Returning home I found a caller waiting for me in the library. He was a rather handsome man in his way, but a close observer might have noticed a certain shiftiness in his eyes and hard lines about his mouth, and perhaps other signs of a misspent life. Not being a close observer, I did not notice any of these things. He struck me as an ordinary person with whom it might be a pleasure to talk. I was somewhat surprised at his first remark, which was made by way of introduction.
“I am,” he said, “well known to the police, and am said to be the most dangerous criminal of my class now at large. I am an expert forger and have served time in four prisons.”
His frank statement was preliminary to the request for a temporary loan that would enable him to complete the work of reformation, that was endangered by a lack of funds. It was late in the day, and before acceding to his request it was necessary that there should be some investigation, so I asked him to call on the morrow.
“I have been at the Commencement exercises all day,” I said, “and am not in a condition to be of much help to you just now; but if you would like to stay a while and chat, I should be glad.”
He welcomed the suggestion, and, now that the matter of business had been postponed, he was at his ease. In a friendly way he made me acquainted with the general theory of forging and check-raising,—at least so far as it is intelligible to the lay mind. His criticism of prison management was acute, and he pointed out the seamy side of the plans of the reformers. I listened with docility to his story of the under world. He was a well-educated man with an appreciation of good literature, which was a characteristic, he informed me, of most forgers. He was especially interested in sociology, and had all its best phrases at his tongue’s end. He attributed all his misfortunes to Society. For one thing I listened in vain,—the admission that in some respects he might himself have been remiss. The idea of reciprocal obligation did not seem to have any place in his philosophy. As delicately as I could I tried to turn the conversation from the sin of Society, which I readily acknowledged, to the less obvious point of personal responsibility. Granting that Society was imperfectly organized, that juries were ignorant, and judges lacking in the quality of mercy, and prison wardens harsh, and chaplains too simple-minded, were there not faults on the other side that it might be profitable to correct? It was of no use to try to induce such currents of thought; they were quickly short-circuited.
At last I said, “You have told me what you did before you concluded to reform. I am curious to know how, in those days, you looked at things. Was there anything which you wouldn’t have done, not because you were afraid of the law, but because you felt it would be wrong?”
“Yes,” he said, “there is one thing I never would do, because it always seemed low down. I never would steal.”
It was evident that further discussion would be unprofitable without definition of terms. I found that by stealing he meant petty larceny, which he abhorred. In our condemnation of the sneak thief and the pickpocket we were on common ground. His feeling of reprobation was, if anything, more intense than that which I felt at the time. He alluded to the umbrellas and other portable articles he had noticed in the hallway. Any one who would take advantage of an unsuspecting householder by purloining such things was a degenerate. He had no dealings with such moral imbeciles.
It seemed to me that I might press the analogy which instantly occurred to me between “stealing” and forgery.
“Do they not,” I said, “seem to you to amount to very much the same thing?”