorter career, which ends, if not always in detection, certainly in disappointment and misery. Success, then, in this connection, signifies putting off the evil day—a day which is as sure to come as any other day. Time is an enemy which no rogue can ever outrun.
Even such pitiful success as this is not within the grasp of small abilities. The possessors of such moderate endowments will find it emphatically true, that Honesty is the best policy for them, however brilliant and seductive a dishonest course may be.
When Shakspeare wrote, "Put money in thy purse," he probably did not intend to exhort any one to pocket another's money, but to confine himself to that which he actually possessed. But, judging by the number and variety of the ingenious frauds which are practised upon the community, the saying in question seems to have been adopted in its most unscrupulous sense as a principle, by sundry personages, more remarkable for smartness than for honesty. Not a few of these characters have selected the mails as the means of facilitating their designs upon the pockets of the public at large.