We presume no intelligent person need be told that the pretensions as to the "golden" and other "secret and valuable medicines" which these quacks boast themselves to possess, are absolutely without foundation. They no more possess such remedies than they possess any legitimate right to the names and medical titles which they too frequently assume.

In cases of indiscretion, the quack treatment is always with mercury—notwithstanding denials. Sometimes serious mercurial poisoning results, and not unfrequently, through the charlatan's ignorance of proper treatment in complicated diseases, irreparable injury ensues.

The quack advertisements and pamphlets are the source of incalculable evils to youths between the ages of seventeen and thirty. They are impelled by fear to visit the quack's den, where they are "played" as long as practicable. Sometimes exciting drugs, like cantharides, are given in the medicine, and thus intensify the evil. The quack, of course, ascribes the result to the patient's alarming condition, who is growing worse, in spite of his medicines, and who can only be cured by more powerful and costly drugs. Sometimes a seemingly candid but equally misleading offer of "no cure no pay" is offered. In this case the patient is usually required to sign a statement of his condition, in which his symptoms and his previous bad habits are fully set forth. It is stipulated that the "doctor" is to be paid a certain round sum when a cure is effected, and while the case is under treatment the patient pays for the medicines. If no pay is asked for the "stuff," the quack is seldom or ever a loser. Such a document few persons, with characters to lose, would care to run the risk of publishing, and hence they generally acknowledge themselves cured, or pay the doctor handsomely to redeem the document.

While wading through this dark morass of deception and fraud, the "anatomical museums" must not be overlooked. These Priapean establishments, in which is an exhibition of wax models of different organs and parts of the human body, are too vile for description. "Lectures" are delivered with the design of furnishing patients to the quack practitioners in whose interest the place is run. Thousands—we might have said millions—of copies of disgusting little books on "Marriage," or the "Philosophy of Marriage," or some cognate obscenity are distributed gratis, and it is no unusual sight to see a score of nervous, hollow-eyed patients waiting for treatment.

We have endeavored to speak plainly and to the point in dealing with quacks and quackery, because it is a topic of sovereign importance and urgency. Hundreds upon hundreds of our population are plundered and poisoned by these medical pests of society, and if we have not made it plain that it is dangerous to have anything to do with the advertising doctors of New York or any other place, we have failed in our purpose. Their advertisements, their pamphlets, and their rascally little books, penetrate the remotest corners of the land. Curiosity leads the farmer's son or the apprentice to send for some advertised book to satisfy a craving for information, or to pander to an already diseased imagination, and the bad seed is sown. He is surprised, startled, and finally alarmed; and he writes. He is told in the reply that "I seek my remedies in far-off climes; some in the distant prairie, some in the ever-blooming balsam; in the southern climes, where eternal summer reigns, and on the top of the snow-clad Himalayas." Accompanying the reply is a recipe calling for articles having no existence, or for decoctions from plants unknown to botanists. But in whatever form the response comes, the result is uniform. Plunder, always plunder, in the first place; sometimes this is supplemented by murder; whole families are destroyed, insanity is engendered, and the victims of these vile knaves are driven headlong to destruction and an early grave.

It has always been the dearest wish of a quack doctor to possess a diploma of some sort, no matter where or how dishonestly procured. Sometimes it was forged; sometimes second-hand; but however or wherever procured it was framed and conspicuously displayed in the "consulting" room. By the recent and entirely wholesome amendment of the law, however, those beguiling documents are no longer available. It is now imperative that the certificate of every physician must be filed with the County Clerk. Until this provision is observed, no doctor—no matter how eminent or well-qualified—can practice in New York. Many a quack, flourishing like a green bay-tree, was summarily brought to the "end of his tether," by this most wise legislative enactment.

We would be derelict to the duty we owe to the public did we not here, and in this connection, state our emphatic opinion that the editors and proprietors of newspapers, as a rule, have hitherto looked too leniently on this subject of quackery and its baleful announcements. Happily some of our journals will not publish such advertisements, and no editor can excuse himself by saying that he is ignorant of the character of such announcements. It must be known to every man of experience that such advertisements are unfit for the perusal of young men or women, and it is surprising that the heads of families should permit newspapers containing those advertisements to enter their houses. As a well-known English author some-time since wrote:

"It is pregnant with matter for grave reflection, and this not only in reference to patients themselves, but also in regard to the reprehensible conduct of parents who so recklessly admit into their family circle newspapers which insert the obscene advertisements of the quacks. As I have said before, these advertisements are traps for their sons and an offense to the modesty of their daughters. Well assured am I that many cases of unaccountable suicide in youths and young men, which cause so much surprise and misery in families, are due to these unfortunates having become the dupes of quacks."

This is a very terrible picture of the evil wrought through the abuse of the advertising columns of the press, but experience has shown us that it is not by any means overdrawn. The responsibility of the health and comfort—even of the lives—of many of the rising generation thus rests with the newspapers. How careful, then, ought publishers to be that the columns of their journals should in nowise assist in disseminating that which pollutes the minds of the young, renders them unfit to fulfill the duties of society, or to enjoy its pleasures, and, in short, makes their whole life a burden and a misery.



CHAPTER XVI.

ABORTION AND THE ABORTIONISTS.

The Career of Madame Restell—Rosensweig's Good Luck.

"Such is the fate of artless maid. Sweet flow'ret of the rural shade! By love's simplicity betrayed, And guileless trust.

Till she, like thee, all soiled, is laid Low in the dust." —Burns, "To a Mountain Daisy."

Love's young dream—the dream of the ages—has sometimes a fearful awakening. In her "guileless trust" and unsuspecting ignorance, a young woman weaves a light web of folly and vain hopes, which one day closes around her like a poisoned garment, instantly changing all her fluttering raptures into a wail of the deepest human anguish. All at once the whole force of her nature is concentrated in the effort of concealment, and she shrinks with irresistible dread from every course that would tend to unveil her miserable secret. Overshadowed by a misfortune that is worse than death, in her half-benumbed mental condition, she hears of the professional abortionist, and braces herself for one of those convulsive actions by which a betrayed woman will sometimes leap from a temporary sorrow into the arms of Death.

The dark crime of abortion abounds in New York, as it does in all great cities. Yet this crime is conducted with so much care that rarely a case comes to light. Even when one of these ghouls is arrested and put on trial it is but seldom that conviction follows, because it is an offense extremely difficult to bring home to the perpetrator. Many indictments, for inexplicable causes, from time to time have been pigeon-holed; but as the transaction is committed in private, the victim is the only witness, and she is naturally averse to exposure.

It is only when the remains of some beautiful victim are found packed in a box, or jammed into a barrel, that the imagination realizes the imminent peril dishonored women incur by trusting themselves to the mercy of those sordid butchers. The author of her wrong usually makes the arrangement, under cover. The wily practitioner talks blandly and soothingly. If the operation succeeds, all is well; if not, the poor victim's body is secretly disposed of. She is chronicled among the mysterious disappearances, because every precaution had been taken that her friends should know nothing whatever of her condition, or of her whereabouts.

Naturally, the practice of child-murder hardens the hearts and petrifies the feelings of those systematically engaged in it. The tortures inflicted on the patient are, no doubt, in many cases unavoidable if the end is to be achieved; but many of these operators are cruelly ignorant and unscrupulous, and barbarously brutal and reckless. The mind shrinks from contemplating the thrilling honors of some of the scenes enacted within those deadened walls. Despite the tears and protestations of the suffering woman, the operation will sometimes be repeated two or even three times. But helpless and unprotected as she is, she is compelled to submit, because she is terrorized by her inquisitor's threats to send her to some hospital at once, to expose her condition to the world and to die.

When death appears only too probable, the abortionist generally has the victim either sent to a hospital or to some regular physician's premises, and leaving her before her condition or their connection with the case has been discovered. If the death occurs on their own premises, a certificate from some doctor called in at the fast moment, and deceived as to the cause of death, may enable a quiet little funeral to take place. And again, the fact cannot be denied that from time to time regular, diplomated physicians have been found who would not hesitate, for a consideration, to give "crooked" certificates. Should it be found impracticable to dispose of the body in such a convenient and regular way, in some cases it is shipped by rail to a distant and fictitious address, without any clue by which it can be traced back to the "shipper."

The pitiable case of Miss Alice Augusta Bowlsby will occur to many readers just here. The facts in her case were simply these: One Saturday night towards the end of August, 1871, a trunk containing the remains of a young and beautiful female was found at the depot of the Hudson River Railroad, checked for Chicago. The remains were subsequently recognized as those of Miss Bowlsby of Paterson, New Jersey, and the trunk was traced, by means of the truckman employed to carry it, back to the residence of Dr. Jacob Rosenzweig. It was soon discovered that the death of the unhappy girl was caused by an operation tending to produce abortion. Rosenzweig was a burly fellow, with a forbidding aspect, and a bold, confident look. His large, bullet eyes looked defiantly from behind the deep-intrenched line of wrinkles that care or conscience had gradually drawn around them. He had, in fact, a forbidding aspect, and when he was placed on trial before Recorder Hackett, according to a newspaper reporter present,

"one eye was devoted to watching the Grecian bend of his vulture-hooked nose, while the other was on duty over a precocious lock of his curling red hair, which clung to the verandah of his left ear like a Virginia creeper."

Rosenzweig was convicted of manslaughter while treating a woman for abortion, and was sentenced to state prison for seven years—a sentence so obviously out of proportion to the enormity of the crime that a howl of public indignation went up to the skies. However, Recorder Hackett had awarded the utmost penalty of the then existing law, and Rosenzweig was sent to Sing Sing. Soon after, a law was enacted by the state legislature, making the penalty of crimes like Rosenzweig's twenty years in the state prison, with hard labor. After this law was passed, and when the abortionist had served about a year of his sentence, another charge of abortion was found against him, and he was brought down the river, again put on trial and sentenced. Mr. Howe, for his defense, in appeal, raised the natural objection that it was unfair and improper to try Rosenzweig in two cases at once. Consequently, he got a new trial, in which he was acquitted, because the old law under which he had been previously convicted had been repealed. Here was a manifest miscarriage of justice effected by a wise change in the laws. This prisoner escaped, but such a result could hardly, within the range of possibility, occur under the same law again.

In the majority of cases, the victims of abortion are gotten rid of by the practitioner before they die. The operation once over, they are hurried from the premises with all possible dispatch, even though the fatigue and exposure may imperil their lives. Many die a few days after reaching home, in which case the name of the abortionist is never known, and many more linger for a few months or years, mere physical wrecks of their former selves, till merciful Death folds them in his leaden arms.

Before the recent laws were passed, making it a punishable offense to offer to produce abortions, either by medicine or instruments, there were many nostrums, in the form of pills and powders, covertly advertised for the alleged purpose of producing miscarriages. When a person called on one of those quacks and explained the purpose for which the medicine was needed, he was told that it was very dear—from five, ten, to fifteen dollars a box. At the same time he would be assured that his lady friend was merely suffering from "an obstruction arising from cold." If he insisted on explaining, the hard face of the quack would grow darker and harder, and a mysterious gleam of intelligence would shoot from the speculative eye as he was told:

"I will not sell medicine for anything else but a cold; nor will I treat any lady for anything else. Your young friend has only taken cold, and if she is not relieved by these pills she had better come and see me herself."

No doubt most of those medicines were deceptive, fraudulent and futile. But they had the intended effect of advertising the person who sold them, whose "professional" services were generally brought into request when the pills proved inoperative. This was the secret of Madame Restell's reputation and immense accumulated fortune. Her occupation was that of a midwife, and in that assumed capacity she advertised her "Female Pills." As all the world knows now, her real vocation was the ante-natal destruction of unwelcome babies. To her gorgeous palace at the corner of Fifth avenue and Fifty-second street went for years some of the most wealthy and fashionable women of this metropolis. It is a dreadful admission, and a sad commentary on our boasted civilization, but the truth must be told. Some of her patrons were married ladies who, finding themselves likely to become mothers, and being too heartless and frivolous to desire the pains and cares of maternity, sought this woman's aid and, in some instances, paid her fabulous sums to have their innocent offspring destroyed before they saw the light. Others who sought her services were unmarried girls, who, having sacrificed their honor were prepared to pay any price to conceal their shame, by the destruction of the little life which would blazon it to the world.

Madame Restell's clients were all, or nearly all women of the higher orders of society, and of liberal means. Of this disgraceful fact there can be no manner of doubt. Her scale of charges was so extravagant as to positively prohibit her employment by any one unable to pay a handsome fee for the gratification of their murderous project. Sometimes a poor girl, ruined by some wealthy libertine, would be supplied by him with funds to pay for the terrible operation which would conceal her folly; but in the great majority of cases they were ladies of wealth and social standing who went dressed in elegant apparel, loaded with jewelry, and double veiled, to her palatial mansion to obtain her aid.

Madame Restell, whose name was a scandal and her Fifth-avenue house an outrage upon New York for years, was a native of Painswick, Gloucestershire. She was the daughter of a humble laborer named Trow, and first saw the light in 1813. Her educational facilities—as indeed were all those similarly or even better circumstanced in England seventy years ago—were of the humblest kind. But she was made to work, taught to use her needle, and "sent out to service" in her early teens. And so it came to pass that, at the age of sixteeen, she was "maid of all work" for a butcher in her native town. She was quite good-looking, with piercing black eyes and thick, luxuriant black hair, and shapely form. She had many candidates for her young affections among the young weavers of the place, but a journeyman tailor named Henry Somers was the successful wooer. A year or two after the wedding, Mr. and Mrs. Somers emigrated and came to the city of New York, settling over on the east side, about Oliver street. Somers was lazy, improvident and a tippler, and after a short sojourn in America Mrs. Somers found herself a young and blooming widow, with one child, a girl, to provide for. She had all along industriously supplemented her husband's earnings by her needle. She was now wholly dependent upon it for the subsistence of herself and child.

It was while in these pinched circumstances that she made the acquaintance of Charles R. Lohman, a printer poor as herself, and became his wife. There was no immediate improvement in their condition. Both were impatient of the pinchings of poverty. Neither was constitutionally disposed to work hard and patiently for an honest competence. The celebrated "Female Pills" formed the philosopher's stone which released them from this condition of chafing discontent and brooding unrest. From what source a knowledge of the ingredients requisite for the composition of a pill for such a diabolical purpose was derived, or whether, indeed, the pill was effective or diabolical at all, remains a mystery, inasmuch as none of her medicine seems to have been subjected to chemical analysis. Suffice to say that the couple rented a small room, and the first advertisement of the female physician was printed in the old Sun, and paid for with borrowed money.

Under such auspices the abortion business dawned upon this city, and in more than one of the daily newspapers, between the years 1836 and 1840, appeared glowing puffs of "the beautiful young female physician," as she was termed, accompanied by elaborate advertisements setting forth her specialty. No wonder this Upas tree flourished by the river of crime on whose banks it was fed. No wonder that her brother Joseph, who had been imported from madame's native English town, was kept busy in putting up medicines and compounds for the ladies of New York. No wonder that the Lohmans, alias the Restells, waxed fat and insolent, or that, with only thirty years actual existence, madame informed the public that she had been for "thirty years physician in European hospitals"!

By and by her boldness attracted the attention of the Albany Solons, and in 1846 a law was enacted which was intended to prevent the dark crime which Madame Restell had helped to make so fashionable. In September, 1847, a minion of justice invaded her Gehenna, then at No. 146 Greenwich street, and, upon an affidavit, she was arrested and put in prison. On the tenth of that month she was arraigned and, pleading "Not guilty," was sent back to jail to await her trial. At this preliminary proceeding it appeared that Dr. Samuel C. Smith had been called upon to attend professionally a young woman of Orange County, by the name of Mary Bodine, and, upon discovering evidences of foul play, communicated with the Mayor of New York, and Madame Restell's arrest followed. Public excitement rose to an intense pitch. A spasm of morality shook the city to its foundations. Nothing was talked of but the hideous crimes of the woman abortionist. People lost sight of the war, then raging in Mexico, while listening to the stories of imaginative people about heaps of babies' skulls supposed to be mouldering beneath the floors of the Greenwich-street Golgotha. There were threats of mob violence, and of incendiary proceedings. It was necessary to guard the premises, and Lohman kept himself religiously secluded from public observation.

On the twentieth of October, 1847, the abortionist was placed in the dock of the Court of General Sessions, before Recorder Scott and two aldermen. For the prosecution there appeared Ogden Hoffman, John McKeon and Jonas B. Phillips; for the defense, James T. Brady and David Graham, Jr. The prisoner was charged in the indictment with manslaughter in the second degree. Considerable difficulty was experienced in obtaining a jury. Mary Bodine, herself, was the first witness. She described her engagement as a servant with a person of the name of Cook; her seduction three days after entering upon her duties, and the consequences that followed her visit to Madame Restell's establishment; the conversation that took place; her sojourn in an apartment of the dreadful den; her diet and treatment, and all the revolting details were given with a pre-Raphaelite sharpness of outline that carried the conviction of truth. It was a long trial, and not before November 12th did the Recorder sum up, when the jury, after a brief retirement, found the prisoner "Guilty."

She was sent to the penitentiary on Blackwell's Island, and popular excitement was allayed, while the spasm of public morality, with a soft sigh, fell asleep. When Madame Restell's term of imprisonment expired she came back to the city and, purchasing a new property on Chambers street, hung out her "Midwife" shingle, and carried on her business with nearly as much effrontery, and with quite as much success, as before her prosecution and sentence.

A craving for pomp and ostentation was one of the peculiar phases of Madame Restell's character. To gratify this kind of ambition, she purchased, through a real estate agent, ten lots on Fifth avenue, between Fifty-second and Fifty-third streets. They cost at that time $1,000 each—$10,000 for the ten. When it became known that this woman was the purchaser of the ten lots, a movement was at once made by reputable citizens interested in the respectability of New York's leading avenue to repurchase the property. Five thousand dollars were offered for her bargain without avail. When, many years later, the horrified residents of the fashionable thoroughfare beheld ground broken and the abortionist's mansion gradually raising its brazen front, their indignation knew no bounds. Large sums of money were offered the woman to forego her intention, but she haughtily answered that "there was not money enough in New York" to prevent her. No expense was spared, either in the construction or decoration of this palace of infamy. The frescoed ceilings were works of art. Two Italians worked at them for a twelve-month, at an expense of twenty thousand dollars. The carpets and upholstery, ordered through the house of A. T. Stewart & Co., were manufactured specially in Paris. The paintings were selected from the productions of the greatest artists of the period. Her stable was erected at a cost of twenty-eight thousand dollars. The Osborne House, another of her investments, erected on the ground adjoining her own residence, cost about two hundred thousand dollars.

In February, 1878, evil days again fell upon Madame Restell. On the eleventh of that month she was arrested by Anthony Comstock, of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, and taken to Jefferson Market Police Court, before Justice Kilbretli. She desired her release upon bail, pending examination. The bail was fixed at $10,000, and although she offered to deposit with the court that amount in government bonds, Judge Kilbreth refused. Satisfactory bail not being forthcoming, she was committed to the Tombs, and assigned to a cell on the second tier of the women's prison. By and by, she was released on bail and, pending her trial, some time early on the morning of April 1, 1878, she committed suicide, by cutting her throat from ear to ear, in her bath-tub. The scene was described in that morning's Herald, as follows:

"Mme. Restell's chambermaid, Maggie McGraw, went to her mistress' room at about eight o'clock this morning, but not finding her there she went to the bathroom, which is on the second floor. There, hanging on the door, she saw her mistress' clothes. Thinking that she was taking a bath the girl went down-stairs, but soon returned and, seeing the clothes still there, she looked in. Not seeing the madame, she became alarmed. A peculiar smell then attracted her attention and, looking in, she saw that the bath-tub was filled with bloody water, and at the bottom of the tub lay the body of her mistress, with her throat cut from ear to ear. The instrument of death, a large carving-knife, was lying at her side. The bath-room is fitted up with Oriental splendor, being frescoed and decorated handsomely."

The suicide was buried next day, being conveyed from the Fifth-avenue mansion to the Grand Central Depot, and thence to Tarrytown, the place of interment. The funeral procession consisted merely of the hearse carrying the body and one carriage. It is a strange, revolting story, carrying its own warning and moral, besides furnishing an admirable instance of the unexpected forms in which the great Nemesis manifests herself.



CHAPTER XVII.

DIVORCE.

The Chicanery of Divorce Specialists—How Divorce Laws Vary in Certain States—Sweeping Amendments Necessary—Illustrative Cases.

A large proportion of the marital infelicity now so alarmingly prevalent in this country is no doubt caused by the mal-administration of our divorce laws, and by the demoralizing discord between the legislative statutes of the various States on the subject of divorce. While in the middle and a portion of the Eastern and Southern States, the conditions legally imposed, before a dissolution of marriage can be judicially obtained, are wholesomely exacting and in accord with the strict Scriptural standard, in certain of the Eastern, Southern and Western States the most trifling alleged causes of disagreement or "incompatibility" are sufficient to secure the law's disseverance of the marriage tie. The divorce business of certain courts in Illinois, Iowa, Utah, and some of the territories, enjoy an infamous notoriety all over the world; while even staid old Connecticut offers a positive reward to connubial infidelity by at once granting a full or absolute divorce upon comparatively slight pretexts, leaving both parties legally free to marry again as their altered fancies may elect.

He who, in New York,

"Reads the in image act with pride And fancies that the law is on his side,"

may soon be taught, to his dismay, that some backwood's court in the West has privately given his artful better-half a divorce, and authorized her to wed at her earlier pleasure with the Lothario whom he—the cast-off husband—had not even begun to suspect of treachery. Or, again the lord and master whose preference has wandered from his lawful wife to some designing female poacher on her rightful domain, may openly give that wife the fullest justification in law for a New York divorce, and, after the petition has been granted, go with his paramour to any State outside the jurisdiction of the State of New York, and there be legally joined to her for whom he has forsworn himself. One might infer from these dangerous and disgraceful possibilities that but few of the married ones who, from whatever cause, were discontented with their domestic relations, would be long restrained by any other than the highest exceptional moral considerations from availing themselves of the relief so variously attainable. It must be borne in mind, however, that an honorable action for divorce, openly and honestly undertaken in any State, involves more or less public exposure with considerable pecuniary outlay. These two considerations, in the present lax tendencies of our divorce laws, constitute the chief bar against a wholesome "popular" adoption of the legal remedy for domestic troubles; while their potency has invoked a class of fraudulent practitioners whose insidious business it is to procure dissolution of marriage for any or no cause, "without publicity," and at a cost suited to the most limited means. In other words, New York has been, and still is, the headquarters of a villainous divorce ring, by the audaciously fraudulent practices of which the solemn marital covenant is made a despised and brittle toy of the law—to be broken and discarded at the will of the vicious and depraved.

Lord Howell, for fifty years a judge of Doctor's Commons, pointedly said: "A knowledge that persons uniting in marriage must continue husbands and wives, often makes them good husbands and wives; for necessity is a powerful master to teach the duties it imposes."

These sinister traders in domestic infamy, secret libel, and suborned perjury announce their business and addresses in advertisements in which "success is guaranteed," "no fee required till divorce is granted," "no publicity," etc., while the decree is warranted to be "good in every State,"—in confirmation of which last assertion the divorce specialist's private circular frequently contains the following extract from Article IV, Section I, of the Constitution of the United States: "Full faith and credit shall be given in each State to the public acts, records and judicial proceedings of every other State."

The question may arise, and it is pertinent, who employ these divorce specialists? We answer: All sorts of people. They may be dissolute actresses, seeking a spurious appearance of law to end an old alliance, and to prepare for a new one. They may be frivolous, extravagant, reckless, misguided wives of poor clerks or hard-working mechanics, infatuatedly following out the first consequences of a matinee at the theatre, and a "personal" in the daily newspaper. They may be the worthless husbands of unsuspecting faithful wives, who, by sickness, or some other unwitting provocation, have turned the unstable husband's mind to dreams of new connubial pastures and the advertising divorcist. They may be the "lovers" of married women, who come to engage fabricated testimony and surreptitious unmarriage for the frail creatures whose virtue is still too cowardly to dare the more honest sin. They are not the wronged partners of marriage, who, by the mysterious chastising providence of outraged hearts and homes are compelled, in bitterest agony of soul to invoke justice of the law for the honor based upon right and religion. The manufacture of a case of the contrabandists of divorce is often such a marvel of unscrupulous audacity, that its very lawlessness constitutes in itself a kind of legal security.

Another question naturally arises: What are such divorces worth? We reply that the whole business is unblushing fraud upon the dupes who are entrapped into patronizing the business. Not one of those divorces has ever yet held good when ultimately contested in open court, by the parties against whom they have been secretly obtained. Many of them, however—perhaps thousands!—have served the whole purpose of those purchasing them, because the husbands or wives so cruelly wronged have either lacked the means, or the heart to take public legal measures for exposing the fraud, and setting the divorce aside. How is the poor clerk, or mechanic, the invalid or unfriended wife, to raise hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars necessary for such a purpose?

It seldom happens that the so-called divorce specialist applies to any of the courts in the States of New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland or South Carolina, because in those States the testimony given in divorce proceedings becomes part and parcel of the written court record. The names, residences, and occupations of the witnesses, and all the testimony they offer, is carefully taken down by the referee, and reported upon by him to the court. The judge takes all the papers, and grants the decree or refuses it, upon the report and the testimony, and the record is perpetually on file, and accessible. Consequently when a husband or wife unexpectedly finds that their hymeneal bonds are severed, they have the right and privilege of inspecting the record of the case, in the court archives, and of examining the evidence upon which the decree adverse to them was granted. These are what is termed "dangerous States," in the parlance of the specialists; for there is always a chance of the disbanded mate feeling aggrieved and pugnacious, and of the cat coming with portly stare from the bag with a lively prospect of the perjured witnesses and the specialist having to "scoot" for parts unknown, or run the risk of dignifying the inside of the State prison. Many readers of this page will no doubt remember with what precipitation the notorious Monro Adams made himself "scarce" in January, 1882, upon the discovery of the irregular Chase divorce, and others of the same kind fraudulently procured in Brooklyn.

In the Western and Southwestern States, on the other hand, where the population is sparser, and where no such press of business is before the courts, divorce proceedings are mostly under the immediate control of the court itself. The presiding judge hears the testimony as it is presented, and decides the case on its merits, there and then. There is no necessity for employing a referee, and there are no written records of the case. The decision, the date, and the abstract records appear on the court books, and that is all. And yet, by the section of the Constitution, already quoted, this decree is regarded,—by the court that grants it, at least,—as perfectly legal and operative all over the Union. Although this is not the case, there are almost insuperable obstacles to such a divorce being set aside. For there are no names of witnesses and no records. There is the name of the lawyer; but if a "muss is raised." he is either non est inventus, or his memory is paralyzed. He has no recollection of the names of the witnesses, of the date of the hearing, or indeed of the case. No matter what evidence the injured party might be able to produce, he cannot get an iota of satisfaction nor make the least progress until he knows what evidence was presented against him when the decree was granted. Daniel McFarland found this in Indiana, and so have scores of others. These Western and Southwestern States are therefore not unadvisedly deemed "safe," and hence they are very largely patronized.

In Iowa, Indiana, and Rhode Island, again, the court possesses what is termed "discretionary power" in divorce cases. The State Constitution, after specifying the usual prime ground—adultery—goes on to specify: "And for any other cause for which the court shall deem it proper that a divorce should be granted," or "when it shall appear to the satisfaction of the court that the parties can no longer live harmoniously together." It requires no elaborate reasoning to perceive that a decree granted under such conditions remains tolerably secure. For the testimony has been taken vive voce, and the decree pronounced in open court, after the judge has been "satisfied" that the complainant "can no longer live harmoniously" with her Johnny or his Jenny.

A case illustrating this point came under our notice some years ago. A wealthy young Frenchman eloped from Bordeaux with the girl-wife of a middle-aged wine exporter. The runaways came to New York, and in a short time, through a specialist, the lady obtained, in an Iowa court, a divorce from her deserted husband. The deferred rite of matrimony was then solemnized between the pair.

About twelve months afterward, business called the happy husband back to France. It was not deemed advisable for his charming wife to accompany him. Neither, as a matter of fact, did she wish to undertake the voyage. But she accompanied him on board the steamer and bade him a touching, emotional and affectionate adieu. Mark what followed! Hardly had he got twenty-four hours beyond Sandy Hook than she proceeded to the same specialist, who had severed her former bonds, and employed him to procure her another divorce. It was applied for, and duly granted by the presiding judge of the Fourth District Court of Iowa. When this decree came to hand, with its flash heading and big red seal, the lady was married to a handsome young dry-goods man.

Meantime the absent husband in Paris kept up a fervent correspondence with his wife, anathematizing his ill-luck in being so long kept from her side. She replied regularly and kindly to these letters until her wedding with the young dry-goods Adonis was consummated, when she abruptly ceased to write. The Frenchman remonstrated, adjured, cursed and cabled, but receiving no response finally hurried across the ocean to find that he was a divorced man, and to be reminded, in the choice phraseology of his supplanter, that "what was sauce for the goose, was sauce for the gander."

With true Gallic impetuosity he sought for VENGEANCE! He employed lawyers and spent considerable money in the expectation not only of setting the divorce aside, but in bringing the lady and her paramour to condign punishment. His efforts, however, proved perfectly impotent. The lawyer, resident at the court, remembered nothing of the evidence, and the court remembered the case only so far as that it was perfectly regular and satisfactory.

Thus it will be seen that

"Domestic happiness, That only bliss of Paradise which has survived the fall,"

when once perverted by cunning treachery like this, leaves the betrayed with little chance to cover its poor grave with the ostentatious monument of legal justice.

There are some aspects of this divorce specialist business which would be amusing did they not furnish such a cloak and encouragement to depravity and licentiousness. The following narrative of actual facts illustrates a phase of the kept-mistress ethics, and shows how the Western bogus divorce operates in lowering the tone of society and in sapping the foundations of morality:

A few years since a young stock broker of this city, spent his summer vacation in the sylvan glades of the country surrounding Lake Champlain. He possessed an appreciative eye for feminine beauty, and a soul burning for adventure. Like most men of this type, he was not apt to be disturbed by qualms of conscience where the gratification of his passions was concerned. In an evil hour, he made the acquaintance of a handsome Vermont girl, just merging upon the full meridian of exceptionally voluptuous charms. Without any special claim to mental endowments, Sadie F——- was a superb animal. Her, our frisky broker saw, and wooed. The girl fell madly in love with him, and, before long, ceased to be a virgin of the vale. Lothario was much attached to her, and by his persuasions and ornate representations of city life, backed by aureate promises, she was induced to fly from her once happy rural home and to live with her seducer in this city. He began by treating her well, placing her in handsome apartments in a boarding house on the west side, and for nearly a year the ardor of his attachment knew no abatement. Gradually, however, the affection on his side began to wane. She awoke from her delusive dream to the consciousness that she was alone in a great city without friends, money, or virtue. Whither could she flee? She could not return to her country home to look into the sorrowful depths of her mother's tender eye, or face the stings and sneers of the people of her native village. "A life of pleasure"—as it is sarcastically termed—seemed her only resource. In her terrible extremity, she made a last appeal to her deceiver, and succeeded in touching a tender spot in his heart. Perplexed as to what disposition he could possibly make of the girl who had loved him "not wisely but too well," he consulted an acquaintance notorious for the number and variety of his amours. "Oh, my dear boy, that's easily settled,"' said the friend, "get a Western divorce through one of those advertising fellows." The broker didn't "catch on"—he couldn't see why he should obtain a divorce, and said as much. "But she wants the divorce!" replied the adviser. "Let her be divorced from Frederick Brown, or Augustus Smith, or Maximilian Johnson, and then, you see, her character will be restored, her virtue whitewashed, and she will be corroborated and sustained as a respectable member of society; an object of envy and emulation on the part of her sex, and of interest, admiration and honest courtship by ours." So a decree was duly applied for through one of those "divorce lawyers" wherein the petitioner, Mrs. Sadie Johnson, sought to be severed from the hated yoke of her husband, George Frederick Johnson, who, as the petition set forth, not only treated her with habitual brutality but continually violated the purity of the hymeneal couch, to wit, etc., etc. The papers were duly served upon the defendant, who assumed the name of George Frederick Johnson for the purpose of the suit. At the expiration of the time allowed in such cases for an answer to the petition, no defense had been set up. The lady's lawyer thereupon moved for the appointment of a referee, as well as for counsel fee and alimony. All went smoothly, of course, for the petitioner, and in due course the decree of absolute divorce was granted to this unmarried lady, with permission for her to marry again, while the disreputable George Frederick Johnson was absolutely debarred from any such privilege.

When the decree was recorded, Sadie returned to her family by the peaceful waters of the lake, and was received with open arms. She was an object of envy to the unsophisticated young ladies of the neighborhood, and of open and unbounded admiration to the young men. She had learned to dress and to put on flash airs, and her experience in vice, gilded over by this divorce sham, rendered her much more attractive metal to matrimonially-disposed Strephons than any quiet, retiring Daphne of the rural district. She soon became the wife of a well-to-do country store-keeper, and made his home a pandemonium, which ended by him employing a regular lawyer to procure a divorce, when the foregoing facts were elicited.



CHAPTER XVIII.

BLACK-MAIL.

Who Practice it, How it is Perpetrated, and upon Whom—The Birds who are Caught and the Fowlers who Ensnare them—With other Interesting Matters on the same Subject.

There is a class of crimes prevalent in the metropolis, which, from its secret character and the apparent respectability of those engaged in it, rarely ever sees the light of exposure. Some of these offenses are hushed through the influence or prominence of the operators. In others the facts are never divulged, because the victims prefer to suffer loss rather than have their names dragged into a publicity which, to say the least, would reflect on them discreditably. For these, and other obvious reasons, many kinds of secret crimes flourish and abound in the esoteric life of great cities. In New York, where money is often rapidly acquired, and where little curiosity is manifested as to the mode of its acquisition, there are naturally many facilities for putting black-mailing schemes into successful operation. Scores of persons, apparently respectable, are constantly on the alert to discover compromising facts in connection with persons of wealth. Words dropped from ordinary conversations, hints and allusions overheard, form a clue, which, followed up and reported in a broadly compromising form to the pecunious person concerned, will, in the majority of instances, induce him to imitate the role of the coon that preferred to "come down" rather than be shot at.

Experienced New Yorkers need not be told that there has existed among us for years a class of individuals whose only source of revenue is black-mail. Ever on the qui vive for real scandal or its counterfeit presentment, these cormorants levy tribute upon both sexes. The high and haughty dame, with a too appreciative and wandering eye; the wealthy banker, with a proclivity for "little French milliners;" the Christian husband, with a feminine peccadillo; the pew-owner at church, with a disposition to apply St. Paul's "holy kiss" a little too literally; and the saintly pastor with a skeleton in his closet, are all alike fish in the tribute net of this insatiable toiler of the turbid sea of scandal.

No uninitiated person can form an idea of the large number of such cases that are yearly silenced by the payment of hush-money in this city. Sometimes the victim and the victimizer meet, the money demanded is paid over, and there the matter ends. More frequently the negotiation is conducted by means of a "go between" with the same pecuniary result. In some cases, again, the trouble receives settlement in the office of a lawyer, when a receipt and full release of past and future claims is taken by the legal gentleman, who thus secures his client immunity from further demands. It is a well-accepted axiom that under like circumstances the same cause produces the same effect. And so the causes which lead to black-mailing in this city are precisely similar to the influences operating in Paris or London to produce the same ignoble crime. A married lady may become too familiar with some gentleman who has not the pleasure of being known to her husband; she may have been tenderly sentimental and gushingly confidential with him, and may even have confided her arduous imaginings to paper, when a rupture occurs—and be sure that a rupture always does occur in such cases—the cavalier may not only threaten to talk and "tell," but refuse to return the amatory correspondence, unless under substantial pecuniary inducements. This is the return she gets for what may be termed her privateering experiences, and there are numbers of creatures, whom it were sacrilege to call men, who make a regular business of becoming acquainted with married women for this special purpose. Instances are on record where a certain stipulated sum of money has been paid for years to a professional black-mailer, who held letters written to him by a lady whose acquaintance was made at a matinee. We were cognizant of a case in which the bird of prey, not content with his own extortions, handed over the lady's letters, on his death-bed, to a confederate, who continued successfully to maintain the payment of hush-money until death removed the weak and persecuted victim.

Ladies have no idea what risks they run when making chance acquaintances, nor how such intimacy may end. They may be successfully fortified against all the arts and blandishments brought to attack their honor, and yet be seriously compromised. The handsome and fashionably dressed street-lounger is very frequently a resourceful rascal. He may invite the lady to take a carriage-ride, and, as has sometimes happened, an accomplice acts in the capacity of hackman. The drive selected is through the principal streets. Some hotel or fashionable restaurant is visited, and if she still successfully resists wine and wiles, it is more than likely that she will be visited the following day by a "detective" who will calmly inform her that he "shadowed" her yesterday. Of course he is after money, and she pays his demand rather than permit him to carry into execution his threat of telling her husband.

Young girls, too, are frequently compromised by the professional "masher." This vile species of the genus homo affects the fashionable streets where he saunters in solitary splendor, waiting for an opportunity to make the acquaintance of some young girl on her way to or from school. If her parents happen to be wealthy, the extraction of a neat sum follows this undesirable association; far an exposure in which her name would in any way be associated with the adventurer's, would forever stigmatize her in society. In some instances the immature acquaintance has developed into an elopement, and when parental interference followed, it was discovered that the scalawag husband was not only ready but willing to relinquish his bride when the money agreement was made sufficiently potent. Sometimes, again, a man is sufficiently infatuated to marry a lady with a soiled or shady reputation, and if that circumstance becomes known to the Knight of Black-mail, it is morally certain that potential hush-money will be extorted. In point of fact every kind of "skeleton," social or criminal, if once its whereabouts be discovered and its individuality established, becomes a source of revenue to those unscrupulous pirates of society.

It occasionally happens that black-mailers will systematically weave a web whereby they may entangle a wealthy person. The possession of wealth confers no exemption from the weaknesses and frailties of human nature, and in many instances indeed the unwise use of money only brings the obliquities of its possessor into greater prominence. It is not long since an affluent and well-known elderly merchant of this city, walking in the neighborhood of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, had his attention attracted by a beautiful woman of graceful carriage and voluptuous symmetry of form, who seemed to keep just abreast of him on the inner sidewalk, and maintained this relative position block after block. He was not insensible to the charm of the situation, and, before he exactly knew how, was engaged in conversation with the fair unknown. She was an admirable conversationalist and spoke with that expressive pantomime which gives probability to the blackest lies. Thus conversing, he accompanied her to the residence she had been describing. The "residence" proved to be an assignation house. He entered, unconscious of the character of the house, and, as he had been on his way home, remained within only a few brief moments. Bidding the lady politely "good-day," he took his leave. As he walked rather briskly up the street he was accosted by a gentleman, who brusquely said:

"So, sir! I have got you at last. I have had my suspicions excited for some time past concerning the probity of my wife, but until to-day have failed in discovering proofs of her infidelity. Now, however, I have them! You have just left the house. I saw you and her meet on the street and I followed you."

The respectable elderly gentleman protested with all the indignation of maligned innocence, and was fluent and resourceful in explanation. He had, he said, simply been doing an act of politeness that any gentleman deserving the name would have as readily discharged, and so forth. His interlocutor didn't see it in that light, and told him so. The following day he was waited upon by the much-injured husband, who informed him that he was about to institute divorce proceedings against his wife. To demonstrate that he was dead in earnest he produced a formally drawn complaint in which the wildly astonished and indignant merchant figured as co-respondent. The result of this cunning maneuver may be foreseen. The old gentleman paid a large sum of money to the "injured" husband on the condition that he would withdraw the legal proceedings against his wife. When the money had been spent, the leech again renewed his black-mailing effort, and with success, although the respectable gentleman had been guilty of no further crime than the indiscretion of accepting the woman's invitation to step inside for a minute or two. With the second payment, however, he obtained a promise from the "husband" that on the receipt of the money he would start for California and importune him no more. It is perhaps needless to state that the scoundrel never left, but soon after made further demands, always holding over the victim threats of exposure in divorce proceedings. This system of extortion continued until as much as eight or nine thousand dollars had been paid. He was then impelled, in sheer self-defense, to consult a lawyer, when further extortion at once ceased and determined. It subsequently transpired that the "lady" and her "husband" were two of the most notorious panel thieves in the city.

The "anonymous letter" dodge is also sometimes successfully operated in levying black-mail. The conspirator becomes acquainted with real or alleged facts, and dispatches an artfully-worded communication for the purpose of frightening the intended quarry. Very frequently silence is obtained by the payment of a lump sum of money, especially where the victim lacks backbone and decision of character.

Another form of black-mail is practiced by women who run fashionable assignation houses and bagnios in this city. Gentlemen well known in public life, fathers of families, and even clergymen, are occasionally found in these gilded palaces of sin. It is a simple matter for the madame of the house to inform "her friend" that Mr. This, or the Reverend Mr. That, has been numbered among her recent visitors. The usual machinery is set in motion forthwith—threats of exposure and importunate demands for money. When the intended victim refuses to be black-mailed, his family—his daughter, perchance—is notified of her father's transgression and informed that the affair will be made public. Under such circumstances she is very likely indeed to pay hush-money rather than have her family's honored name dragged through the dirt of public scandal.

It is not so long ago that a regular business of blackmail was conducted in connection with the leading assignation houses. Ladies, as well as gentlemen, who visited them by appointment were "shadowed" and "spotted"; sometimes followed home and their standing and character in the community carefully determined, preparatory to the application of the financial thumbscrews.

A noted black-mailer of this city at one time maintained his wife in a private house, conveniently within call of a woman who kept a house of ill-fame. The wife promptly responded to any summons from the madame, and when she subsequently made the acquaintance of some wealthy visitor she would inform her husband of the gentleman's name and position. If, as probable, he was a person of ostensible respectability and advanced in years, with everything to lose by exposure, he "came down" promptly and liberally. On other occasions this high-toned husband would procure, through the offices of a mutual friend, an introduction for his wife to some prominent member of the Stock Exchange. The lady, who was a remarkably handsome, fascinating and wily woman, usually entangled the intended victim in the snare. Then the Husband appeared on the scene, boiling with indignation and "breathing threatenings and slaughter" until money was paid. The gentleman so entrapped might afterwards complain to his friend who introduced him to the siren, but he would never dream of associating him in the "crooked" transaction.

We are not alarmists by any means, but simply relate facts as they have come within our personal knowledge. The weakness of human nature, combined with the play of the passions, especially the passion of love, renders the existence of the black-mailer possible and often profitable. In a city like ours, where such freedom is accorded to young wives and demoiselles, it is not surprising that machinations against their virtue and their honor are planned and executed.

The picture has still another side. What does the reader think, for example, of a mother who has three daughters,—bright, beautiful little girls, with long braided hair hanging down their shapely backs, large, lustrous, melting eyes; childish, innocent-looking lambs, aged respectively thirteen, fifteen and seventeen,—and sends them on the street in the afternoons, exquisitely and temptingly dressed, in order to capture susceptible elderly gentlemen? Yet these bewitching little girls have been often seen in the neighborhood of Madison Square, on Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and even down on Wall street. Their mother would follow them at a distance, keeping them in view all the time. When accosted by a gentleman, which happened every day, their mother would follow them, watch the man when he came out of the house or hotel with one of her daughters, and the next day visit him, saying he had destroyed her young and beautiful daughter, and so on, and that she was going to have him arrested. This species of black-mail is not so uncommon as it would seem, even the fathers of young and prepossessing girls are partners in these affairs.

As a fact there is nothing that devilish ingenuity can devise to entice men and women into committing every kind of crime that is not practiced by the blackmailers of this city, and many are the fish that are landed and great the booty that is secured.



CHAPTER XIX.

ABOUT DETECTIVES.

The "Javerts," "Old Sleuths" and "Buckets" of Fiction as Contrasted with the Genuine Article—Popular Notions of Detective Work Altogether Erroneous—An Ex-Detective's Views—The Divorce Detective.

We are told that "all the world loves a lover," and it is, perhaps, equally true that most people like to read the details of clever detective exploits. The deeds of criminals naturally awaken the emotions of horror, fear, curiosity and awe in proportion to their heinousness and the mystery by which they are enveloped. Consequently the detective officer who pierces the mystery—unravels it thread by thread, and by unerring sagacity penetrates its innermost depths and lays his hand on the criminal—is at once invested, in the popular mind, with qualities approaching the preternatural. The vivid and fertile imagination of the literary romancist magnifies the illusion. The detective of the successful novel resembles the Deity in his attributes of ubiquity and omniscience. In whatever city his functions are exercised we may be sure that he knows every man-Jack of the criminal classes, their past and present history, their occupation and their residence. He knows all their names, their aliases and their soubriquets, just as Julius Caesar, as tradition tells, knew all the soldiers of his army. Moreover, they are invariably individuals of remarkable personality. While endowed with a strong spice of the world, the flesh and the devil, they are at the same time clothed in a sort of white robe of social immaculacy. They are half lamb and half wolf, if such a paradoxical being were possible.

Take, for instance, the Inspector Javert of Victor Hugo: A tall man, dressed in an iron-grey great coat, armed with a thick cane, and wearing a hat with a turndown brim; grave with an almost menacing gravity, with a trick of folding his arms, shaking his head and raising his upper lip with the lower as high as his nose, in a sort of significant grimace. He had a stub nose with two enormous nostrils, toward which enormous whiskers mounted on his cheeks. His forehead could not be seen, for it was hidden by his hat; his eyes could not be seen because they were lost under his eyebrows; his chin was plunged into his cravat; his hands were covered by his cuffs, and his cane was carried under his coat. But when the opportunity arrived there could be seen suddenly emerging from all this shadow, as from an ambush, an angular, narrow forehead, a fatal glance, a menacing chin, an enormous hand, and a monstrous rattan. When he laughed, which was rare and terrible, his thin lips parted and displayed not only his teeth but his gums, and a savage, flat curl formed round his nose. When serious he was a bulldog, when he laughed he was a tiger. His guiding principles—or perhaps instincts is the more appropriate word—were respect for authority and hatred of rebellion. In his eyes all crimes were only forms of rebellion. Give a human face, writes Hugo, to the dog-son of a she-wolf and we shall have Javert. No wonder that his glance was a gimlet, or that his whole life was divided between watching and overlooking. And, as if all this analytic rodomontade was not enough, we are told in characteristic rhetorical vagueness that he was a pitiless watchman, a marble-hearted spy, a Brutus contained in a Vidocq.

Readers of Dickens will remember that Mr. Bucket appears on the scene in Bleak House in a weird and mysterious way, which suggests that Inspector Byrne, of New York, had been a student of lawyer Tulkinghorn's methods when he undertook to pump Alderman Jaehne. The sly lawyer is plying Snagsby with rare old port in the dim twilight and evolving his story, when suddenly the victim becomes conscious of the presence of "a person with a hat and stick in his hand, who was not there when he himself came in, and has not since entered by either of the windows." This composed and quiet listener is "a stoutly built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in black, of about middle age," and he looks at Snagsby "as if he was going to take his portrait." When the poor, hen-pecked wretch, who has thus been drawn into the legal confessional, learns that Mr. Bucket is a detective officer, "there is a strong tendency in the clump of Snagsby's hair to stand on end."

The method of Bucket consists partly of gross flattery and of being "all things to all men," as Saint Paul somewhere advises. "You're a man of the world," he says to Snagsby; "a man of business and a man of sense. That's what you are, and therefore it is unnecessary to tell you to keep QUIET." He flatters the gorgeous flunkey at Chesney Wold by adroitly commending his statuesque proportions, and hinting that he has a friend—a Royal Academy sculptor—who may one of those days make a drawing of his proportions. Further, to elicit the confidence of the vain and empty-headed Jeames, Bucket declares that his own father was successively a page, a footman, a butler, a steward, and an innkeeper. As Bucket moves along London streets, young men, with shining hats and sleek hair, evaporate at the monitory touch of his cane. When there is a big job on the tapis "Bucket and his fat forefinger are much in consultation together. When Mr. Bucket has a matter of this pressing interest under consideration the fat forefinger seems to rise to the dignity of a familiar demon. He puts it to his ears and it whispers information; he puts it to his lips and it enjoins him to secrecy; he rubs it over his nose and it sharpens his scent; he shakes it before a guilty man and it charms him to his destruction. The Augurs of the Detective Temple invariably predict that when Mr. Bucket and that finger are much in conference a terrible avenger will be heard of before long." Furthermore we are told that "Mr. Bucket pervades a vast number of houses and strolls about an infinity of streets, to outward appearance rather languishing for want of an object. He is in the friendliest condition toward his species, and will drink with most of them. He is free with his money, affable in his manners, innocent in his conversation—but through the placid stream of his life there glides an undercurrent of forefinger."

Sergeant Cuff, of The Moonstone of Wilkie Collins, is "a grizzled, elderly man, so miserably lean that he looked as if he had not got an ounce of flesh on his bones. He was dressed in a decent black with a white cravat. His face was sharp as a hatchet, and the skin of it yellow and dry like a withered autumn leaf. His eyes, of a steely, light gray, had a very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself. His walk was soft, his voice was melancholy, his long, lanky fingers were hooked like claws. He might have been a parson, or an undertaker, or anything else you like, except what he really was." Then as to Cuff's methods: He is introduced to the reader with the usual air of mystery. He makes no allusion whatever to the business he had been hurriedly summoned to investigate, but "he admired the grounds, and remarked that he felt the sea air very brisk and refreshing." To the gardener's astonishment Cuff proved to be quite a mine of learning on the trumpery subject of rose gardens. As in the case of Bucket, the effective armor of Cuff is flattery. "You have got a head on your shoulders and you understand what I mean," is his typical style of address.

It is unnecessary to remind the reader that the detective of the novelist cannot be foiled or turned aside by false scents from the unerring pursuit of his lawful prey. If by malice prepense Javert or Cuff is temporarily beguiled, it is simply for the purpose of showing that the writer himself is in reality a very much more ingenious person than even the subtle detective he depicts for the delectation of his readers. These tricks resemble those feints of failure common to professional gymnasts and trapezists, purposely perpetrated with the object of magnifying in the mind of the excited spectator the difficulty or danger of the performance.

In our American literature the most popular detective stories are not composed of the imaginary performances of fictitious characters. We have made a great advance on that unsatisfactory and effete style. To satisfy the exacting palate of our reading people, we require a real flesh-and-blood detective, with a popular name and reputation, to pose as the figurehead, while an ingenious scribbler does the romancing. There is something thrilling and realistic in this method, and it carries an air of veracity which is irresistibly attractive and convincing. The French people did something of the same kind for Vidocq and Lecocq; but, as in most everything else, there is a pervading breeziness and expansiveness of horizon about the American product that is totally lacking in the blaze, frouzy, over-geometrical, Gallic detective romance.

No doubt the popular conception of the detective has been derived from the flash literature in which the "Old Sleuths" have formed the pervading figure. Concerning them, a clever ex-member of that particular branch of the force recently said:

"Now that I'm out of the business I don't mind telling you what you perhaps already know—that the usual stories of detective work are the veriest bosh. There is not one officer in ten thousand, for instance, who ever disguises himself for any work he may be bent upon. The successful detective is the man who has the largest and most accurate knowledge of a particular class of criminals. For instance, in a counterfeiting case there are one or two United States officers who will look at a bill, and after a scrutiny will say, 'Now, let's see; there are three men in the country who are capable of such work as this. Bad Jack is doing a ten-year stretch in Sing Sing, Clever Charley is in hock at Joliet, and Sweet William is the only one who is at large—it must be William.' So he proceeds to locate William, and when they get him they have the man who did the work."

As to those very interesting newspaper reports about how Detective So-and-So, while strolling down Broadway, saw a suspicious-looking individual whom he "piped" to the east side of the city, and eventually arrested in possession of property supposed to have been the plunder from a certain burglary, they are equally misleading. As the ex-officer, quoted above, said:

"Ninety-nine out of a hundred cases are worked through the squeal of some thief, or ex-thief, who keeps posted on the doings of others of his class in the city. He knows some officer intimately; goes to him and tells him that the night before One-Thumbed Charley turned a trick on Church street, and the stuff is 'planted' at such and such a place. Acting on this information, the officers visit the place indicated, and just sit around and wait till their man shows up. Lots of ability about that, isn't there? Some people have an idea, you know, that after a burglary the detectives visit the house where it occurred, and, after examining certain marks on the window where the man got in, immediately say: 'This is the work of Slippery Sam; he is the only fellow who does this sort of work in this particular style.' Nothing of the kind. It's just as I've told you in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. In the other cases, some citizen gives the officers information that leads to the capture of the man."

If the foregoing illustrations serve no other purpose, they at least emphasize the point which might have been made at the outset of this chapter, that detectives are a recognized necessity of our civilization. Crime and vice permeate every rank and every profession, and just as surely as crime and vice will always exist, so will detectives be employed to discover wrong-doers and hand them over to justice. Crime and vice are two terms used for the infraction of different kinds of laws—social and moral—and detectives may be conveniently classed in the same way. The detectives who deal with the transgression of social laws, including such crimes as counterfeiting coin and notes, railroad bonds, scrip, etc., forgers, embezzlers, swindlers, and the wide class of criminals generally, are exceedingly useful members of the community when they are inspired by a high sense of duty, and guided by principles of truth and integrity. The other class of detectives who enact the role of Paul Pry on breaches of the moral law, as, for example, the working up of testimony in divorce cases, is mostly a despicable, unreliable, corrupt being, whose methods are villainous, and whose existence is a misfortune.

Concerning our New York detectives, a writer of some note said, as recently as 1879:

"It is claimed that in about eight years the district attorney's office in New York has not known of one conviction of a criminal through the instrumentality of their detective police. And in those years the city has been overwhelmed and startled over and over again by depredations of almost fabulous magnitude. Still, although the scoundrels are known, and their haunts familiar to what are called 'the detectives,' they are never brought to justice unless they stagger up against the representatives of some of the many detective organizations in New York. Instead of surrounding the thieves with a net-work of evidence to convict them, the New York headquarters' detectives furnish them with all the facilities for escape known to modern criminal practice."

No doubt this deplorable condition of affairs was very largely due to the prevailing practice of the victims of robberies compromising with the felons. In this way detectives eagerly seize the opportunity of acting as go-betweens, and hence their relations with the criminal classes are established and maintained. They are thus largely interested, not in the prevention and discovery of crime, but in its perpetration and concealment. By this method they thrive, and their large incomes and accumulated property are no doubt largely attributable to the success of these delicate negotiations.

We are glad to bear testimony to the fact, however, that there is a great improvement in the detective force of this city, noticeable during its present administration. The men now engaged on the local detective force are as a class, those who have kept their eyes open, and have formed a wide acquaintance among criminals in the district, and are therefore able to obtain information from these crooks about the movements of those suspected of having been mixed up in certain criminal work. For when the reader reflects how easily criminals keep out of the reach of the police in St. Petersburg, Paris and Vienna, where every concierge, every porter, every storekeeper, every housekeeper, is required to report to the police at least once a week all the details of strangers with whom they may have come in contact, it should be no wonder that criminals can elude the police in New York and other American cities.

Concerning the private detective agencies, it has been said by one of their number:

"They are no better than the regular officers so far as skill is concerned. The only real difference is that there is a superior intelligence in the make-up—their disguise—of the agency people. They are first-rate at shadowing a man, but any man with ordinary good sense, who knows how to keep his mouth shut, will make a good shadow. If you will watch the private agency men carefully you will find that they associate largely with the high-toned criminal class. They are solid with one or two leaders and all the gamblers. All thieves of any prominence are gamblers, and as soon as they turn a big trick, they are sure to turn up here or in some other city and 'play the bank' a little. The agency men who are associating with the gamblers hear of this as soon as the crook strikes town, and a little inquiry set on foot will show where the crook came from. If, then, in the course of a few days, a complaint is lodged with the agency people from the town where the suspected party has been that a big confidence game has been played, or that a forged or raised check has been worked on some bank or other institution, it is not very hard to imagine that the thief who was recently so flush is the one who turned the trick."

There are a great many private detective organizations in New York City, some of which are located in elegant and commodious quarters, with a net-work of agencies covering the whole country and extending even to Europe. Between these reliable firms and the guttersnipe operator there are among detectives, as among other professions, every grade of reliability and respectability, some making a handsome living and some earning a bare existence. There are some thousands of them, and they all occasionally find something to do which pays. It may be watching some money-broker's exchange down-town, for the dishonest boy of some establishment clandestinely selling the postage stamps of his firm. It may be shadowing a confidential clerk, whose blood-shot eyes and generally "used-up" air have attracted the notice of his employers, who thereupon desire to learn where and how his evenings are spent. It may be some bank clerk, hitherto enjoying the confidence of the directors, but who now, in consequence of certain rumors, desire to have him watched. Or it may be any of a thousand instances in which an employee ceases to retain the full confidence of his employer, and the convenient private detective's services are at once put in requisition. Undoubtedly it would greatly surprise the army of clerks, cashiers and assistants of this and every great city to learn how many of them are thus under detective espionage. The young fellow may have fallen into the web of the siren. He may be down at Coney Island or at the races enjoying himself; utterly unconscious that a pair of watchful eyes is observing every motion and chronicling every act. Some fatal morning the reckoning comes. He may be a bank teller, and he is requested by the board of directors to show his books and give an account of the situation and prospects of the bank. Despite his proficiency in bookkeeping, he will be unable to figure up and cover the money he has squandered in gambling houses, on the street, or at the race-course. "Crimine ab uno disce omnes," says Virgil. From a single offense you may gather the nature of the whole.

The detective who accepts employment for the purpose of procuring testimony in divorce cases is undoubtedly at the nadir of his profession. No self-respecting member of the private detective organizations will undertake the service even when the pecuniary inducement, as is frequently the case, is large and tempting. For testimony so procured is regarded by the courts with suspicion. The veracity of a person who would crawl into a house, peer through a key-hole or crane his head through a transom window for the purpose of witnessing an act of immorality, can hardly be considered higher than his sense of honor, decency and self-respect. When he stoops to this kind of business he will hardly manifest any remarkable zeal for truth-telling, and he will be quite likely to offer to sell his evidence to the other side—a course which invariably transpires when the other side is willing to pay for the information.

Violations of conjugal faith are, unfortunately, not unknown, but in the majority of cases the intrigue progresses in secure secrecy until some wholly unforeseen accident brings it to sudden and relentless publicity. The recent case of a Brooklyn lady, who was carried into the city-hospital of that city about the beginning of last June, with both legs broken, illustrates this position with singular force and aptness. To quote from the article of the New York Sun of June 7, 1886:

"Mrs. Williams is young and pretty. 'She is not bad,' her melancholy husband said of her yesterday, 'only gay like.' She has been married about ten years, and two little children—a boy and a girl—are now longing for a mother's care and tenderness, which she cannot give them perhaps ever again. The faithful husband of the unfortunate woman is a hard-working man, honest if not dashing, devoted to his home, fond of his wife and proud of his children. 'I have been way down,' he says, 'but I am getting good wages now and getting on top again. But Lizzie wasn't content with these things. She was full of life, and I ought to have watched her long ago. Then this wouldn't have happened.'

"What has happened is this: When Lizzie went down on Fulton street on Saturday a week ago, ostensibly to make some purchases, she didn't return that night. Her husband's anxiety was increased when on Sunday he had no tidings of her. Day after day passed without word, and he sent for a young woman friend of Mrs. Williams to come in and look after the children and the household.

"On Thursday a young man from East New York, a friend of Mrs. Williams and a relative of a certain young lady friend of hers, stuck his head in the basement window of Fainter Williams' house and said:

"'Lizzy is in the City Hospital. She was hurt by a runaway, and both her legs are broken.'

"Mrs. Williams had first sent word to her East New York friend, who had thus taken the first tidings of his wayward wife to her anxious husband. Williams went at once to the hospital and found his Lizzie. She told him she had been driving with a friend in Fulton avenue and had been hurt.

"'Who was he?' Williams asked eagerly, the suspicions which he had been putting away from him for a long time suddenly becoming convictions.

"'None of your business,' said pretty Lizzie, defiantly. This reply was calculated to satisfy her husband that all was not right. In fact, it convinced him that everything was wrong, and in his excitement and pain he upbraided his wife with such vehemence that she called upon the hospital attendants to put him out of the ward unless he quieted down.

"Superintendent of Police Campbell heard of the alleged runaway in Fulton street, and he wanted to know why it had never been reported to him officially. He began an investigation and learned that the mishap had occurred out on the Coney Island boulevard. Mrs. Williams was confronted with this report. She denied its truth vehemently and protested 'before Almighty God' and in the presence of nurses and patients that she was run over and hurt in Fulton street. Nothing could move her from this statement, and when fifty witnesses to her accident sent word to the Police Superintendent of what they had seen, she was not discomfited, but repeated her false statements with determination.

"Mr. Williams says that his wife has for a long time nodded to sportive-looking men as they have passed his Bergen street house, and her absences from home have been irregular and sometimes prolonged indiscreetly into the evening. He has felt that her love of attention and social excitement was leading her beyond the bounds of propriety, but he had no doubt until now of her faithfulness to him and her children.

"Who took Mrs. Williams to drive on this eventful Saturday afternoon a week ago is her secret, shared only by her escort. Where they met is not known by anyone, but they started about four o'clock and drove through Prospect Park to the Coney Island boulevard. The day was fine and many fashionable turnouts and flashy rigs were on the road. Mrs. Williams, in her close-fitting and becoming dark habit, sat beside a young man not over twenty-five years old, in a road wagon of approved style, and behind a well-kept and fleet-footed horse. It was unmistakably a private rig. Her escort was of light hair and complexion, fashionably dressed, and of a style that is called 'giddy.'

"Down the level road they drove at a good pace toward the King's Highway, which crosses the boulevard about two and a half miles from the Park, and just north of John Kelly's hospitable road house. A short distance before this point was reached ex-Alderman Ruggles of Brooklyn came bowling along at a 2.40 gait, and he gave the young man who was driving Mrs. Williams a brush along an open stretch of road. As they were speeding on toward Coney Island a dog-cart suddenly loomed up, coming from the opposite direction, and bore down upon the racers.

"Mrs. Williams and her friend were on the right side of the road and Alderman Ruggles was in the middle. The dog-cart undertook to pass between them, and in doing so struck the wheel of the light road wagon, throwing Mrs. Williams' companion out. He was not hurt, and he held on to the reins just long enough to check his horse's speed and change his course. The spirited animal turned short across the road right in front of Kelly's and the wagon was upset, throwing Mrs. Williams out. She fell under the wagon and her left ankle and right thigh were fractured. A great many people saw the upset and ran to the injured woman's assistance. . . . . .

"When Mr. Williams was told about the accident he said, 'If that's so, I give her up. If she has done that I am through with her. She cannot come back to me. As long as she lies to me, to shield this other fellow, she may go to him. She can't come to me.'"

This giddy Brooklyn woman reckoned too much on her influence over her husband, when she expected to soothe his resentment by holding her tongue. Those women who deceive good, indulgent husbands, frequently discover, to their sorrow, that the most unmerciful and inexorable of men are those who have been deceived by their idolized partners. Yet men of this kind would be far more likely to thrash a private detective, who had possessed himself of the particulars of the amour in a sneaking way, than to recompense him, and properly, while the courts would absolutely refuse to receive such testimony unless abundantly corroborated. For those and other considerations, which will readily occur to the thoughtful reader, the detective who engages to get up testimony in cases of marital unfaithfulness is regarded as quite ghoulish by his fellow-detectives, and looked upon as being entirely unworthy of credence by lawyers and courts.

After all that has been said the press is, on the whole, the best detective—the most reliable and efficient agent against evil-doers. When a crime is committed the daily newspaper, with its Argus eyes, gives such minute and circumstantial details, together with such exhaustive particulars concerning its environment, and the details of its perpetration and supposed authors, that the public at large, so instructed and informed, become detectives. Hence "crooked" and wicked people are really more afraid of the thunderbolt exposure of the newspapers than of the slower and more uncertain action of the law.



CHAPTER XX.

GAMBLING AND GAMBLERS.

The Delusins that Control the Devotees of Policy—What the Mathematical Chances are Against the Players—Tricks in French Pools—"Bucking the Tiger"—"Ropers-in"—How Strangers are Victimized.

"And there were several offered any bet, Or that he would, or that he would not come; For most men (till by losing rendered sager), Will back their own opinions with a wager." —Byron's "Beppo."

Some people are born gamblers, and resemble Jim Smiley, of Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog." Jim was "always betting on anything that turned up, if he could get anybody to bet on the other side; and if he couldn't he'd change sides. Any way that suited the other man would suit him—any way just so's he got a bet, he was satisfied." If there was a horse-race, we are told, "you'd find him flush or you'd find him busted at the end of it; if there was a dog-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a cat-fight, he'd bet on it; why, if there was two birds setting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first."

Despite all efforts of repressive legislation, games of chance are in vogue all over the country. Gambling is practiced everywhere. Tourists to and from Europe engage in draw-poker and other games of chance, while they make pools and lay wagers on the distance sailed per day, or the length of the voyage, and on the number of the pilot-boat that will first be hailed. Gambling prevails on board those splendid steamers that ply up and down the great rivers of the country, and more than one passenger, driven to distraction by his losses at the gaming-table, has thrown himself overboard. Our legislators occasionally while away the time in traveling between Albany and New York in a poker-game, and they frequently meet each other at their lodgings around the capitol for the same purpose. At picnics in summer, when Nature wears her most enticing garmenture, groups of young men may be discovered separated from the merry-making multitude, jammed into some nook with a pack of cards, cutting, dealing, playing, revoking, scoring and snarling, wholly engrossed in the game.

No game of chance is more extensively played in New York City than policy. Many people are disposed to regard policy as the negro's game exclusively, but this is a great mistake. Policy embraces all classes in its ranks, and the white devotees of the game outnumber the colored five to one. Among the patrons of the policy-shops which, despite police raids and surveillance, still flourish in the district, of which the Post Office may be considered the focus, may be seen lawyers, journalists, advertising agents, book-keepers, mechanics, liquor-dealers, bar-tenders, peddlers, insurance agents, etc. Gamblers, as a class, are very superstitious, and the white policy-player is hardly less so than his colored brother. The latter dreams a good deal, while the former divides his time between trying to guess the lucky numbers and avoiding evil omens. Bad luck walks arm in arm with him beneath every ladder, and below every safe that is being hoisted to a top-floor room. If he forgets anything when he is leaving home in the morning, and has to turn back, he is ruined for the day. If he washes with a piece of hard untractable soap, and it darts from his hand and scoots along the floor, his "luck has dropped" and "slidden" likewise. If he, by some malign fate, meets a cross-eyed person, especially the first thing on Monday morning, he is plunged into despair.

It is estimated by an old policy-player that every dollar a man gets out of the game costs him at least five. To show how slim is the chance of winning, it is only necessary to explain that many men play the numbers 4, 11, 44 every day regularly, and this well-known "gig" only comes out about once a year, or say once in every 600 drawings. This is especially the negro's "gig." He watches for its coming day after day with fond anticipation. He would rather "ketch dat 'ar gig" for five dollars than receive a present of ten.

The lotteries now sold surreptitiously in New York are supposed to be drawn in Kentucky; but years ago numbers were drawn from a wheel on the steps at the old City Hall in the park. When the State Legislature annulled the charter of the lottery company and declared the game illegal, it moved over to New Jersey, where it was drawn as late as 1850.

"It was a standard joke in the old time," said an experienced operator recently, "to find out what numbers a man had played, and then to volunteer to stop at the City Hall and take a copy of the numbers drawn. A false slip was invariably brought back, and when the player examined it, seeing all the numbers he had bought, he generally dropped his work and went to collect the winning. When the lottery was driven from New York, interested persons used to cross over to New Jersey to witness the drawing, and the numbers were taken from the wheel amid the greatest noise and excitement. Some numbers were received with derisive hoots and howls, and others applauded; and all through the drawing certain favorites would be loudly and continually called for, and if they failed to appear curses filled the air. After being driven out of New Jersey, the lottery men found refuge in several other places, notably Delaware, Maryland, and other Southern States. The principal drawings now take place at Covington, Ky., opposite Cincinnati. The numbers from 1 to 78 inclusive are put into glass globes and placed in a wheel. This wheel is turned until the numbers are well mixed, when a trap in the wheel is opened and a boy, with his eyes tightly bandaged and arm bare, draws forth one of the globes, which is unscrewed and the number in it called. From ten to fourteen numbers are thus drawn, according to the size of the lottery. The drawing is immediately telegraphed on to New York in cipher, certain words standing for certain numbers. After the drawing is translated the runners are furnished with a list of the numbers on a 'running slip,' as it is called, which they immediately take to the various policy shops. No 'hits' are paid on the running slips, as some of the numbers are invariably wrong. About an hour or so after the drawings are received in New York, a printed slip is sent to every office, and then all claims are promptly settled. The managers, being in an unlawful business in this State, have the opportunity to swindle as they please. The players have no redress. Ten thousand dollar 'hits' have been made, according to tradition, and 'hits' of from $500 to $1,500 are known of sometimes. Three-number lottery tickets are sold on every drawing, and constitute a very lucrative branch of the business. Prizes are supposed to range from $30,000 down, and any ticket with one draw-number on it entitles the holder to the price originally paid for it. The first three drawn numbers constitute the first prize, and that ticket nobody ever gets."

The most of the money spent in policy is on "gigs" and "combinations." A "gig" is composed of three numbers, and they must all come out of the same lottery to entitle the player to win. Besides "gigs," there are "saddles," "capitals," "horses," "cross-plays," and "station numbers." In fact there are almost as many ways of playing policy as there are numbers in the wheel. As an old gambler explained it:

"You see there are placed in the wheel 78 numbers, from which are drawn 12, 13, 14, or 15, as the case may be. The latter number will not be drawn but once a week. Suppose 13 to be drawn. The rates—that is, the sum the player will receive if he wins—are as follows: For day numbers, 5 for 1; for station or first numbers, 60 for l; for saddles, 32 for 1; for gigs, 200 for 1; for capital saddles, 500 for 1; for horses, 680 for 1; and for station saddles 800 for 1. Cross plays—the numbers to come in either lottery—may be made at the same rate, subject to a deduction of 20 per cent. You see that some of these offer a remarkable margin for profit. The station saddle, with its 800 for 1, seems to offer unequaled facilities for making a fortune. But since the game was started, no one has ever been known to hit one. To get a station saddle you must not only guess two of the thirteen numbers drawn, but you must also guess the position they will occupy in the slip. The chances of this is so very remote that the policy-player, sanguine as he generally is, very seldom attempts it. The next in order is the capital saddle, with its 500 for 1. A capital is two of the first three numbers drawn. Of course there must be a first, second, and third number, and either two of these three constitute a capital saddle."

The chances of playing a "capital saddle," "gig" or "horse" in policy are easily determined by the following formulae, well known to all students of the advanced branches of Algebra:

The number of combinations that can be formed of n things, taken two and two together, is

n * [(n - 1)/2]

For n things, taken three and three together, the number is

n * [(n - 1)/2] * [(n - 2)/3]

For n things, taken four and four together, the number is

n * [(n - 1)/2] * [(n - 2)/3] * [(n - 3)/4]

Applying these formulae to policy, it will be seen that to ascertain the number of "saddles" in any combination you multiply by the next number under and divide by 2; for "gigs," multiply by the next two numbers under and divide by 6; while for "horses" you multiply the next three numbers under and divide by 24. Thus,

78 X [(78 - 1)/2] = 3,003 "saddles."

78 X [(78 - 1)/2] X [(78 - 2)/3] = 76,076 "gigs."

78 X [(78 - 1)/2] X [(78 - 2)/3] X [(78 - 3)/4] = 1,426,425 "horses."

In other words, there are 3,003 "saddles" in 78 numbers, and it follows that any person playing a capital has two chances in his favor and 3,001 against him.

There is a joke among policy-players that the game is the best in the world, because so many can play it at once. Different players have various ways of picking out the numbers they think will come out. Some go by dreams exclusively, some play chance numbers they run across in the streets, or signs or express wagons, while others make a study of the game and play by fixed rules.

As we have already hinted, the business of policy-playing is insignificant in comparison to what it used to be. Still we are assured that New York City is still spending a good many thousand dollars a day in "policy," two-thirds of which professedly, and really more, goes to the managers and agents. If policy-players would stop awhile and think seriously of their ways, they would cease playing; or if they would keep an account of all the money spent on the game for a month or two, they would discover that they had chosen a wrong road to fortune.

Pool gambling at the various race-courses in the suburbs of New York is now under stern interdict of the law. This feature is greatly deplored by those who are in the habit of patronizing this exciting pastime. Of course the business is carried on sub rasa in the city, in a sort of sporadic form. No doubt, if we are to reason from analogy, the pool-fever, emboldened by being "winked at" and tolerated, will, by and by, assume its noisy, epidemic manifestations.

It is hardly necessary to dwell on the familiar auction pool, with its close, stifling, dingy room; its crowd of solemn, stupid, wide-awake gentlemen seated in chairs before a platform, backed with a blackboard, on which are inscribed the names of the horses expected to start; and its alert, chattering auctioneer, gay as a sparrow, and equally active, fishing for bids, with strident voice and reassuring manner. A few words, however, may be spared to touch lightly on what is designated the "Mutuel" system, which was invented by M. Joseph Oller, an ingenious Frenchman, about 1866. Those who had the good fortune to attend Paris in 1867 may remember that M. Oller's indicators were prominent race-course features during the Great Exposition. They are now familiar to all frequenters of our American race-courses, and their mode of operation needs no explanation. The pool-seller's profit is safe as in all big gambling schemes. He subtracts a commission of five per cent., and thus makes a handsome profit when business is at all brisk.

The "Paris Mutuel" would appear to be a pretty square arrangement, but, according to those acquainted with its true inwardness, it has been "easily manipulated by those in control." There are two ways of cheating, according to one authority, and "both are practicable during the last moments of the race, when the horses are coming up the home-stretch. At this time everybody is anxiously intent upon the contest and nothing else, so that it is an easy matter for the operator to see what horse is ahead, and then quietly add five or ten tickets to his record on the indicator; or, on the other hand, if the horse favored by the 'ring' is away behind, he can quietly take off some of his tickets and so save $50 or $100 out of the five. The former, however, is the easier method and can be with difficulty detected, for very few people keep transcripts of the French pools, more particularly that before they are closed everybody is off trying to secure a good place to see the race."

The prohibition placed upon pool selling naturally renders the book-maker's occupation to be at a premium. Book-making is reckoned a "science," and is based upon the principle of the operator betting up to a certain limit, "play or pay," against every horse entered. Despite all statements, official or otherwise, to the contrary, there are a large number of "hells" or gambling houses in New York city, in which millions of dollars are lost every year by unwary persons. The New York Herald of June 14, 1886, contains a synopsis of the experiences of an educated and high-toned young man belonging to a good family, who had descended from gambling to the practices of a sneak thief. According to the story he told Inspector Byrnes, he was in love and at the same time