THE teller of strange tales is not the least among benefactors of men.
His cup of Lethe is welcome at times even to the strongest, when the
_tædium vito_ of the commonplace is in its meridian. To the aching
victim of evil fortune, it is ofttimes the divine anaesthetic.
To-day a bitter critic calls down to the storyteller, bidding him turn
out with the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, for the reason
that there is no new thing, and the pieces with which he seeks to build
are ancient and well worn. "At best," he cries, "the great one among you
can produce but combinations of the old, some quaint, some monstrous,
and all weary." But the writer does not turn out, and the world swings
merrily on.
Perhaps the critic forgets that if things are old, men are new; that
while the grain field stands fast, the waves passing over it are not one
like the other. The new child is the best answer.
The reader is a clever tyrant. He demands something more than people
of mist. There must be tendons in the ghost hand, and hard bones in the
phantom, else he feels that he has been cheated.
Perhaps, of all things, the human mind loves best the problem. Not
the problem of the abacus, but the problem of the chess-board when the
pieces are living; the problem with passion and peril in it; with the
fresh air of the hills and the salt breath of the sea. It propounds this
riddle to the writer: Create mind-children, O Magician, with red blood
in their faces, who, by power inherited from you, are enabled to secure
the fruits of drudgery, without the drudgery. Nor must the genius of
Circumstance help. Make them do what we cannot do, good Magician, but
make them of clay as we are. We know all the old methods so well, and we
are weary of them. Give us new ones.
Exacting is this taskmaster. It demands that the problem builder
cunningly join together the Fancy and the Fact, and thereby enchant and
bewilder, but not deceive. It demands all the mighty motives of life in
the problem. Thus it happens that the toiler has tramped and retramped
the field of crime. Poe and the French writers constructed masterpieces
in the early day. Later came the flood of "Detective Stories" until
the stomach of the reader failed. Yesterday, Mr. Conan Doyle created
Sherlock Holmes, and the public pricked up its ears and listened with
interest.
It is significant that the general plan of this kind of tale has never
once been changed to any degree. The writers, one and all, have labored,
often with great genius, to construct problems in crime, where by acute
deduction the criminal and his methods were determined; or, reversing
it, they have sought to plan the crime so cunningly as to effectually
conceal the criminal and his methods. The intent has always been to
baffle the trailer, and when the identity of the criminal was finally
revealed, the story ended.
The high ground of the field of crime has not been explored; it has not
even been entered. The book-stalls have been filled to weariness with
tales based upon plans whereby the _detective_, or _ferreting_ power
of the State might be baffled. But, prodigious marvel! no writer has
attempted to construct tales based upon plans whereby the _punishing_
power of the State might be baffled.
The distinction, if one pauses for a moment to consider it, is striking.
It is possible, even easy, deliberately to plan crimes so that the
criminal agent and the criminal agency cannot be detected. Is it
possible to plan and execute wrongs in such a manner that they will have
all the effect and all the resulting profit of desperate crimes and yet
not be crimes before the law?
There is, perhaps, nothing of which the layman is so grossly ignorant
as of the law. He has grown to depend upon what he is pleased to call
common sense. Indeed his refrain, "The law is common sense," has at
times been echoed by the judiciary. There was never a graver error. The
common sense of the common man is at best a poor guide to the criminal
law. It is no guide at all to the civil law.
There is here no legal heresy. Lord Coke, in the seventeenth century,
declared that the law was not the natural reason of man, and that men
could not, out of their common reason, make such laws as the laws of
England were. The laws have not grown simpler, surely, and if they could
not be constructed by the common reason of men, they could certainly not
be determined by it. That men have but indistinct ideas of the law is to
be regretted and deplored. For their protection they should know it; and
there is need of this protection. The voices of all men were not joined
in the first great cry for law and order, nor are they all joined now.
The hands of a part of mankind have ever been set against their fellows;
for what great reason no man can tell. Maybe the Potter marred some, and
certainly evil Circumstance marred some. But, by good hap, industry has
always, and intelligence has usually, been on the law's side. Ofttimes,
however, the Ishmælites raise up a genius and he, spying deep, sees the
weak places in the law and the open holes in it, and forces through,
to the great hurt of his fellows. And men standing in the market-places
marvel.
We are prone to forget that the law is no perfect structure, that it
is simply the result of human labor and human genius, and that whatever
laws human ingenuity can create for the protection of men, those same
laws human ingenuity can evade. The Spirit of Evil is no dwarf; he has
developed equally with the Spirit of Good.
All wrongs are not crimes. Indeed only those wrongs are crimes in which
certain technical elements are present. The law provides a Procrustean
standard for all crimes. Thus a wrong, to become criminal, must fit
exactly into the measure laid down by the law, else it is no crime;
if it varies never so little from the legal measure, the law must, and
will, refuse to regard it as criminal, no matter how injurious a wrong
it may be. There is no measure of morality, or equity, or common right
that can be applied to the individual case. The gauge of the law is
iron-bound. The wrong measured by this gauge is either a crime or it is
not. There is no middle ground.
Hence is it, that if one knows well the technicalities of the law, one
may commit horrible wrongs that will yield all the gain and all the
resulting effect of the highest crimes, and yet the wrongs perpetrated
will constitute no one of the crimes described by the law. Thus the
highest crimes, even murder, may be committed in such manner that
although the criminal is known and the law holds him in custody, yet it
cannot punish him. So it happens that in this year of our Lord of the
nineteenth century, the skilful attorney marvels at the stupidity of the
rogue who, committing crimes by the ordinary methods, subjects himself
to unnecessary peril, when the result which he seeks can easily be
attained by other methods, equally expeditious and without danger of
liability in any criminal tribunal This is the field into which the
author has ventured, and he believes it to be new and full of interest.
In order to develop these legal problems the author appreciated the need
for a central figure. This central figure must of necessity be a lawyer
of shrewdness and ability. Here a grave difficulty presented itself.
No attorney, unless he were a superlative knave, could be presumed to
suggest the committing of wrongs entailing grievous injury upon innocent
men. On the other hand, no knave vicious enough to resort to such wrongs
could be presumed to have learning enough to plan them, else he would
not be driven to such straits. Hence the necessity for a character who
should be without moral sense and yet should possess all the requisite
legal acumen. Such a character is Randolph Mason, and while he may seem
strange he is not impossible.
That great shocks and dread maladies may lop off a limb of the human
mind and leave the other portions perfect, nay, may even wrench the
human soul into one narrow groove, is the common lesson of the clinic
and the mad-house. An intellect, keen, powerful, and yet devoid of any
sense of moral obligation, would be no passing wonder to the skilled
physician; for no one knows better than he that often in the house of
the soul there are great chambers locked and barred and whole passages
sealed up in the dark. Nor do men marvel that great minds concentrated
on some mighty labor grow utterly oblivious to human relations and see
and care for naught save the result which they are seeking. The chemist
forgets that the diamond is precious, and burns it; the surgeon forgets
that his patient is living and that the knife hurts as it cuts. Might
not the great lawyer, striving tirelessly with the problems of men, come
at last to see only the problem, with the people in it as pieces on a
chess-board?
It may be objected that the writer has prepared here a text-book for the
shrewd knave. To this it is answered that, if he instructs the enemies,
he also warns the friends of law and order; and that Evil has never yet
been stronger because the sun shone on it.
It should not be forgotten that this book deals with the law as it is
and with no fanciful interpretation of it. The colors are woven into a
gray warp of ancient and well settled legal principles, obtaining with
full virtue in almost every state. The formula for every wrong in this
book is as practical as the plan of an architect and may be played out
by any skilful villain. Nor should it be presumed that the instances
dealt with are exhaustive. The writer has presented but a few of the
simpler and more conspicuous; there is, in truth, many another. Indeed
the wonder grows upon him that the thief should stay up at night to
steal.
Wheeling, W. Va., June 1, 1896.