Nowhere and at no time, save in the England of the eighteenth century, was the underworld so populous or so popular as in the America of to-day. In life, as in letters, crime and criminals hold there a lofty place. They are the romance of the street and the tenement-house. In their adventure and ferocity there is a democratic touch, which endears them to a free people. Nor are they so far remote from the world of prosperity and respect in the cities of the United States as elsewhere. The police is a firm and constant link between criminal and politician. Wherever the safe-blowers and burglars are, there you will find stool-pigeons and squealers, ready to sell their comrades for liberty and dollars. And if the policeman is the intimate of the grafter, he is the client also of the boss who graciously bestowed his uniform upon him. At chowder parties and picnics thief, policeman, and boss meet on the terms of equality imposed upon its members by the greatest of all philanthropic institutions Tammany Hall. If you would get a glimpse into this strange state within a state, you have but to read the evidence given before the Lexow Committee in 1894. It would be difficult to match the cynicism and brutality there disclosed.

In every line of this amazing testimony you may detect a contempt of human life and justice, an indifference to suffering, an eager lust after unearned dollars, which are without parallel. The persons who play their part in this austere, begrimed tragi-comedy, come for the most part from oversea, and have but a halting knowledge of the language spoken by judges and senators. Yet their very ignorance stamps their speech with authenticity, and enhances its effect. The quick dialogue is packed with life and slang. Never were seen men and women so strange as flit across this stage. Crook and guy, steerer and turner, keepers of gambling-hells and shy saloons, dealers in green-goods, come forward with their eager stories of what seems to them oppression and wrong.

With the simplicity which knows no better they deplore their ill-rewarded “industry,” and describe their fraudulent practices as though they were a proper means of earning bread and butter. They have as little shame as repentance. Their only regrets are that they have been ruined by the police or forced to spend a few barren years in the State prison. And about them hover always detective and police-captain, ill-omened birds of prey, who feed upon the underworld. There is nothing more remarkable in this drama of theft and hunger than the perfect understanding which unites the criminal lamb and the wolfish upholder of the law. The grafter looks to his opponent for protection, and looks not in vain, so long as he has money in his pocket. The detective shepherds the law-breakers, whom he is appointed to arrest; he lives with them; he shares their confidences and their gains; he encourages their enterprise that he may earn a comfortable dividend; and he gives them up to justice when they are no longer worth defending. No dramatist that ever lived could do justice to this astounding situation, and it is the highest tribute to human ingenuity that few of the interlocutors fall below their opportunity.

And it may be admitted that New York gave, and gives, an easy chance to policemen bent upon oppression. What can the poor, ignorant foreigners, who throng the east side of the city, do against their brutal and omnipotent guardians? “An impressive spectacle was presented to us one day,” reports the Committee, “in the presence of about 100 patrolmen in uniform, who during the period of three preceding years had been convicted by the police commissioners of unprovoked and unwarranted assault on citizens.” Still more impressive than “this exhibit of convicted clubbers” was “a stream of victims of police brutality who testified before the Committee. The eye of one man, punched out by a patrolman’s club, hung on his cheek. Others were brought before the Committee, fresh from their punishment, covered with blood and bruises, and in some cases battered out of recognition.” The whole city seemed the prey of a panic terror. One day “a man rushed into the session, fresh from an assault made upon him by a notorious politician and two policemen, and with fear depicted upon his countenance threw himself upon the mercy of the Committee and asked its protection, insisting that he knew of no court and of no place where he could in safety go and obtain protection from his persecutors.” From all which it is plain that too high a price may be paid for the philanthropy of Tammany Hall, and that a self-governing democracy cannot always keep an efficient watch upon its guardians.

What is it in the life and atmosphere of America which thus encourages crime, or rather elevates crime to a level of excellence unknown elsewhere? In the first place, the citizens of New York are the disciples of Hobbes. To them life is a state of war. The ceaseless competition for money is a direct incentive to the combat. Nature seems to have armed every man’s hand against his fellow. And then the American is always happiest when he believes himself supreme in his own walk. The man who inhabits the greatest country on earth likes to think of his talent as commensurate with his country’s. If he be a thief, he must be the most skilful of his kind; if he be a blackmailing policeman, he must be a perfect adept at the game. In brief, restlessness and the desire of superiority have produced a strange result, and there is little doubt that the vulgar American is insensitive to moral shocks. This insensitiveness is easily communicated to the curious visitor. A traveller of keen observation and quick intelligence, who has recently spent “a year amongst Americans,” accepts the cynicism of the native without a murmur. After yielding to that spirit of enthusiastic hope which is breathed by the Statue of Liberty, he thus discusses the newly-arrived alien:

Even the stars in their courses [thus he writes] fight for America, if not always for the immigrant when he lands. The politicians would fain prevent his assimilation in order that his vote might be easily manipulated by them; but first of all he must have a vote to be handled, and to this end the politicians provide him with naturalisation papers, fraudulent it may be the State Superintendent of Elections in New York estimates that 100,000 fraudulent naturalisation papers were issued in New York State alone in 1903, and thus in the very beginning of his life in America the immigrant feels himself identified with, and takes delight and pride in, the American name and nature; and lo! already the alien is bound to the “native” by the tie of a common sentiment, the [Greek word] of the Greeks, which is one of the most powerful factors of nationality.

Poor [Greek word]! many follies have been spoken in your name! But never before were you identified with fraudulent naturalisation! Never before were you mistaken for the trick of a manipulating politician!

Such being the tie of a common sentiment, it is not surprising that the Americans are universally accustomed to graft and boodle. With characteristic frankness they have always professed a keen interest in those who live by their wits. It is not for nothing that Allan Pinkerton, the eminent detective, called affectionately “the old man,” is a national hero. His perfections are already celebrated in a prose epic, and he is better known to west as to east than the President himself. And this interest, this sense of heroism, are expressed in a vast and entertaining literature. Nowhere has this literature of scoundrelism, adorned by Defoe and beloved by Borrow, flourished as it has flourished in America. Between the dime novel and the stern documents of the Lexow Committee there is room for history and fiction of every kind. The crooked ones of the earth have vied with the detectives in the proper relation of their experiences. On the one hand you find the great Pinker-ton publishing to the world a breathless selection from his own archives; on the other, so practised a novelist as Mr Julian Hawthorne embellishing the narrative of Inspector Byrnes; and it is evident that both of them satisfy a general curiosity. In these records of varying merit and common interest the attentive reader may note the changes which have taken place in the method and practice of thieving. There is no man so ready to adapt himself to new circumstances as the scoundrel, and the ingenuity of the American rogue has never been questioned. In the old days of the backwoods and romance Jesse James rode forth on a high-mettled steed to hold up cars, coaches, and banks; and James Murel, the horse-thief, celebrated by Mark Twain, whose favourite disguise was that of an itinerant preacher, cherished no less a project than an insurrection of negroes and the capture of New Orleans. The robber of to-day is a stern realist. He knows nothing of romance. A ride under the stars and a swift succession of revolver-shots have no fascination for him. He likes to work in secret upon safe or burglar-box. He has moved with the times, and has at his hand all the resources of modern science. If we do not know all that is to be known of him and his ambitions it is our own fault, since the most expert of his class, Langdon W. Moore, has given us in ’His Own Story of his Eventful Life’ (Boston, 1893) a complete revelation of a crook’s career. It is an irony of life that such a book as this should come out of Boston, and yet it is so quick in movement, of so breathless an excitement, that it may outlive many specimens of Bostonian lore and culture. It is but one example out of many, chosen because in style as in substance it outstrips all competitors.

Without knowing it, Langdon W. Moore is a disciple of Defoe. He has achieved by accident that which the author of ‘Moll Flanders’ achieved by art. There is a direct simplicity in his narrative which entitles him to a place among the masters. He describes hair-breadth escapes and deadly perils with the confident air of one who is always exposed to them. He gives the impression of the hunted and the hunter more vividly than any writer of modern times. When he is opening a safe, you hear, in spite of yourself, the stealthy step upon the stair. If he watches for a pal at the street end, you share his anxiety lest that pal should be intercepted by the watchful detective. And he produces his effects without parade or ornament. He tells his story with a studied plainness, and by adding detail to detail keeps your interest ever awake. Like many other great men, he takes his skill and enterprise for granted. He does not write of his exploits as though he were always amazed at his own proficiency. Of course he has a certain pride in his skill. He cannot describe his perfect mastery over all the locks that ever were made without a modest thrill. He does not disguise his satisfaction at Inspector Byrnes’ opinion that “he had so deeply studied combination locks as to be able to open them from the sound ejected from the spindle.” For the rest, he recognises that he is merely a workman, like another, earning his living, and that nothing can be accomplished save by ceaseless industry and untiring toil. Like many another hero, Langdon W. Moore was born in New England, and was brought up at Newburyport, a quiet seaport town. The only sign of greatness to be detected in his early life was an assault upon a schoolmaster, and he made ample atonement for this by years of hard work upon a farm. He was for a while a typical hayseed, an expert reaper, ready to match himself against all comers. He reached his zenith when he was offered fifty dollars in gold for six weeks’ toil, and he records with a justified pleasure that “no man had ever been paid such high wages as that.” But his energetic spirit soon wearied of retirement, and he found his way to New York, not to be fleeced, like the hayseed of the daily press, but to fleece others. The gambling hells knew him; he became an adept at poker and faro; and he soon learned how to correct or to compel fortune. His first experiment was made upon one Charley White, who dealt faro bank every Saturday night; and it is thus that Moore describes the effect of an ingenious discovery:

He kept his box and cards in a closet adjoining his room. One night during his absence I fitted a key to his closet, took out his cards, and sand-papered the face of eight cards in each deck. I then removed the top of his faro-box, bulged out the centre of the front plate at the mouth, and filed the plate on the inside at both corners to a bevel. I then replaced the top, put in a deck of cards, and made a deal. I found the cards not sanded would follow up and fill the mouth of the box after each turn was made; and if the mouth remained dark and the edge of the top card could not be seen, one of the sand-papered cards was next, and a loser. This would give me several “dead” turns in each deal.

By this means the great man, still despised as a Boston bean-eater, was able to bring his adversary to ruin. The adversary at last discovered the artifice, and “for the next five years,” to quote Moore’s own words, “we met as strangers.”

It will be seen that from his earliest days Moore possessed a scientific ingenuity, which the hard experience of life rapidly improved. And it was not long before a definite direction was given to his talent. Arrested in 1856, as he thought unjustly, he determined “to do no more work until obliged to do it for the State.” He therefore turned his skill of hand to account, and went into the “green goods business.” His success in this venture was so great that he made the best dollar bills ever put upon the market, and he boasts legitimately that in the game he “never lost a man.” Presently he discovered that there was a quicker profit in stolen bonds. “From my first venture in this bond-smashing business,” to quote his own simple words, “in 1862 up to 1870, I made more money than in any branch of industry I was ever engaged in.” “Branch of industry” is admirable, and proves that Moore had a proper appreciation of his craft. But bond-smashing compelled a perfect knowledge of locks and bolts, and in this knowledge, as has been said, Moore was supreme. At the end of his career, when he had hung his arms upon the wall, and retired to spend a green old age at Boston, it was to his treatment of Yale and Lillie locks that he looked back with the greatest pleasure. But no exploit flattered his vanity more easily than the carrying off from the Bank at Concord the Concord of Emerson and Hawthorne of some three hundred thousand dollars. That he purchased his freedom by an ample restitution mattered nothing to the artist. His purpose was achieved, his victory won, and if his victims came by their own again, he at least had the satisfaction which comes of a successful engagement.

Of this adventure he writes with more enthusiasm than he is wont to show. He wishes his readers to understand that it was not a sudden descent, but the culmination of five months’ steady work. He had watched the bank until he knew the habits of its manager and the quality of its locks. He “was satisfied from all he saw that by hard persistent work the bank could be cleaned out completely.” It was on a July day in 1867 that the scheme first took shape in Moore’s mind. He had stopped at noon at the hotel at Concord for food, and saw the cashier of the bank returning from his dinner.

The bank had been closed during his absence [thus he tells his simple story], and he now unlocked the street door and left the key in the lock. I followed him upstairs and saw him unlock the outer and inner doors of the vault, and also the door of the burglar-box. I presented a hundred-dollar note and asked to have it changed. Being accommodated, I left the place, observing as I went out that the lock on the street door was a heavy one of the familiar tumbler variety, and that it had a wooden back.

Thus the train was laid, and in three months came the explosion. Impressions were taken of locks, keys were provided, a waggon and team were held in readiness, and one day as the cashier left the bank to get his dinner, Langdon W. Moore, with a meal-bag concealed under his vest, quietly opened the front door and entered the bank. One check he knew. As he went in a girl of twelve tried to follow him a near relative of the cashier. The exercise of a little tact satisfied her that the directors were in session, and she ran off to her playmates under the big elm at the opposite corner of the street. Moore lost no time in locking the door behind him, in opening all the locks, which yielded to his cunning and foresight, and in packing the meal-bag full of bonds, bank-notes, and plate. He accomplished the deed without haste, and by the time that the cashier had finished his dinner Moore had disappeared with his bag, and his waggon, and his friends, and left no trace behind.

Another masterpiece, in Moore’s opinion, was what he magniloquently calls the great robbery of an express car. Here, too, he proved the fineness of his craft. He left nothing to chance, and he foresaw, with the coolness of a practised hand, every step which his adversaries would take. His first care was to obtain the assistance of the messenger who travelled on the car which he proposed to rob, and the zeal and energy wherewith he coached his accomplices ensured success. Again and again he rehearsed every scene in the comedy. Before his eyes the messenger was attacked by two masked ruffians, of whom one caught him by the throat, while the other put a pistol to his head, saying, “If you open your mouth I will blow a hole through your head large enough for a pigeon to fly through.” Then the messenger was gagged and bound, a piece of soap was put into his mouth, that he might appear in the last extremity, and presently he was set to learn by heart the tale that he should tell his employers. By long practice each actor became perfect in his part. The car was raided, one hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars was the modest spoil, and Pinkerton and his men were gallantly defied. A hasty trip to Canada still further perplexed the pursuers, and if we may believe Moore, he not only baffled the great detective, but persuaded the Express Company to dispute his claim. Moore, in fact, took a sportsman’s as well as an artist’s pleasure in the game. After the discomfiture of his enemies, he loved nothing better than a neat job. He professes a frank delight in explaining how once upon a time he opened the Honourable Benjamin Wood’s safe, and did not soil his carpet. And there was good reason for his scruple. No sooner had he flashed his dark lantern on the office than he observed that the floor was newly covered, and that fresh paint and paper shone upon the walls. Now he had no objection to easing the Honourable Benjamin of fifty thousand dollars. Being a gentleman, he would scorn to spoil a new Brussels carpet. Accordingly he took some papers from Mr Wood’s file and spread them carefully on the floor. The rest of the dramatic recital shall be given in his own words:

When this was done, we drilled two five-eighth-inch holes through the fire-proof door into the bolt case, jacked the plate from the frame,... and opened the door. I then put in a wooden wedge at the top to keep the plate from springing back, took down the jack, and shook out all the loose filing upon the papers. This I gathered carefully up, and put the lime, plaster, and papers in the coal-hod, placed some more clean papers under the door, and made everything ready to leave the building as soon as the boodle was transferred safe to our pockets. After looking through the books and papers, the money was taken out and counted. It amounted to but a single one-dollar note.

Was ever an artist so bitterly deceived? Langdon W. Moore rose to the occasion. He was no pilferer, and scorned to carry off so mean a booty. In the words of the police-captain, he would not add larceny to burglary. But he paid the penalty of greatness. His work was instantly recognised. “I know the man,” said Captain Jordan, “for there is but one in the world who would take all that trouble to save your carpet while breaking open your safe.”

It reminds you of the story told by Pliny of Apelles the painter, who once upon a time called upon Protogenes, another master of his craft, when Protogenes was not within. Whereupon Apelles, seeing a picture before him, took a pencil and drew in colour upon the picture a passing fine and small line. Then said he to the old woman in the house, “Tell thy master that he who made this line inquired for him.” And when Protogenes returned, and had looked upon the line, he knew who had been there, and said withal, “Surely Apelles has come to town, for it is impossible that any but he should make in colour so fine workmanship.” Thus genius is betrayed by its own perfection, and he who refused to soil the carpet could not but be recognised by his skill.

And Langdon W. Moore was forced to pay another and a more grievous penalty for his renown. As the fame of his prowess spread abroad, he fell a prey to the greed of detectives. Do what he would, he could never rid himself of the attentions of the police. Henceforth it was almost impossible for him to work in safety, and whatever booty he obtained he must needs share with his unwelcome companions. He was like a fly condemned to spend his life in the irk-some society of the spider. When he had not much to give, his poverty was rewarded by years in prison; and then, as he says himself, he “was welcomed back into the old criminal life by crooked police officials.” These officials had no desire to help him. “I was not asked by them” again it is Moore who speaks “if I was in want of anything, but was told that if I wanted to make some money they could put me on to a good bank job where I could make a million.” And, if we may believe the historians, Moore’s experience is not singular. The truth is, the thief-taker still flourishes in America. Jonathan Wild, his occupation gone in England, has crossed the ocean, and plies his trade with greater skill and treachery than ever. He thinks it better to live on the criminal than to catch him. And thus he becomes a terror not to the evildoer but to the law-abiding citizen. It is his business to encourage crime, not to stamp it out. If there were no thieves, where would the stool-pigeon and detective find their profits? “W’y, said a pickpocket in New York, “them coppers up there in the Tenderloin couldn’t have any diamond rings if we didn’t help to pay for ’em. No, they couldn’t. They’d sit down in the street and actually cry an’ they’re big men some of ’em if we guns was run off the earth.” In other words, the lesson of the American Underworld is that the policeman may be a far greater danger to the community than the criminal. Jonathan Wild will always do more harm than Jack Sheppard. The skill and daring of the cracksman makes him a marked man. But quis custodes custodiet?