On this page
- Departments (2)
-
Text (6)
-
Untitled Article
-
Untitled Article
-
Untitled Article
-
Untitled Article
-
SWINDLING- AGAIN.
-
THE MAMMON OF RESPECTABILITY.
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
-
-
Transcript
-
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
Untitled Article
W E had no intention-of . an immediate return to the theme of last week ' s diatribe , but some form of pecuniary dishonesty or other is ever coming uppermost and foremost mttie daily iotirnals ; ever the old scene of quick-Keeled rascality Wing some unanticipated dodge , or double , or cover , and tardy Justice limping in pursuit , not with that untiring purpose ascribed to her by Hobace , but with the apparent hope that she may succeed m losing sight of her quarry , and so have a good excuse for reposing herself . Hail , England ! purgatory of dupes and paradise of rogues If our legislative protectors were in earnest , which of course they are not , some encouragement might be derived from Napiee s fervid onslaught on Admiralty management and the continual cheers with which his speech was greeted ^ n the House . Such an attack of an experienced admiral on rotten English ships * might be
more valuable than a volley fired at sound French ones , and might bear hard , not only on rotten ships , but on rottenness in general . But let not our readers be deceived ; the applause meant nothing more than that the House was amused with the " saeva-indignatio of an old seaman , gratified with his pluck , and something interested with what is now rare enough , a not sham enthusiasm—b udge . lhe public will no more read on the broad sheet of the Times a plain satisfactory account of an effective punishment actually "" Jicted on the suppliers of sappy timber , and uncontinuous copper bolts , than on the boot and shoe sellers , or the suppliers of the filthy stores that killed the troops returning , from India . There will be some law fo ° \ in which the offenders will be quite lost to the public eye ; some ' ^? * . _ — ¦ ¦ **• T — - — — A ^ - >* 1 AnnH ¦ */¦* ^ v VVl . fl CtW * T \ f \ whose elessness must be
. . * lack of witnesses , some public man car shielded , some mistake , some excuse ; and the nation will have to put up with some farcical account of the matter , which would not impose upon a good housewife for the smashing of a dinner service m detail by a careless and drunken cook maid ; or , if the pumshmentshould perchance arrive , it will not be of a deterring character . Do onr readers know the meaning of the word " deterring ? ' It-means «' frightening away ; " not the mere washy ¦ " preventive which ot late has implied something that tries to be preventive , but cannot . We shall go on , not only with our old text , but with our old inference . Some new form of punishment must be brought into play ; something more severe than moderate fines , impi-isonmenti or even transportation , which gives a man that delusive kind of " comfort ¦ which the ostrich experiences when it buries its head in the sand
and ceases to see its pursuers . The man hidden in a gaol , or secluded in a penal settlement , has indeed a dull sense of disgrace eternally hanging upon him , but he is defended from the quick burning shame which would be intolerable if he were exposed to the eyes of those whom he has robbed . He has obtained , by his very sentence , a positive refuge from this ; his eyes are protected from printed ; as his ears from uttered vituperation . Where a man is found out in a gross breach of private trust , or in a public robbery , the kindest thing you can do to him is to seclude him ; it is what he would do himself , not at the expense cf the nation , if crime had not seared all feeling out of him . Criminals must be mortified in those very points , in those very propensities , to gratify which they the murdered
have made themselves criminals . Tawem , ex-quaker , 4 iisHmislree 8-tlmUi 0-nTigh ^ •—respectability being , of course , the chief beau ideal of quaker felicity . Taweli ,, no doubt , would have preferred that one dark day of expiation , that escape from consciousness into oblivion in a moment , to a month ' s exposure on the same spot to the hissings and scowls and curses of the multitude . This would have been the just and proper mortification of his passion for respectability . There are others who go in , a 3 the Yankees say , for respectability of not so drab a kind—a proud city and county position , with their respective appurtenances . In their case , too , exposure to the keen , condemning glances of their humbler and honestor brethren incommerco ,
—to whom they would have scarcely deigned to nod on ' Changeand the disgusting gibea of city and country roughs—fellows whom they would not have touched , willingly with the end'of their walking sticks—wo fancy that a fair chance of such a consummation would be calculated to be rather " deterring . " SI . Then there aro tlie luxurious champagne , opera box , and phaeton gentlemen . They arc fond of bodily pleasure , and a fair pntspec-t of bodily puin would bo probably the best deterrent of this class of swindlers ; a sound public Hogging would not be a bit too bad in their case , and the condemning authority should have his option .
These floggings and exposures should be an addition to the lighter penalties of lining and imprisonment . In certain cases we bave already sanctioned the grosser of tho two kirn ' s—flogging . Tho mere promulgation of this ? punishment , irrespective of the position of the offender , has effectually rendered the person of royalty inviolate . Nothing but prudence has prevented the adjudication of tho snine punishment for violence to wives . All very well , you say , for the lower orders . Tho nearer tho mortification is to the heart or the head , tho more absolute tho necessity for searing it out ; the brand may act nt once us a stamp and a euro * These unpur class , or what would be upper class swindlers , nro tjie
worst of all , for an evident reason—they are agency . To what is it you trust to dimmish crime in the lower classes ? A" certain amount of education , a certain amount of religious instruction ; and with most of them such means , where used , do operate , and powerfully . But with the , upper class , of offenders these means have been utterly inefficacious ; they have almost to a man enjoyed every ordinary advantage of instruction and training—but all in vain . They may repent and reconsider ; but you have nothing to trust to but their fears , and these fears it is the business of the Legislature to find some effectual way of excitin « v The lower orders , indeed ! in spite of their little dirty tricks of twopenny adulteration—for which , of course , they ought when caught to be well punished—we shall soon begin to consider them on the whole the honester class of the two . ~ -.. ! _ #
How grand and beautiful , though often somewhat imaginative , are Lord Bacox ' s discoveries of primal and comprehensive laws ! We have been finding the full application of some of these only ot late years ; one , for instance , is , that commerce follows the grand laws of genius , happiness , knowledge , religion , and love , —the more giving , the more gaining ; the more communication , the more production ; we no longer consider what is gained by a neighbouringcountry as necessarily so much lost to our own . Dante ' s fine lines in the " Pui-gatorio " on love give more beautiful expression to this law than weliave seen in any other writer : —
Perche quanto si dice piu li nostro , Tantb possiede piu di ben ciascuno , and so on ; the whole passage is too long for transcription , but is well worth reading ; it occurs in the fifteenth book . Louis Napoleon only lately confessed himself , theoretically at least , an apostle of this creed , as we find at the conclusion of his address on the commercial treaty . Again , there is another law , also , it would seem , of very wide application , namely , the advantage of a return to the primitive , to first principles ; Montesquieu has advocated it , we believe ; so has Bubke . Bomngbeoke's words are before us : •—" Allthat can be donejtherefore , to prolong the duration of a good government , is to draw back on every favourable occasion to the ilrstgood principles on which it was founded . "— Idea of a Patriot King .
So in many other ways , wearied with the modern , we seek refuge in cruder antiquity . Scholars fly from Latinisnis to the niore Saxon " well of English undefined . " " Painting flies from the flashy and careless to the rigid , as men seek the feelings of youth in the fields in which they once were young . " Wearied with modern fine Uidies Will . Honeycomb at ] astwedsamillnnaid , withthe unchanged rustic charms and manners winch might have captivated his great-great grandfather . Kousseau would have a wholesale return to the comparative pureness and simplicity of savage life . Perhaps commerce itself , that child of civilization , might find _ itself retempered - —i * etrempe—by a return to somewhat of its primitive state . honest than the
The savage and the half-savage seem more civilized . When the Chippeways were in England , we remember being told by their exhibitor , that though they received their spirits and powder in advance , they were never known to fail in bringing their honest quotum of " furs' and skins to the English trader . In an excellent little book on trades and manufactures , it is stated that the " East India diamonds are generally imported from Madras in small packages , ; named buises ; and so honestly is the trade conducted , that these bulges are bought and sold by invoice without even being opened for examination . " Bbydone told us in former days of a rude tribe of rustic carriers in the neighbourhood of Naples so trustworthy , that only one instance of breach of faith was ever known among them . If we rcmember rightly the guilty person was killed , and his family were excommunicated by the villagers . ... the
It would seem that tho savage and tlie rude , beingnearer fountain-head of commerce , see more clearly into its spring and true quality , as that the very essence of which , and its final prosperity , must consist in good faith . The savage is often a downright thief , but with him plunder is one thing and barter another . We mix the two , and the stream of commerce bears not only the fair and faithful ¦ . merchant ' s bark , but the pirate , the privateer , and tho smuggler ; and the struggle of commerce is to outwit , ruther than simply to compensate and receive compensation . Frequent attacks on dishonesty in trade , and contracts of all kinds , are looked upon by some with an eye of suspicion as a covert attack upon trade generally ; on the contrary , we are its truest friends in desiring its purification , oven "by fire . "" At present there is a lenity and power of evasion that has almost a provisional air , as if wo ourselves and our rulers looked upon our own amenability as by no means an improbable occurrence .
Untitled Article
CjOMETHING was said of old , touching 1 " the Mammon of un-O righteousness , " and when it may bo proper " to innko friends with it . . No'lews ' , " at '" the ' present time , might be with expediency uttered concerning * the . Mammon of ltespeetability , and tho uses to which it might be directed . Mammon , under whatever disguise , is still Munnnon . It matters little whether " tho least erect spirit that foil" appears as a respectable member of the middle class interest , or an unrighteous stoward , who had done worse than steal hia master ' s daughter , having 1 appropriated his gold . Tho' man under tho clothes is otill tho saino . Well , wo all know this ; but how few not on tho knowledge ! None but a philosopher looks under appearances ; nnd u philosopher , as we may learn from the fato of Sochates , is not generally regarded us a respectable person .
Untitled Article
* This rottennosB of ; England ' s emblem , tho oak , is of evil omen . The English Admiralty cannot cot seasoned' timber . Ayo doubt very much ¦ whether JJouis Natolkon nrids eqiml difficulty in procuring it . Tliia unseasoned-timber building ia a trick of corrupt Russian officials . On . PHANT , in hia well-known work , told us that generally high offe-udors in ' Russia can afford to bribe oven their judges out of their fraudulent gains . Sometimes , however , tho Emperor takes tho matter Into his own hands : and for some trick of this grcon-timber kind , a former governor of Sebnstopol found himself rnther Biiddonly labouring , as a convicted ftlon , in tho works over which only a day or two boforo ho hud preaided .
Untitled Article
unamenable to moral 470 The Leader mid Saturday Analyst . [ May 19 , 1860 .
Swindling- Again.
SWINDLING AGAIN .
The Mammon Of Respectability.
THE MAMMON OF RESPECTABILITY .
-
-
Citation
-
Leader (1850-1860), May 19, 1860, page 470, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2348/page/10/
-