stories were much alike, the business became a little dull after the
first week or two. Robberies and fights, and fights and robberies,
were narrated until the atmosphere became charged with them. It was
the same story, or the same stories with slight variation, and we used
to wish for a little variety. And it was astonishing how the advent of
a pretty woman used to refresh the wearied jurors, but they were not
often allowed that luxury.
[Sidenote: A PRETTY WOMAN AS WITNESS.]
One afternoon we came to a case of robbery, and the name of the
first witness had a feminine sound as the clerk read it. Jurors had
been sitting, not quite at their ease, listening to the testimony
of men and women whose stories were as devoid of sentiment as the
certificate of a steamboat inspector, and whose forms and faces were
as unattractive as a dredging machine. When the witness was called
in this case, the jurors listlessly raised their eyebrows, and out
of deference to their acquired habit, turned their eyes towards the
door. She came; we saw; she conquered. She was pretty; she was finely
attired; her demeanor was full of modesty, and, at the same time, of
self-possession. As she walked forward to the foreman’s place, to be
sworn, there was a general straightening of everybody around the room.
Chairs were drawn nearer to the table, young jurors stroked their
mustaches, and old ones passed their hands over their bald crowns, to
be sure that no cobwebs lay there. Collars and neckties were examined,
to ascertain if _en règle_, and when the lady walked to the witness
chair, the double line of heads was as straight and attentive as
though just from the discipline of a Russian drill-master. When the
foreman questioned her, she answered in a voice as silvery as a chime
of tea bells, and it seemed very unfortunate for all her listeners
that her story was brief. Not a word that she spoke was lost to any
of the forty ears that were inclined towards her, and when she turned
upon us a pair of bewitching eyes (I forget their color), there could
be no doubt that the unwashed and unlettered burglar against whom
she complained deserved the severest penalty of the law. As she left
the room, her silken dress rustling like the leaves of autumn in a
gentle breeze, we regretted that she could not longer remain; and
when the door closed, an impressible juror sitting near it moved a
bill of indictment, which would have been carried without opposition,
had there been no necessity for another witness to complete the chain
of evidence. The officer who captured the thief and recovered the
property was then called; but he was a commonplace fellow, and we
only listened to his story in the cause of justice. Compared with the
lady who preceded him, he was as a marine turtle to a gazelle, or as
a mud-scow to a yacht, and we were heartily glad when he was through
with his testimony. If burglars would be free, they should never be
caught robbing a pretty woman who can go before a grand jury. That
fellow received the heaviest sentence allowed by the law, as _she_
went before the petit jury, and told her story under the eye of the
judge.
LXIX.
BORROWING AND BORROWERS.
HOW THE BUSINESS IS PROSECUTED IN NEW YORK.—THE NUMBER
OF BORROWERS.—THEIR DIVISIONS AND SUBDIVISIONS.—HOW THEY
OPERATE.—THE STORIES THEY TELL.—THEIR ENERGY.—ABILITY TO READ
CHARACTER.—SUFFERINGS OF THEIR VICTIMS.—FRAUDS UPON HORACE
GREELEY.—DEVICES TO AVOID THESE SWINDLERS.—ANNUAL AMOUNT OF THEIR
SWINDLES.—HOW A MAN CUTS HIS EYE TEETH.
Money is the motive power of the world. In executive capacity, it
is an angel or devil. By it civilization must be measured, and all
accomplishment wrought. A material blessing, it is the parent, too, of
such an amount of spiritual comfort as may not be reckoned. Money will
buy everything but health and affection; and, through its aid, the one
is protected and the other provoked. No marvel that men worship money;
it is the strongest of secular deities, the firmest of supporters,
and the staunchest of friends. Nobody can live without it; it is life
itself. Every one must and will have it in certain quantity, either
by fair means or foul. Every community is composed of borrowers and
lenders, and the former are always in stupendous majority. They who
have most lend least; and, consequently, borrowers are brought to
depend on the class widely removed from prosperity.
The number of men who subsist upon others by persistent fleecing can
scarcely be estimated. They abound in this country, especially in
New York, which may well be called the haven of the hard-up, and the
blissful seat of the professional borrower. All roads lead to New
York; all swindlers and adventurers journey thither in expectation
of finding victims. Their anticipations are generally realized, and
they bless the stars which have guided them to monetary Manhattan.
They come by every boat and train, from every state and nation, with
devices, plans, and pretexts for genteelly defrauding that colossal
goose known as the Public.
Fortunes are so much more easily and quickly made here than in any
other city, that the borrower, whatever his calling or his clime, is
tempted to visit us because confident of his reward. Europeans often
wonder at the carelessness of Americans in respect to money, and are
astounded when told that, in this Western land, the chief requirements
for procuring loans without security are falsehood and effrontery.
They cannot understand how it is possible for hundreds and thousands
of men to live by politely robbing others, and yet keep up an
assumption of honesty and respectability. Aware that such things could
not be in the old world capitals, they are surprised at the opposite
order of affairs over here.
[Sidenote: THE METROPOLIS AS A FIELD FOR SWINDLERS.]
It would be extremely interesting to know the amount that this
community is swindled out of annually, not only by its own citizens
and people, but by foreigners of every grade. I venture to affirm,
that there are almost always here from twenty to twenty-five thousand
persons whose principal business it is to filch from the purse of
whomsoever they can. Borrowing is their exclusive profession. They
have reduced it to a science, and arranged it as an art. They have a
certain genius for imposition, a dramatic power of misrepresentation,
a fecundity of invention which would have inured to their great
advantage in some honest calling. But of honesty they will have
none; preferring to wheedle, falsify, and plunder by the niceties
of manipulation and the subtleties of deception. These professional
borrowers are of divers degrees and countless types, though their end
is continuously and persistently the same.
The normal mind would suppose that borrowing is the hardest way to
get money; that earnest and honest work of any kind would be much
the easier of the two. But the mind of the professional borrower is
abnormal. Having no clear conception of truth, justice, or advantage,
it sees life at an extremely obtuse angle. It may have been healthful
at first, but it becomes diseased by continued violation of integrity,
and finally ceases to have cognizance of its own operations.
Money is often called, and generally seems to be, a vulgar commodity,
which generous souls ought to be above considering. The mere
possession of money may not be, and indeed it very rarely is, either
refining or ennobling; but to be without it, begets unhappiness, opens
the door to temptation, provokes a tendency to disesteem, if not
to degradation. Nothing is so demoralizing as to be under material
obligations that cannot be discharged; and when these obligations are
voluntarily and continually assumed, he who assumes them grows to be,
ere long, a sycophant and a slave.
[Sidenote: BEWARE OF DEBTS.]
“Beware of debts!” is an excellent motto for secular guidance, and its
conscientious follower will, in the long run, thank his stars for its
adoption. To owe is to be owned, to surrender individuality, to lose
independence, to forfeit self-respect. The debtor soon parts with his
sensibility, and waxes callous. His course winds downward; at every
turn he is forced to do greater violence to his natural self and the
cause of truth. Eventually, he becomes a worse offender than those the
laws punish; for he is an enemy to society whom society has no power
to confine.
[Sidenote: THE CLASSES OF BORROWERS.]
The metropolis is infested with so many and such different borrowers,
and they are so much a part of the community, that they may be divided
and subdivided into classes.
The first class is composed of those who, being in business, draw
largely on the future at a venture, but with the expectation of paying
in due season. They are usually hopeful, even sanguine, though less
prudent and conscientious than they should be, and more considerate
of themselves than of others. These men turn their confidence and
audacity to profit, provided fortune favors them; but if she be
adverse, they go down, and drag their lenders with them. They rise
again, however, in new fashions for borrowing, and once more challenge
circumstances to do their behest. If they win at last, they boast of
their energy, perseverance, and courage, and despise men who have been
more conscientious and less lucky.
The second class have legitimate callings, but substitute credit for
capital. They borrow largely without concerning themselves in regard
to liquidation. They are not positively, though they may be considered
negatively, dishonest. They will pay if they can conveniently; but if
they cannot, they refuse to fret, resigning their financial burdens
to those compelled to bear them. They have the support of an easy
selfishness, and when their creditors complain, they invite them to be
patient, and wait for the day of judgment.
The third class shift from one occupation to another, and in every
shifting are liable to deterioration. Half the time they are out of
business, but they are always going into something new that promises
admirably. They dwell in to-morrow, and defer the fulfilment of all
their engagements to that uncertain fragment of time. They borrow
right and left, careless of whom, never reckoning the amount they
have taken or the covenant they have made. They will pay if they are
dunned; but if not, they will scatter their obligations with their
breath. After a certain range of experience in effecting private
loans, they learn that many persons would rather suffer loss than ask
for a return of money, and they take advantage of this sensibility.
They fortify their want of principle by affirming that a debt is not
due until demanded, and they always pretend to forget what it would be
unpleasant to remember. They are poor in performance. They invariably
want extensions, and regard to-day as if it were non-existent. Catch
them with a full purse, and represent your right to a part of its
contents, and you may count upon payment long deferred.
The fourth class are constitutionally dishonorable—the impersonation
of selfishness. They have no intention of paying, even at the time of
borrowing, and never will pay so long as they can avoid it. They talk
a good deal of their integrity, for the express purpose of imposing
upon their hearers. They consider every man a potential creditor, and
try to influence him to that end. They are good for what they pay cash
for. Their word ranks with their bond, and both are worthless. They
can be depended upon to meet their obligations only when compulsion is
employed.
The fifth class are still worse; for they not only regard borrowing as
a virtue, but they deem payment a vice. To defraud anybody seems to
give them a positive pleasure, and they never felicitate themselves
so much as after a successful swindle. They are earnestly opposed to
discharging any and every obligation, however sacred the circumstances
under which it is contracted. They are among the very few of their
kind who would rather throw away money than pay a debt with it; and
a creditor whom they have been obliged to satisfy, they reckon ever
after as an enemy. By some perversion of understanding and derangement
of morals, they have come to believe that the world’s goods belong
to the most ingenious swindlers, and that they are entitled to such
distinction. This class seldom have any position, commercial or
otherwise, but prey upon the public without mercy.
[Sidenote: THE MOST PROFESSIONAL OF BORROWERS.]
[Sidenote: ENERGY OF THE CLASS.]
The sixth class, so far as known, have never done anything but
borrow. They are the most professional of professionals. Their only
idea of property is to get whatever they can without an equivalent.
Work is hateful to them, and fraud delightful. They struggle hard
for the reward of dishonesty, and receive it with a feeling akin
to enthusiasm. They have never had the slightest credit; and how
they contrive to dupe their fellows, year after year, is one of the
mysteries of humanity. Physiognomy and manners proclaim against them;
and yet they accomplish such results through dishonesty as upright men
would vainly strive for by honorable means. Continual practice renders
them perfect in the art of cozening. They are able to espy a loan in
a face as a banker is to detect alloy in coin. They appear to have an
intuitive knowledge of the contents of an unseen pocket-book, and of
its owner’s special weakness, which they proceed at once to play upon;
they can get money out of a hunks, and have been known to raise the
wind in the dead calm of a millionaire.
These principal classes include subdivisions too numerous and diverse
to mention. Borrowers change their grade as they advance in meanness
and recklessness. They may begin in the first rank and fall to the
lowest. They will do this year what they would not have done last.
They are always liable to sink, even below the level they occupy.
They require a broad field for operations, because the proper victims
cannot be gathered twice by the same hand. They droop their crest
as they accumulate infamy, and exercise more and more hypocrisy and
deeper and bolder falsehood as their career continues.
Borrowers roam the island of Manhattan from morning to midnight,
invading every place and penetrating every corner. They can no
more be shut out than the Atlantic Ocean; they are all-pervading,
persistent, and resistless. They will climb to the apex of Grace
Church, or walk to High Bridge in a driving storm, for the sake of a
trivial loan, when they could not be hired to do honest work for ten
dollars an hour. They never know dejection; if they did, they would
be philanthropic enough to make a case for the coroner. They rob the
credulous and cajole the weak with a zest and cheerfulness which can
only spring from a serene consciousness of doing evil. While the good
suffer and the deserving starve, they enjoy themselves and grow round
with plenty.
Professional borrowers have a knowledge of human nature equal to
Shakspeare or Cervantes; and in physiognomy they laugh Lavater to
scorn. They often ask loans without getting accommodation; but this
does not prove their insight at fault,—only their love for experiment.
The demands they make upon the unwilling are tentative efforts to be
treasured up as warning in the future. They would never go to the
wrong man were not the right one absent. They cannot always have
things as they want, and so they take them as they must. The merest
novice makes no approaches to the Astors, or Stewarts, or Vanderbilts;
their reputation has gone before them, and he can discover at a
glance that not a single dollar can be torn from their financial
souls. Such an absolute incapacity for procuring money gleams from
every lineament of the rich, that the rudest savage would recognize it
on instinct.
If borrowers preyed upon the prosperous, they would do little harm;
but, unfortunately, they find their victims among those who have not
locked up their hearts and thrown away the key. The man who lends is
primarily a good fellow; and that he should be driven into scepticism
and cynicism by deliberate swindles, is deplorable indeed. Such
shattering of faith is a sin against the race; and if a professional
borrower did not aspire to total depravity, he would hesitate before
committing it. But he stops at nothing, except it be the vision of a
debt discharged, or the ghost of an unredeemed due-bill.
[Sidenote: THE FEAR THEY INSPIRE.]
Hundreds of our citizens, strange as it may appear, are in perpetual
dread of borrowers. They are aware that their countenances and their
hearts are against them, and that, resolve as they will, they are in
danger of being wheedled. They are angry with themselves whenever they
succumb to the blandishments they have suffered so much by; and still,
when assailed by a direct petition for a loan, they yield without
protest.
Plausible swindlers seem to keep in memory every over-amiable
man who will open his purse for the telling of a piteous tale or
specious story. They are ever on the trail of such a member of the
tender-hearted tribe, and they inevitably run him down. Go where he
may, they invariably find him out, and, with wheedling tongue, lick up
his substance.
[Sidenote: HORACE GREELEY AS A VICTIM.]
The kind and gentle Horace Greeley was, until the last day of
his life, the victim of impecunious cheats. He was opposed, on
principle, to giving them a penny; and yet, in practice, he was
a perpetual purveyor to their imaginary needs. For many years, I
doubt if any energetic applicant for a loan ever left the presence
of the great journalist without carrying his point. During the last
twenty-five years of his life, Mr. Greeley must have lent to entirely
irresponsible persons, without the slightest expectation of getting
anything back, not far from fifty thousand dollars. Every week he
would berate himself for his encouragement of such “confounded
loafers,” as he styled them, and express his determination to reform
his loose and lavish habit. But with the new week would be resumed the
open-handed generosity, from the impossibility of saying “no” even to
the most transparent impostor.
While entering the Tribune office, the editor would often notice a
borrower lying in wait, and tell him beforehand there was no use
of asking for money; that he could not get another penny under any
circumstances. The cozener, however, knowing his man, would follow him
into the sanctum, and in less than a minute Mr. Greeley would be seen
opening his pocket-book, and be heard to say, “Now, take that, and
don’t come here any more; for I’m going to turn over a new leaf.”
Of course the new leaf was never turned over, unless in a backward
direction. The journalist’s reputation as a succorer of suckers was so
firmly established that he drew them from every quarter, and could not
shake them off.
Hundreds of other New Yorkers have acquired much the same kind of
fame, and are exposed to the same sieges, with similar results.
Fearing borrowers as Captain Cuttle feared his landlady, they seek
their places of business furtively, and go home by back streets.
Not infrequently they lock themselves in private rooms and hide in
out-of-the-way corners, to escape itinerant chevaliers of industry.
While honorable gentlemen are thus skulking to avoid borrowers,
unscrupulous debtors walk composedly through the crowd, and stare
their creditors out of countenance—thus showing the outward advantage
that dishonesty possesses over uprightness and fair dealing.
Some persons have been victimized so often, that they have hung up
placards like these in their offices:—
[Sidenote: PRECAUTIONS OF THE PRUDENT.]
“No money lent here in sums less than ten thousand dollars.”
“All applicants for loans are expected to furnish mortgages on real
estate in the city.”
“Gentlemen desirous of borrowing are referred to the Rothschilds, in
London, Paris, and Frankfort.”
“First-class collaterals required on all loans.”
“Rates of lending to-day, five per cent. a minute, and nothing
received as security except double eagles.”
“Persons who are hard up are politely, but firmly, requested to go to
the devil.”
* * * * *
The effect of these announcements is reputed to be excellent. In
numerous instances they prevent professionals from revealing their
chronic wants; in others, they abash fellows who had made up their
minds to arrange for a loan; and in others again, they cripple the
hopes formed of a successful swindle.
I have been told, by a person who tried the experiment, that these
manifestoes have saved them thousands of dollars a year, and an
infinite amount of annoyance besides. Such placards certainly have
a fine extinguishing effect upon the flaming ardor of the social
highwaymen so superabundant in Gotham.
The length of time that a borrower (outside of business) has been
plying his vocation may be determined by the amount he asks for. When
he is rather new to the trade, he wishes usually to be accommodated
with a loan of five hundred dollars, and, if that sum be inconvenient,
he thinks he can get along with something less. He has been known
to accept thirty or forty cents on the dollar of his original
proposition, and generally it is not safe to offer him any sort of
compromise.
After a year or two of genteel swindling, the borrower fixes his
demand at from one hundred to fifty dollars, but can be induced to
take twenty-five dollars as a sort of instalment on the obligation,
which he fancies the community has, in some mysterious manner,
incurred.
Ten-dollar swindlers have, for the most part, seen much dishonorable
service, and are among the most numerous of their nefarious guild.
They are to be found everywhere,—in the street, at the hotels, at the
theatres, at the races, even at private parties sometimes,—where they
make the stereotyped excuse that they have left their porte-monnaie in
another coat, and that they would be profoundly obliged for a trivial
loan until the day following.
[Sidenote: PETTY IMPOSTORS.]
The petty impostors, who solicit loans from five dollars to fifty
cents, have usually met with so many rebuffs that they make their
approaches with a diffidence that usually undoes them. They mention
five dollars with an infirmity of voice, evincing that they have no
expectation of obtaining it, and drop down to three, two, or one with
a precipitancy revealing their familiarity with disappointment. As a
last resort, they inquire dolefully for postal currency representing
half a dollar; and it is seldom they fail to get it, through sheer
commiseration, from the person besought.
One of the most transparent and impudent orders of swindlers are those
who tell you they are in a certain strait, and could be easily helped
if they would apply to their father, brother, or some other near
relative. But they are too proud, they take pains to inform you, to
demean themselves in that fashion, and therefore they have recourse
to a stranger on whom they have not the slightest claim. This mode
of borrowing, an insult to the lowest intelligence, deserves to be
answered with the boot; and yet, as it involves a certain sort of
flattery, it frequently meets with a practical response.
It is estimated that, independent of all regular or mercantile
transactions, the denizens of New York lose from five to six million
dollars annually by swindlers claiming to be philanthropists,
reformers, scholars, business men, and gentlemen in temporary
distress. These miscellaneous borrowers have pretexts of every kind,
all of them appealing to the best part of our common nature, if they
were only true.
The sole difference between professional borrowers and beggars is,
that the former always promise to pay, and the latter never promise,
though one can be as much depended upon for settlement as the other.
[Sidenote: CONSTANT CALAMITIES.]