CHAPTER II
CAPTAIN WHITEFEATHER TAKES AN ENLARGED VIEW OF SWINDLING. SOCIAL EVILS AND THEIR REMEDY
CAPTAIN WHITEFEATHER TAKES AN ENLARGED VIEW OF SWINDLING. SOCIAL EVILS AND THEIR REMEDY
CAPTAIN WHITEFEATHER TAKES AN ENLARGED VIEW OF SWINDLING. SOCIAL EVILS AND THEIR REMEDY
No—the theme is too pregnant with circumstance; too vast—too voluminous. Let me then subdue the vain, though laudable, ambition—let me repress the fond, the wild desire of such distinction. Is it for a single pen to write the History of Swindling? Is it for one man to chronicle, with scrupulous fidelity, the rise and progress of the exquisite art (for I must call it so)? Is it for onecurious pair of eyes—one toilsome hand—to pore over and put down the many million facts to be registered in a complete body of the Science? Could the life of a patriarch, even though he worked the hours of a cotton-spinner, suffice for the labour? Consider, Barabbas, what running to and fro—what fetching and carrying of truths—what sifting and winnowing of chaff and husk—what gold-washing—what pearl-diving! Now picking up stray matter for your work in Egypt—now, with a thought, among the sages in India—now off, it may be, upon a wild-goose chase to Arabia Petræa—now among the Scandinavians—and now, cold as a snowball, to be called away to the opium-sellers at the walls of the Tartars! Is it possible for one man, though with ribs of brass and soles of adamant, to go through the toil and travel? And this, be it remarked, will only take in the first thousand years or so of the age of our dear, ill-used mother earth. How much remains to be done—what crooked ways to thread—what dirt and rust to scratch away—what inscriptions to guess at—what monuments to measure—even before you come to Semiramis! And when, reeling like a porter under a thousand-weight of facts—for a very few facts make a pound—you arrive at Semiramis, have you disciplined yourself to bear the indifference of a superficial generation—to be asked by listless ignorance, “Who the devil is Semiramis?” Dear Barabbas, your yearnings are indeed most noble; but there is a limit to human action—there is a point where man must stop. The task is not earthly; or, if indeed it be a mortal labour, it is only to be achieved by the united heads and hands of many. A band of hard-working encyclopædists—temperate labourers living upon bread and water and figs—might possibly, in the course of a few lustres, produce some hundred volumes of the work; but a complete body of swindling from the birth of time to its present lustihood, it is a thing only to be dreamed of—aglorious phantasm—a magnificent but most deceitful vision!
But grant it done. Say that the last proof—the ten millionth sheet—lies before you, the smooth-faced devil waiting at your garret door to carry off the corrected matter for the press. Say that it is printed, published, and the whole five hundred volumes folio scrupulously conned, as they doubtless would be, by the critics—alack! alack!—what a melancholy book hath the press groaned with—what a ghastly chronicle, what a blood-dyed, tear-stained record!
“A complete body of swindling!” Let us turn a few of the leaves. They creak like dungeon hinges! Are not the pictures terrible? Whole generations of men, thin-chapped, hollow-eyed, scourged and in bonds; fainting in midday; stark with the dews of night. Tens of thousands, living carcasses, in mines—thousands and thousands writhing in blood and agony upon the field—with the vassals of glory, a cloud of vultures, hovering to pick their bones. Next let us peep through prison bars, and—no; close the book—it is too shocking—one’s marrow freezes, and the brain reels at it.
“Methinks,” says the reader, “the Captain takes a too comprehensive view of his subject.”
Right, sagacious reader; and yet, were the history of swindling in all its ramifications to be duly chronicled, the work would be no less voluminous, no jot less tragical. The present is, after all, not an auspicious age for folios; neither is it the best of all possible eras for the publication of disagreeable truths. Lazarus himself, to touch worldly sympathy, should in these days be a Lazarus in superfine cloth—the best cambric and the glossiest beaver; nay, he would be something the gainer by a waistcoat of gold-smeared velvet, and, at least, a chain of silver. To make iniquity or sorrow bearable, it is highly necessary that itshould be properly dressed. Hence, reader, I, Barabbas Whitefeather, instructed by the better spirit of the age, forego my first Utopian purpose, and leaving the full history of swindling to be written by a future college of sages, shall confine myself more immediately to the existing wants of the world—shall attend to the crying necessities of the present generation. Controlled by my better genius, I renounce folios.
After all, the world has not, as I at first superficially believed, so keen a want of a complete history of swindling: for how many books have been written which, although not professedly treating of the theme, are, by their very subject, works of reference and authority in the matter! What, for instance, is much ofAncient History? WhatThe Lives of the Roman Emperors? WhatThe History of Conquests? WhatThe History of Discovery—from the first finding of Mesopotamia to the last providential flight upon New Zealand? If men will read not with their eyes alone, but with understanding hearts, how much is there in all these works, in all these narratives, that is indeed no other than materials for a complete body of swindling? Loose pearls that need stringing—scattered lights to be brought to one point? Indeed, to a contemplative mind, to a reader properly prepared for the perusal of history and biography, it is almost impossible for him to open a volume from which he should not gather knowledge of a swindling kind. It is often the very staple of a book, though to the shame of many writers, I grieve to say it, the subject is most ungenerously disguised under foreign trappings—passed off under a false name. Hence, reflecting that if men will look round them, they are not wholly destitute of works containing the philosophy of swindling on a grand historical scale—on an enlarged and transcendental plan—I shall endeavour to prevail upon myself to become merely useful, leaving it to the poorly ambitious to glitterand to soar. Let other men make pedestals to themselves of unopened folios; they have their veneration—they are talked of, never read. I—I will descend among the crowd—will mix with my fellow-creatures—will right and left scatter among the children of innocence a “Handbook”—a veritable tome to be carried between the thumbs and fingers of men in their paths by day, and like a guardian and protecting genius to nestle in their bosoms at night. Yes, it shall be no large carcass of a book; no literary mammoth of a bygone time; a load for a shelf; but a light and dainty fairy for the palm. A “Handbook!”—Yes, there is a freshness, a beauty, a truthfulness in the name; it shall be “The Handbook of Swindling!” Uncut folios, avaunt! and, thick as humming-birds in tropic groves, “Handbooks,” in green and gold, trim your glowing winglets and flutter among men.[11]
11.The reader will perceive from the self-complacency with which the author talks of “Handbook,” that he would pass the compound as purely one of his own invention. The editor, however, conceives it to be a part of his stern duty to state that a book printed at Baden-Baden, where the Captain was wont to retire in autumn for the benefit of the waters and other benefits—a book entitled (we give the English) “The Handbook of Cogging,” was found among the Captain’s other literary effects. He had, doubtless, forgotten that Handbook was fromHandbuch.—[John Jackdaw, Ed.]
11.The reader will perceive from the self-complacency with which the author talks of “Handbook,” that he would pass the compound as purely one of his own invention. The editor, however, conceives it to be a part of his stern duty to state that a book printed at Baden-Baden, where the Captain was wont to retire in autumn for the benefit of the waters and other benefits—a book entitled (we give the English) “The Handbook of Cogging,” was found among the Captain’s other literary effects. He had, doubtless, forgotten that Handbook was fromHandbuch.—[John Jackdaw, Ed.]
Having resolved upon the mode in which I shall benefit humanity, having come to the determination to contract myself into the smallest possible size, that I may the more deftly make my way among the crowd, it is but due to myself—it is but just to my readers—to make known in a few words the extent and range of my purpose. That purpose is, I am proud to feel it, of the best wisdom, of the noblest benevolence; it is to make every man—at least every thinking, reasonable man, for I write not to blockheads—aSwindler. Yes; it is my aim to render him, at allpoints, armed for the contest of life—to prepare him for the cutting and thrusting and picking and stealing of this eventful passage. It is my purpose to make known a few golden rules—the result of a long and various experience—by which the attentive and quick-witted student may learn to play with men as he would play with pieces of chess, by which every move on the board of life may be his own, to the utter discomfiture of a plodding and merely painstaking opponent. And in all this there shall be nothing legally forbidden; nothing that shall suddenly shock your delicate nostrils, reader, with the smell of hemp: no, no; though turnkeys and the hangman walk about you, if you are an apt scholar, you shall snap your fingers at them, and swindle securely.
“And now,” thinks the reader,—for I know his thoughts as well as I know my own whiskers,—“now the book begins to open; now the work warms up.” Be not impatient.
Impressed as I am with the purpose of this inestimable little work, it befits the dignity of that purpose that there should be no unseemly haste, no helter-skelter in the communication of ideas. Were I writing the “Handbook of Egg-Sucking,” or any such domestic treatise, I might jump into my subject; but “Swindling” is not to be approached irreverently.
Its influence on the happiness of society is to be duly considered, that the maxims by which it is the hope of the author to recommend it may have their due weight upon the disciple; who, when he shall learn that swindling is, indeed, synonymous with self-preservation, will brush up his hair, take breath, and then, unless he have no more sensibility than a stock or stone, lapse into a state of the profoundest and most admiring attention. Yes; I was right—the pupil is now all ears.
Philanthropists and philosophers have come to the comfortable conclusion that there are in England too manyEnglishmen. John Bull has played the Sultan, and has an alarmingly numerous family. Unhappily, however, he has not the Sultan’s wealth—neither has he the Sultan’s prerogative: he cannot feed all his sons and daughters; he must not choke or drown them. The bow-string and the Bosphorus are not for John. What then is to become of the family of Bull? Shall they tear each other piecemeal? Forgetful of their origin, shall they destroy one another in civil fight?Amor patriæ—humanity—all the finer and nobler feelings of the human heart revolt at the very thought. “What,” the philanthropist will inquire with tears in his eyes—“what, then, is to be done with a superabundant population?” My reply is as brief as, I flatter myself, it is conclusive—they must swindle. We have been gradually adopting what I believe to be the only remedy for the national disease; we have for some years in many instances applied what I conceive to be the only cure for the social malady; but it is only when it shall be applied upon a grand scale, when, in fact, a curative science shall be professed and practised by men cognisant of all its subtle and most bountiful capabilities—for it is yet in its infancy—that the greatness of its social value will be thoroughly manifested and acknowledged.
It is allowed that all the professions are full to running over. The Church is crammed to suffocation with applicants for deaneries, prebends, vicarages; to say nothing of the thousands with their hearts fixed upon mitres. There is hardly standing room among the candidates for lawn and silk aprons.
In the Courts of Law there are wigs as thick as cauliflowers in Battersea Gardens. Besides, the sneaking spirit of the times has so enervated the British character, that Englishmen lack somewhat of that generous pugnacity which, in the days of our fathers, would precipitate them into the arena of the law to feed with their own fleshthe lions therein prowling. And when it happens that a gentleman with the true English blood in him shall resolve upon such noble sacrifice, why, so numerous are the animals awaiting him, that many a term shall pass, and not one of thecarnivorashall have so much as a mouthful of the honest gentleman’s flesh—shall not even make their mark in him. Consider it well, reader; count, if you can, the hundreds of excellent, watchful, well-disposed persons who, every morning during term, come down to the Courts to prey; and who, nevertheless, return to their homes all innocent of strife. Is not this a discouraging prospect for thousands of young men, most of them very willing to become Chancellor? But so it is; the profession has a greater supply than demand. In fifty years it will be thought great luck in a man to die Lord Chief Justice or Attorney-General.
In the Army, a profession that I have followed with an ardour peculiarly my own, can anything be more barren? Here am I, at the age of nine-and-thirty—I, who have—but no, the dignity of my subject, the national importance of this treatise, shall not be lessened or neglected by aught personal. Hence, I disdain to speak of a deep bayonet wound inflicted in the most dastardly manner in the small of my back, during my first campaign in Biscay—of a gash across my nose, from an enemy’s sickle, when bivouacking in a hen-roost—of an imaginary fracture of theos—but no; I have said it, I will not mingle my private griefs, were I chicken-hearted enough to think them so, with matters of national interest. Besides, every man’s country is proverbially ungrateful to him. Hence, I should despise myself did I more than allude, in the most evanescent way, to my heavy pecuniary losses in the service of Mexico, Chili, Peru, and other places too numerous to mention. But so it is; and what, I ask—what cares the commander-in-chief, sitting in hispride of place at the Horse Guards—what cares he for my superb plum-pudding spotted charger, shot whilst grazing—it was only the day before I had been on him—by an enemy’s vidette? What cares he for the loss of my three saddles, generously given up to be converted into highlows for my barefooted comrades? Yes, what—I must, I will ask it—cares the said commander-in-chief for the subsequent ignominy endured in consequence of that gallant steed—that by me devoted leather? Would it affect him, even for half-an-hour, to know that on my return to England—my beloved land!—after three years’ absence, I was, at half-past six on a December morning, summoned by my landlady to see a Mr Jones, the said Mr Jones and a friend at the same time entering my apartment to remind me of my lost barb, my long-forgotten saddles? On that morning the commander-in-chief was, I doubt it not, snoring ingloriously in bed; little dreaming—it may be, little caring—that at that hour a brother soldier, placed between two big men in a small gig, was being conveyed at the rate of three miles an hour through fog and frost to Chancery Lane. I remember the Tyburn-like pace; for, let me do his benevolence justice, Mr Levi in the handsomest way apologised for not having had the horseroughed; adding that, as he had no other call to make that morning, “he was not in no ’urry.”
Friendly reader, as an officer and a gentleman, I protest to you that I would not have even thus casually alluded to personal adventures did they not in the most striking, and I may add in the most pathetic manner illustrate the condition of a man who, with a military flame burning in his breast, generously offers his fire in the cause of nations. I might proceed; but the same modesty that has hitherto confined me to the rank of captain—and I may here allude to an infamous conspiracy on the part of the publisher and printers of theArmy List, my name, as I have been informed,having been maliciously omitted from that miscellany—the same modesty ties up my tongue on my own sufferings, my own deserts; or at most but lets it move in fitful murmurings. I have done! To proceed.
In the Army what are the hopes for superabundant young gentlemen, too spirited to starve, and too nice to dig? What, I ask, can be their hopes when a hypocritic sentimentality is gaining ground amongst those who are pleased to call themselves thinking men—a whining, sneaking abuse of glory and all its mighty purposes? There is a whimpering, white-faced cowardice that would extract all the stern immortal beauty from the battlefield, showing it to be no other than a place of butchery; that would display the valiant soldier with his throat cut, his bowels gloriously protruding, as a horrible sight—a piece of sacrilege done by man upon his fellow. And more than this, the same cant lifts up its face of turnip pallor, and pointing to where ten or twelve thousand stalwart fellows lie magnificently dead in blood and mire, has the effrontery to askcui bono, as my old schoolmaster used to say—to put the impudent “What’s the good of it?” I should abuse the ingenuousness of the young martial spirit were I to be silent on the innovation of this wicked principle; a principle which, with the infamous invention of the steam gun and the unhallowed introduction of the rocket brigade, will go far, or Captain Whitefeather is no prophet, to utterly destroy what I was once proud to think the instinct for war in the “paragon of animals.” There is something inconceivably cowardly in the steam gun. Possessed of such engines, neither party will fight; and thus, nations always prepared for war, will hold continual peace. They will, so to speak, treat and deliberate at “full cock”; and being always ready, will never fire. Is not this, I ask, a lamentable state of the world for a man to be born in? Let us, however, unflinchingly look truth in the face; by so doing we shall be the better prepared forthe evil days at hand, which to enable men to meet with some serenity of mind is the high purpose of this essay. Such days are nearer, much nearer, than those who have capital in powder mills like to dream of. We shall, of course, continue to keep a small standing army; but blank cartridges for birthdays will be the only order from the Horse Guards: bullets will become as rare as brilliants; whole tons of the death-dealing lead being sold to the type-founders. Laurel, “the meed of mighty conquerors”—why a whole grove of it will in the coming time be held of no more account, nay, of not so much, as a handful of dried marjoram. Have I dreamt it, or did I at a late philosophical meeting see a grave, pragmatic man rise from his seat, and when up, did I or did I not hear him seriously put it as a motion—that the planet Mars should be no longer called Mars, but be known to all future generations asJames Watt?
The Army, then, affords no refuge for the tens of thousands up to within these few years begotten, christened, suckled, nursed, fondled, schooled, petted, sported with, wept over by fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers, for the glorious purposes of war. In such case is it not, I ask, the highest purpose of the philanthropist to find employment for men, who in happier times might have been usefully employed in burning the cottages of our enemies, lessening the numbers of our enemies’ children (thus nipping a foe in the bud) on lances and bayonets, tearing up olive groves, carrying away the vanity of plate and pictures from enemies’ churches, and in fire, and blood, and terror, planting the immortal bay? Since the British Lion is no longer to be fed upon Frenchmen’s flesh, since he is henceforth to have a regimen of bread and milk and dates, it behoves us to see that he be gradually and duly prepared for the change in his diet, lest consumption fall upon him; or, a still greater point, lest he break all bonds and spread dismay around.
I have now, I trust, convincingly proved that the many asylums hitherto open to the pious, the wise, and the brave, are most inconveniently crammed; and that with less room for an increasing generation, the crowds will consequently become more dense, more clamorous, and in a word, more revolutionary. What is the remedy in this great natural crisis?
In one word make I answer—“Swindling!”
The philosophy of the present time is remarkable for its contempt—nay, for its wholesome abhorrence of poverty. A want of the luxuries of life is not merely inconvenient, it is positively ignominious. Hence what wrigglings, and smugglings, and heartburnings are every day acted and endured, to stand well with the world; that is, to stand without a hole in our hat or a damning rent in our small clothes! The modern man is wonderfully spiritualised by this philosophy; so much so that if he can secure to himself a display of the collar he is almost wholly unconscious of the absence of the shirt. Indeed so deep and so widely spread is this sentiment that the present time might be denominated the Age of Collars.
This spirit is on the advance; and it is the consciousness of this truth that impresses upon me the necessity of publishing a system by the adoption of which the country may be saved from a desolating revolution, and tens of thousands of future generations be secured those benefits and enjoyments which, as the sons of Adam, they are justified in expecting from the fulness of time.
I have proved, at least to my own satisfaction—a great sustaining point with an author—proved that by the natural course of things multitudes of generous spirits, before devoted to the professions, will be thrown upon their own resources—a dreadful condition for most men. What is to become of them? They cannot sink down into petty hucksters; railroads have destroyed the race of pedlars;they must not, even if they had sufficient moral courage, hold forth their white hands as medicants; and if, stung by the injustice of society, they should in a moment of exasperation take to the road, why, highwaymen, save and except the highwaymen of fifty years ago, cease to be picturesque; and there is another heavy discouragement—the barbarous institution of a rural police. These fiery souls—the unemployed, superabundant young gentlemen—must, then, become knight-errants; that is, they must institute an order of chivalry peculiar to the age, and the best calculated to meet the wants of the sufferers. Let us take a single knight.
Here is Peter Muddleton, son of Jonah Muddleton, greengrocer, Houndsditch. Jonah Muddleton dies, leaving Peter heir to the goodwill of his shop, with seven hundred pounds in the three per cents. Well, had Peter fallen upon a less ambitious age, he would have tied his apron around him, walked behind the counter, and, saving a new coat of red and yellow paint bestowed upon the outside of the shop, and the substitution of “Peter” for “Jonah,” things would have gone on even as when Muddleton senior was in the flesh. Peter, however, has a spirit above ha’porths of starch and pen’orths of pepper; and having, as he most potently believes, a gentlemanly taste, resolves to do anything that may become a gentleman, but certainly not keep to a shop. The seven hundred pounds, to Peter’s real astonishment, become in a brief time about eight hundred shillings. A little month and Peter is penniless. What is to be done? Is Peter to be blamed for the spirit of the age? Could he, the hapless son of a vulgar sire, stultify himself to the fascinating and exalting appeals of an advancing era? No; he is, in the first instance, the victim of over refinement, and his moral perceptions having been rendered painfully acute to the degradation of a shop, and his physical man far too thin-skinned for the labour of Adam—and, moreover, having not a sixpence, and seeingno gentlemanly mode of obtaining that much-abused yet most necessary little coin—he magnanimously resolves to eat and drink the best, and to wear the costliest, and all—without it. This is the determination of a genius: but even the most consummate wit may be assisted by the experience of others, and it would be a sorry affectation in me—it would be worse, it would be a gross injustice to my fellow-creatures—to deny that from my own observation of life I am incapable of the dearest services to young gentlemen so curiously placed as Peter Muddleton.
I have taken a single case; I have adduced one of the humblest examples; I already see a hundred thousand, many varying in their original rank in life; but all, at length, compelled by the spirit of the age to take their stand upon the broad ground of—Swindling.
All commercial operations of the present, and certainly of the future age, do and will tend to place the whole wealth of the country in a few hands. I am not vain enough to suppose that this book will enjoy a large daily sale for more than a hundred years; with all the partiality of an author, I cannot bring myself to expect that the state of society—whose wants the work is to meet—will endure above another century. However, I shall have done my duty, and I may safely leave the year 2000 to the active philanthropy of otherWhitefeathers. For more than the next hundred years there must, if my previous hypotheses are allowed, be an enormous amount of intelligence unemployed by the professions; the tangible fat of the land becoming every year engrossed by a smaller number. Now, to prevent any violent partition of property, it is—I can lay my hand on my heart and vow it—it is my purpose to make the few contribute in the easiest and pleasantest way to the wants of the many. Briefly, it is my object to show to the elegant unemployed how they may successfully and safely swindle the shopkeeping minority. The whole system is reducedinto a trial of wit; and if the swindler be a man of real genius, and the man swindled have a touch of generous feeling in him, he will forget what might be vulgarly called a loss in admiration of his conqueror. I have seen much of shopkeeping nature; and I am convinced that a man properly, wholly, and withal delicately swindled—where there have been no rubs or hitches in the work—that a man who, with all his eyes and ears about him, has nevertheless, without his knowing it, been turned, “like a cheveril glove,” inside out by the professor—that such a man, after the first burst of disappointment, feels but little of the bitterness of resentment; the small drop of gall in his heart is speedily taken up, and by a process delightful for the benevolent mind to consider, is assimilated to the milk of human kindness still running in the ventricles of the swindled; who—I have known such an instance—after a moody, savage look, will burst into a laugh, slap his leg, and with a confident, yea, with an exulting voice, declare that “no less a swindler could ever have swindledhim.” Here is a homage—an irresistible token of admiration—paid to one man; and if we consider, in proportion to the possessions of the others, how small, how trivial has been the tribute levied upon him, a positive enjoyment afforded to another! Believe it, reader, the swindled, if well swindled, is not without his joy.
This maxim is never to be lost sight of by the pupil. If he would disarm a man of the natural ferocity of the animal when fobbed, he must fob him blandly, graciously, completely. Humanity—a consideration of the feelings of others—demands this. How often have we seen a worthy man in a very tempest of passion—his face like copper—his eyes starting—his tongue stammering his wrongs:—“The—the—the—infamous scoundrel!—the barefaced villain! Did he think I was to be done in that way? Did he think me a fool?”
There it is, take the good man’s goods; but, in the taking, see you never wound his self-love.