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قراءة كتاب Mysteries of Police and Crime

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‏اللغة: English
Mysteries of Police and Crime

Mysteries of Police and Crime

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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Maudsley. The preventive agencies are all the more necessary where heredity emphasises the universal natural tendency. The taint of crime is all the more potent in those whose parentage is evil. The germ is far more likely to flourish into baleful vitality if planted by congenital depravity. This is constantly seen with the offspring of criminals. But it is equally certain that the poison may be eradicated, the evil stamped out, if better influences supervene betimes. Even the most ardent supporters of the theory of the “born criminal” admit that this, as some think, imaginary monster, although possessing all the fatal characteristics, does not necessarily commit crime. The bias may be checked; it may lie latent through life unless called into activity by certain unexpected conditions of time and chance. An ingenious refinement of the old adage, “Opportunity makes the thief,” has been invented by an Italian scientist, Baron Garofalo, who declares that “opportunity only reveals the thief”; it does not create the predisposition, the latent thievish spirit.

TYPES OF FEMALE CRIMINALS
TYPES OF FEMALE CRIMINALS
(From Photographs at the Black Museum.)

However it may originate, there is still little doubt of the universality, the perennial activity of crime. We may accept the unpleasant fact without theorising further as to the genesis of crime. I propose in these pages to take criminals as I find them; to accept crime as an actual fact, and in its multiform manifestations; to deal with its commission, the motives that have caused it, the methods by which it has been perpetrated, the steps taken—sometimes extraordinarily ingenious and astute, sometimes foolishly forgetful and ineffective—to conceal the deed and throw the pursuers off the scent; on the other hand, I shall set forth in some detail the agencies employed for detection and exposure. The subject is comprehensive, the amount of material available is colossal, almost overwhelming.

Every country, civilised and uncivilised, the whole world at large in all ages, has been cursed with crime. To deal with but a fractional part of the evil deeds that have disgraced humanity would fill endless volumes; where “envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness” have so often impelled those of weak moral sense to yield to their criminal instincts, a full catalogue would be impossible. It must be remembered that crime is ever active in seeking new outlets, always keen to adopt new methods of execution; the ingenuity of criminals is infinite, their patient inventiveness is only equalled by their reckless audacity. They will take life without a moment’s hesitation, and often for a miserably small gain; will prepare great coups a year or more in advance and wait still longer for the propitious moment to strike home; will employ address and great brain power, show fine resource in organisation, the faculty of leadership, and readiness to obey; will utilise much technical skill; will assume strange disguises and play many different parts, all in the prosecution of their nefarious schemes or in escaping penalties after the deed is done.

With material so abundant, so varied and complicated, it will be necessary to use some discretion, to follow certain clearly defined lines of choice. I propose in these pages to adopt the principle embodied in the title and to deal more particularly with the “mysteries” of crime and its incomplete, partial, or complete detection; with offences not immediately brought home to their perpetrators; offences prepared in secret, committed by offenders who have long remained perhaps entirely unknown, but who have sometimes met with their true deserts; offences that have in consequence exercised the ingenuity of pursuers, showing the highest development of the game of hide-and-seek, where the hunt is man, where one side fights for life and liberty, immunity from well-merited reprisals, the other is armed with authority to capture the human beast of prey. The flights and vicissitudes of criminals with the police at their heels make up a chronicle of moving, hair-breadth adventure unsurpassed by books of travel and sport.

Typical cases only can be taken, in number according to their

CRIMINALS’ WEAPONS: REVOLVERS, KNUCKLE DUSTERS, AND LIFE PRESERVERS IN THE BLACK MUSEUM. Photo: Cassell & Company, Limited.
CRIMINALS’ WEAPONS: REVOLVERS, KNUCKLE DUSTERS, AND LIFE PRESERVERS IN THE BLACK MUSEUM.
Photo: Cassell & Company, Limited.

relative interest and importance, but all more or less illustrating and embracing the hydra-headed varieties of crime. We shall see murders most foul, committed under the strangest conditions; brutal and ferocious attacks, followed by the most cold-blooded callousness in disposing of the evidences of the crime. In some cases a man will kill, as Garofalo puts it, “for money and possessions, to succeed to property, to be rid of one wife through hatred of her or to marry another, to remove an inconvenient witness, to avenge a wrong, to show his skill or his hatred and revolt against authority.” This class of criminal was well exemplified by the French murderer Lacenaire, who boasted that he would kill a man as coolly as he would drink a glass of wine. They are the deliberate murderers, who kill of malice aforethought and in cold blood. There will be slow, secret poisonings, often producing confusion and difference of opinion among the most distinguished scientists; successful associations of thieves and rogues, with ledgers and bank balances, and regularly audited accounts; secret societies, some formed for purely flagitious ends, with commerce and capitalists for their quarry; others for alleged political purposes, but working with fire and sword, using the forces of anarchy and disorder against all established government.

The desire to acquire wealth and possessions easily, or at least without regular, honest exertion, has ever been a fruitful source of crime. The depredators, whose name is legion, the birds of prey ever on the alert to batten upon the property of others, have flourished always, in all ages and climes, often unchecked or with long impunity. Their methods have varied almost indefinitely with their surroundings and opportunities. Now they have merely used violence and brute force, singly or in associated numbers, by open attack on highway and byway, on road, river, railway, or deep sea; now they have got at their quarry by consummate patience and ingenuity, plotting, planning, undermining or overcoming the strongest safeguards, the most vigilant precautions. Robbery has been practised in every conceivable form: by piracy, the bold adventure of the sea-rover flying his black flag in the face of the world; by brigandage in new or distracted communities, imperfectly protected by the law; by daring outrage upon the travelling public, as in the case of highwaymen, bushrangers, “holders-up” of trains; by the forcible entry of premises or the breaking down of defences designed against attack—by burglary in banks and houses, “winning” through the iron walls of safes and strong-rooms, so as to reach the treasure within, whether gold or securities or precious stones; by robberies from the person, daring garrotte robberies, dexterous neat-handed pilfering, pocket-picking, counter-snatching; by insinuating approaches to simple-minded folk, and the astute, endlessly multiplied application of

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