Knots untied, or, Ways and by-ways in the hidden life of American detectives / By Officer George S. McWatters.

  • McWatters, George S.
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

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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    stract riglit and truth. It would seem that he, poor man, beheves in some system of abstract and speculative moral- ity as a governing and directing force in society, without any ]-egard to the customs of trade, etc., which obtain in a civilization, the main end of which is to enable its chief individual participants to make money by various means of enticing it out of their neighbors' pockets and filching it from the hands of labor. This sort of abstract morality, spiritual morality, whicli is talked from every pulpit in the land to audiences com- posed, for the main part, of people who, however strict attention they may pay to the talkers, punctuate the sen- tences of their discourses for them with scheming thoughts of Avhat they are going to do in a busines-way the next day — has failed of its desired results often enough, one would think, to confound the talkers. The wonder to me is that the intelligent classes do not, more than they do, look things squarely in the face, and see for themselves how utterly hopeless it is to ever do without the detective in society, so long as our legislators make ten laws for the protection of property to one for man; so long as the sacredness of property is a phrase which sanctifies the protection of all ill-gotten gains, if they but be gotten in some regular, or not too irregular, way, even more surely than it covers or protects the products of actual hard labor, — the very things of all that need protection, and the pro- tecting of whicli, in the hands of those to whom they rightly belong, the laborers, would secure all other rights in society; for surely the defrauding of labor is the radi- cal iniquity of the age (as it has been that of all the historic ages, so far as I can learn), out of whicli spring all the rest of the corruptions of society. But the talkers do not care to meddle with reforms Vxdiich have a wise, radical end in view. They hate things which are radical. They dislike to disturb the founda- tions of society. They are wiser than their Master, and have so veiled his philosophy and teachings of a politico-