Knots untied, or, Ways and by-ways in the hidden life of American detectives / By Officer George S. McWatters.
- McWatters, George S.
- Date:
- 1871
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Knots untied, or, Ways and by-ways in the hidden life of American detectives / By Officer George S. McWatters. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![perhaps the result Id the long run may be beneficial to the •' regular trade, inasmuch as the present victims, when they come to get possession of the real counterfeit money, may buy more than they otherwise would, to make up their former losses. In this they will imitate other business men, who, when chancing to lose by one attempt ed swindle, balance accounts of profit and loss by doub' ling, in a successful swindle, or as gamblers hedge their bets on a horse-race. At any rate, the '^money-makers, whether of bank billd, or other false pretences, regular or irregular, will always, I suppose, manage to find honest farmers, and like victims, so long as the ignorance of the people sus- tains such institutions as private banks ; and it matters but little whether a bank bill has passed under the eye of Jones, president, and' Williams, cashier, or not, so long as it is well ^' executed enough to '^ execute its own mission, which is, to swindle labor out of its just dues. The man who devised paper money and banking, as it is generally conducted, was the shrewdest servant that the tyrant and sagacious classes ever had in aiding them to keep the laboring classes subjected and contented with being robbed. If any reader thinks my estimate of that man's clever swindling capacity too emphatic or high, let him sit down soberly, and consider the subject in all its aspects, beginning with the cost of the paper, and the thousand profitable uses it is made to serve for the money- manufacturer, and then reflect how it is as nauch one man's natural right to make money as another's, but that the few manage to make a monopoly of the business. The fact is, that the counterfeiters are really more dem- ocratic than the bank men, and only stick to their con- stitutional rights, — the right of individuals, as well as of bodies politic, to manufacture mone3^ If the State would lot the matter of money-making alone, and abolish all laws regardii]g it, it would not only abolish counterfeit- ers and counterfeiting thereby, and bogus counterfef'](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21066966_0650.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
