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470 The Leader and Saturday Analyst. C^a...
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SWINDLING AGAIN. ' TX7E had no intention...
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* This rottenness of England's emblem, t...
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THE MAMMON OP RESPECTABILITY. SOMETHING ...
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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.
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470 The Leader And Saturday Analyst. C^A...
470 The Leader and Saturday Analyst . C ^ ay 19 , I 860 .
Swindling Again. ' Tx7e Had No Intention...
SWINDLING AGAIN . ' TX 7 E had no intention of an immediate return to the offensive VV theme of last week ' s diatribe , but some form of pecuniary dishonesty or other is ever coming- uppermost and foremost in the daily journals ; ever the old scene of quick-heeled rascality finding 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 pur legislative proteetors were in earnest , which of course they are not , lome encouragement might be derived from Napier s fervid onslaught on Admiralty management , and the continual cheers with which his speech was greeted m 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 oh rottenness in general . But let not our readers be deceived : the applause meant nothing
more than that the House was amused with the " sseva-imhgnatio ' of an old seaman , gratified with his pluck , and something interested with what is now rare enough , a not sham enthusiasm—Fudge . -The public will no more read on the broad sheet of the Times a plain satisfactory account of an effective punishment actually inflicted on the suppliers of sappy timber , and uncontinuous copper bolts , than on the boot and shoe sellers , or the si \ ppliers of the filthy stores that killed the troops returning from India . There will be some law foo-, in which the offenders will be quite lost to the public eye ; some lack of witnesses , some public man whose carelessness must be shielded , some mistake , some excuse ; and the nation will have to put no 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 punishment should perchance arrive , it will not be of a deterring character . Do oiir readers know the meaning of the word " deterring ? " ^ It means " frightening away ; " not the mere washy " preventive ' which of late has implied something that tries to be preventive , but cannot . We shall go on , not only with pur old text , but with our old inference . Some new form of punishment must be brought into play ; something more severe than moderate fines ,- imprisonment , 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 of 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 . TaweMi , ex-quaker , -his-TmstTes ; rtlmHreTmgh ^ •—respectability being , of course , the chief beau ideal of quaker felicity . Tawell , 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 hissiuys 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 , as 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 , exposnre to the keen , condemning glances of their humbler and honester brethren in commerce ,
—to whom they would have scarcely deigned to nod on 'Changeand the disgusting gibes 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 . " j & Then there arc the luxurious champagne , opera box , and phaeton gentlemen . They nro fond of bodily pleasure , and si lair prospwt of bodily pain would be probably tho best deterrent of this da . ss of swindlers ; a sound public flogging would not be a bit too bad in their case * and tho condemning authority should havo his option .
These floggings and exposures should bejm addition to the lighter penalties of fining and imprisonment . In certain cases wo have already sanctioned the grosser of tho two kinc ' s—flogging . The mere promulgation of thin punishment , irrespective of the position of tho offender , has effectually rendered the perpon of royalty inviolate . Nothing but prudence luw prevented the adjudication of the same punishment for violence to wives . AH very well , you say , for the lowor orders . The nearer tho mortification is to the heart or the head , tho more absolute the necessity for searing it out ; the brand may act at once ns ir stamp nnd a cim * . These upper elnss , or what would bo-upper class swindlers , nro the
worst of all , for an evident reason—they are unamenable to moral a-ency . To what is it you trust to diminish crime in the lower classes ? A certain amount of education , a certain amount ot religious instruction ; and with most of them such means where used do operate , and powerfully . But with the upper class ot 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 ot exciting 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 . v ^ , i # ;
How grand and beautiful , though often somewhat imaginative , are Lord Bacon ' 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 o-ivin" -, the more gaining ; the more communication , the more production ; we no longer consider what is gained by a neighbouring country as necessarily so much lost to our own . Dante s fine lines in the " Purgatorio " on love give more beautiful expression to this law than we have seen in any other writer : — Perche quarito si dice piu li nostro , Tanto possiede piu di ben ciaseuno ,
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 . Bolingbsoke's words are before us : — " All that can l > e done , j | there fore , to prolong the duration of a , good government , is to draw back on every favourable occasion to the first good principles on which it was founded . "—Idea of a Patriot JLing .
So in many other ways , wearied with the modern , we seek refuge in cruder antiquity . Scholars fly from Latinisms to the more Saxon " well of English undented . " " Painting flies from the flashy and careless to the rigid , as men seek the feelings of youth in the fields iii which they once were young-. " Wea"ed _ wrth modern fine ladies Will . Honeycomb at last we ^ tlsamillcmaid , \ viththeunchanged rustic charms and manners which might have captivated his great-great grandfather . Rousseau would have a wholesale return to the comparative pureness and simplicity of savage life . Perhaps commerce itselfv that child of civilization , . might . find _ itself retempered —retrempg—by a return to somewhat of its primitive state . honest than the
The savage and the half-savage seem more civilized . When the Cluppeways 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 mnnufac-, lures ,-it . is stored that the " East India diamonds are generally imported from Madras in small packages , named bulses ; and so honestly is the trade conducted , that these bulses are bought and sold by invoice without even being opened fur examination . ' * Brydone 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 remember rightly the guilty person was killed , and his family were excommunicated by the villagers . the
It would seem that the savage and the rude , being- nearer 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 savnge is often a downright thief , but with him plunder is one thing and baiter another . We mix tho two , and the stream of commerce bears not only the fair and faithful merchant ' s bark , but the pirate , the privateer , and the smuggler ; and the struggle of commerce is to outwit , rather than simply to ' compensate ' and rrceive compensation . Frequent attacks on dishonesty in trade , and contracts of all kinds , are looked upon by some with nn eye of suspicion as a covert attack upon trade generally ; on the contrary , we are its truest friends in desiring its purification , oven " b y fire . " At present there i « a lenity and power of evasion that has ahnost a provisional air , ns if wo ourselves and our rulers looked upon our own amenability as by no moans an improbable occurrence
* This Rottenness Of England's Emblem, T...
* This rottenness of England ' s emblem , tho oak , is of evil omen . The English Admiralty cannot get seasoned timber . We doubt very much 'Whether Lodis Napoleon nnds equal difficulty in procuring it . This unseasoned-timber building is ft trick of corrupt Bussi / ui officials . Ojli jphant , jiu his well-known work , told us that geric ' rnlly high offenders in Russia can afford to bribe cvtui their judges out of their fraudulent gains . Sometimes , however , the Emperor takes the mattor into his own hands ; and for somo trick of this green-timber kind , a former governor of Sebnstopol found himuelf rather suddenly labouring , as a convicted ft-lon , in the works over which only a day or t . wo before ho hud presided .
The Mammon Op Respectability. Something ...
THE MAMMON OP RESPECTABILITY . SOMETHING was said of old , touching : " the Mammon of un-O righteousness , " and when it may be proper " to make friends " with it . No lens , at the prenflrit time , might be with expediency uttered concerning : the Mammon of Respectability , und the uses to which it might be directed . Mammon , under whatever disguise * is a til I Mammon . It . matters little whether " the least erect spirit that fell" nppears as a respectable member of the middle class interest , or an unrighteous steward , who had done wor ^ e than steal hi * master ' s daughter , having appropriated his gold . The man under tho clothes is wtill the eauio . Well , we nil know this ; but how few act on the knowledge ! None but n philoHophor looks under appearances ; and a philosopher , ns wo may learn from the ftito of BocBATiiS , is not gcuomlly regarded ns a respectable person .
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Citation
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Leader (1850-1860), May 19, 1860, page 10, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_19051860/page/10/
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