AT WAR WITH SOCIETY;
OR,
TALES OF THE OUTCASTS.
BY
JAMES M‘LEVY,
(EDINBURGH POLICE DETECTIVE STAFF,)
AUTHOR OF “ROMANCES OF CRIME.”
CAMERON AND FERGUSON, PUBLISHERS.
GLASGOW: 88 WEST NILE STREET.
LONDON: 12 AVE MARIA LANE.
GLASGOW:
DUNN AND WRIGHT,
PRINTERS.
CONTENTS.
The Ingenuity of Thieves.
INTRODUCTORY.
IT would not be a hopeful sign of the further triumph of the good principle over the evil if the devil’s agents could shew us many examples where they have beaten us, and been enabled to slide clean off the scale. Since my first volume was published, I have been twitted with cases where we have been at fault. I don’t deny that there are some, and I will give one or two, of which I have something to say. In the meantime, I have consolation, not that I have contributed much to the gratifying result in being able to point to the fact, that, since the year 1849, the Reports of the General Board of Prisons have shewn a gradual and steady decrease of the population of our jails. I am free to confess that this result is only, to a small extent, due to us, and the reason is plain enough. The old rebel has had the advantage of us. We have, until very recently, been acting against him on the principle of those masters and mistresses, who, with a chuckle in their hearts, lay pieces of money in the way of suspected servants to catch them,—something in the Twelvetrees way, only they don’t wish their unwary victims “to die on the spot;” nay, having caught them, they only turn them off to rob and steal elsewhere. Yes, in place of our philanthropists meeting the arch-enemy at the beginning, when he is busy with the young hearts, detecting the first throb of good and turning it to a pulse of evil, we have been obliged to wait until the young sinner was ripe and ready for our hardening mould of punishment. There was no Dr Guthrie there—a good way cleverer than the enemy, I suspect, and capable of checkmating him by nipping the canker in the early bud; and then we have been hampered by our legal governors, who have been, and still are, always telling us we must keep a sharp look out for what they call, in their law jargon, an “overt act,” the meaning of which, I am informed, is, that we must wait until the rogues are able to do some clever thing, sufficient to shew us they have arrived at the age of discretion, and become meritorious subjects for punishment.
With this advantage over us, it is no great wonder we are sometimes outwitted; nay, the wonder rather is, that we succeed so often as we do, and I think it might be a great consolation to our philanthropists working among the Raggedier ranks, when I tell them, as I have already done, that I don’t hold the enemy at so much count as many do. His terrible reputation is due to our own laxity. We let him into the camp, hoof and horns, and then complain that we can’t drive or pull him out, whereas we have the power, if we would only exercise it, of keeping him out. To my instinctive way of looking at things in those days of improved tactics in war, it seems something like folly to trust to the strength of the wild boar’s tail in dragging him out when we can so easily barricade the hole.