AS HE SEES HIMSELF
THE exercises of Commencement Day had been unusually interesting, though prolonged. I had attended them all. I had listened to the wisdom of the selected members of the graduating class, and afterwards to the less dignified but more optimistic remarks of the old graduates. The general impression that I received was that though the country had been in danger, the worst was over.
Returning home I found a caller waiting for me in the library. He was a rather handsome man in his way, but a close observer might have noticed a certain shiftiness in his eyes and hard lines about his mouth, and perhaps other signs of a misspent life. Not being a close observer, I did not notice any of these things. He struck me as an ordinary person with whom it might be a pleasure to talk. I was somewhat surprised at his first remark, which was made by way of introduction.
“I am,” he said, “well known to the police, and am said to be the most dangerous criminal of my class now at large. I am an expert forger and have served time in four prisons.”
His frank statement was preliminary to the request for a temporary loan that would enable him to complete the work of reformation, that was endangered by a lack of funds. It was late in the day, and before acceding to his request it was necessary that there should be some investigation, so I asked him to call on the morrow.
“I have been at the Commencement exercises all day,” I said, “and am not in a condition to be of much help to you just now; but if you would like to stay a while and chat, I should be glad.”
He welcomed the suggestion, and, now that the matter of business had been postponed, he was at his ease. In a friendly way he made me acquainted with the general theory of forging and check-raising,—at least so far as it is intelligible to the lay mind. His criticism of prison management was acute, and he pointed out the seamy side of the plans of the reformers. I listened with docility to his story of the under world. He was a well-educated man with an appreciation of good literature,which was a characteristic, he informed me, of most forgers. He was especially interested in sociology, and had all its best phrases at his tongue’s end. He attributed all his misfortunes to Society. For one thing I listened in vain,—the admission that in some respects he might himself have been remiss. The idea of reciprocal obligation did not seem to have any place in his philosophy. As delicately as I could I tried to turn the conversation from the sin of Society, which I readily acknowledged, to the less obvious point of personal responsibility. Granting that Society was imperfectly organized, that juries were ignorant, and judges lacking in the quality of mercy, and prison wardens harsh, and chaplains too simple-minded, were there not faults on the other side that it might be profitable to correct? It was of no use to try to induce such currents of thought; they were quickly short-circuited.
At last I said, “You have told me what you did before you concluded to reform. I am curious to know how, in those days, you looked at things. Was there anything which you wouldn’t have done, not because you were afraid of the law, but because you felt it would be wrong?”
“Yes,” he said, “there is one thing I never would do, because it always seemed low down. I never would steal.”
It was evident that further discussion would be unprofitable without definition of terms. I found that by stealing he meant petty larceny, which he abhorred. In our condemnation of the sneak thief and the pickpocket we were on common ground. His feeling of reprobation was, if anything, more intense than that which I felt at the time. He alluded to the umbrellas and other portable articles he had noticed in the hallway. Any one who would take advantage of an unsuspecting householder by purloining such things was a degenerate. He had no dealings with such moral imbeciles.
It seemed to me that I might press the analogy which instantly occurred to me between “stealing” and forgery.
“Do they not,” I said, “seem to you to amount to very much the same thing?”
I had struck a wrong note. Analogies are ticklish things to handle, for things which are alike in certain respects are apt to be quite different in other respects. His mind was intent onthe differences. The sneak thief, he told me, is a vulgar fellow of no education. The forger and the check-raiser are experts. They are playing a game. Their wits are pitted against the wits of the men who are paid high salaries for detecting them. They belong to quite different spheres. If we are looking for analogies we should look up and not down.
“You wanted to know,” he said, “what was the difference between stealing and check-raising. Now, let me ask you a question. What’s the difference between check-raising and some of those big financial operations we’ve all been reading about? Suppose I have a check for five dollars, and I put my brains into it and I manipulate it so that I can pass it off for five hundred. I shove it in to the cashier and he takes it. Before he finds out his mistake, I have made myself scarce. What’s the difference between that transaction and what the ‘big fellows’ on the street are doing?” He mentioned several names that I had not thought of in that connection.
“The difference,” said I, “is—” Then it occurred to me that it was a subject to which I should give further thought. So we postponedthe conversation till he should call again—which he never did.
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I may be doing injustice to my friend the forger, but he gave me the impression that he considered himself to be, on the whole, a rather admirable character. His proposed change of business seemed to be rather a concession to the prejudices of the legal profession than the result of any personal scruple. As he saw himself he was a man of idealistic temper whose ideals conflicted with social usage. Society was all the time getting into his way, and in the inevitable collisions he had usually the worst of it. He regretted this, but he bore no malice. By the time a man has reached middle life and accumulated a good deal of experience he takes the world as he finds it.
He had encased himself in a moral system which was self-consistent and which explained to his own satisfaction all that had happened to him. One thing fitted into another, and there was no room for self-reproach.
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Many attempts have been made to depict thecharacter of an accomplished scamp. But Gil Blas and Roderick Random and Jonathan Wild the Great are after all seen from the outside. The author may attempt to do them justice, but there is a vein of irony that reveals a judgment of his own. They lack the essential element of incorrigibility, which is that the scamp does not suspect himself, has not found himself out.
No novelist has ever been able to give such a portraiture of a complacent criminal as was given a century ago in the autobiography of Stephen Burroughs.
Burroughs was the son of a worthy clergyman of Hanover, New Hampshire, and from the outset was looked upon as a black sheep. As a mere boy he ran away from home and joined the army, and then with equal irresponsibility deserted. He became a ship’s surgeon, a privateersman, then a self-ordained minister, a counterfeiter, a teacher of youth, a founder of libraries, and a miscellaneous philanthropist. He was a patriot and an optimist and an enthusiastic worker in the cause of general education. He was chock-full of fine sentiment and had a gift for its expression. He enjoyed doing good, though in his own way, andnever neglected any opportunity to rebuke those who he felt were in the wrong. He had a desire to reform the world, and had no doubt of the plans which he elaborated. He was capable on occasions of acts of magnanimity, which, while not appreciated by the public, gave him great pleasure in the retrospect. The intervals between his various enterprises were spent in New England jails. These experiences only deepened his love of liberty, which was one of the passions of his life.
Burroughs had a happy disposition that enabled him to get a measure of satisfaction out of all the vicissitudes of his life. He had learned neither to worry nor to repine. He was not troubled by the harsh judgments of his fellow men, for he had learned to find his happiness in the approbation of his own conscience.
He writes: “I possess an uncommon share of sensibility, and at the same time maintain an equality of mind that is uncommon, particularly in the midst of those occurrences which are calculated to wound the feelings. I have learned fortitude in the school of adversity. In draining the cup of bitterness to its dregs, I have been taught to despise the occurrences of misfortune.This one thing I fully believe, that our happiness is more in our power than is generally thought, or at least we have the ability of preventing that misery which is so common to unfortunate situations. No state or condition in life, but from which we may (if we exercise that reason which the God of Nature has given us) draw comfort and happiness. We are too apt to be governed by the opinions of others, and if they think our circumstances unhappy, to consider them so ourselves, and of course make them so. The state of mind is the only criterion of happiness or misery.”
It was from this lofty point of view that Stephen Burroughs wrote the history of his own life. His tendency to didacticism interferes with the limpid flow of the narrative. Sometimes a whole chapter will be given over to moralizings, but the observations are never painful. They all reveal the author’s cheerful acquiescence in the inevitability of his own actions. Along with this there is the air of chastened surprise over the fact that he was made the object of persecution.
At the very beginning of the narrative one recognizes an independence which would do credit to a better man. In New England, clergymenhave always been looked upon as making good ancestors, and Burroughs might have been pardoned if he had shown some family pride. From this weakness he was free. “I am,” he says, “the only son of a clergyman, living in Hanover, in the State of New Hampshire; and were any to expect merit from their parentage, I might justly look for that merit. But I am so far a Republican that I consider a man’s merit to rest entirely with himself, without any regard to family, blood, or connection.”
The accounts of the escapades of his boyhood are intermingled with dissertations on the education of youth. “I have been in the habit of educating youth for seven years, constantly; in the course of my business I have endeavored to study the operations of the human heart, that I might be able to afford that instruction which would be salutary; and in this I find one truth clearly established, viz.: a child will endeavor to be what you make him think mankind in general are.”
The neglect of this truth on the part of his parents and teachers was the cause of much annoyance to Burroughs. Throughout his life he was the innocent victim of an educational mistake.Though after a while he learned to forgive the early injustice, one can see that it rankled. He endeavored to think well of mankind in general, but it was more difficult than if he had been habituated to the exercise in infancy.
At Dartmouth young Burroughs was peculiarly unfortunate; he fell into bad company. As an unkind fate would have it, his room-mate was an exemplary young man who was studying for the ministry. It appears that this misguided youth attempted to entice him into what he describes as “a sour, morose, and misanthropic line of conduct.” Nothing could have been more disastrous. “To be an inmate with such a character, you will readily conceive, no way comported with a disposition like mine, and consequently we never enjoyed that union and harmony of feeling in our intercourse as room-mates which was necessary for the enjoyment of social life.”
To the malign influence of his priggish room-mate several misfortunes were attributed. In endeavoring to restore the moral equilibrium which had been disturbed by the too great scrupulosity of his chum, he exerted too much strength in the other direction. The result was that “a powerfultriumvirate” was formed against him in the Faculty. The triumvirate triumphed and his connection with Dartmouth ended suddenly.
This gave occasion to a chapter on the failure of the institutions of learning to prepare for real life. The author declares “more than one half of the time spent in the universities, according to their present establishment on this continent, is thrown away, and that my position is founded in fact I will endeavor to prove.”
I do not see how his argument is affected by the fact to which the editor calls attention in a carping footnote. “It is not strange that the author should reason in this manner. He was expelled from college in the second quarter of his second year, and in fact he studied but little while he was a member.” The editor, I fear, had a narrow mind and judged according to an academic standard which Burroughs would have despised.
From the uncongenial limitations of a college town it was a satisfaction to escape to sea. Here Burroughs’s versatility stood him in good stead. “Having no doctor engaged, I undertook to act in that capacity; and after obtaining the assistance, advice, and direction of an old practitioner,together with marks set on each parcel of medicine, I thought myself tolerably well qualified to perform the office of a physician on board the ship.”
From his seafaring life Burroughs returned with his reputation under a cloud. There were ugly rumors afloat which were readily believed by a censorious world. For once he confesses that his philosophy failed him. “I returned to my father’s house sunken and discouraged; the world appeared a gloomy chaos; the sun arose to cast a sickly glimmer on surrounding objects; the flowers of the field insulted my feelings with their gayety and splendor; the frolicsome lamb, the playful kitten, and the antic colt were beheld with those painful emotions which are beyond description. Shall all nature, shall the brute creation break out into irregular transports, by the overflowing of pleasing sensations, whilst I am shut out from even the dim rays of hope?”
Certainly not. To a mind constituted as was his there was an absurdity in the very suggestion. The brute creation should not have any monopoly of comfortable sensations, so he cheered up immediately and spent the next year loafing around his father’s house.
He had been on the coast of Africa and had taken part in some strange scenes, but his moral sense had not been blunted to such an extent that he could not grieve over some infractions of the moral law which he observed in peaceful Hanover. He regretted that he had been led inadvertently by a young man named Huntington to join a party which robbed a farmer’s beehive.
“For some unaccountable reason or other, youth are carried away with false notions of right and wrong. I know, for instance, that Huntington possessed those principles of integrity that no consideration would have induced him to deprive another of any species of property, except fruit, bees, pigs, and poultry. And why it is considered by youth that depriving another of these articles is less criminal than stealing any other kind of property, I cannot tell.”
Burroughs himself was inclined to take a harsher view of these transgressions than he did of some others; for example, of counterfeiting, in which he was afterwards for a time engaged during one of his brief pastorates.
The argument by which his scruples in this particular were overcome are worth repeating. Thelaw was indeed violated in its letter, but might not a justification be found by one who interpreted it in a large spirit of charity?
“Money is of itself of consequence only as we annex to it a nominal value as the representation of property. Therefore we find the only thing necessary to make a matter valuable is to induce the world to deem it so; and let that esteem be raised by any means whatever, yet the value is the same, and no one becomes injured by receiving it at the valuation.”
The principle of fiat money having been established, the only question that remained was whether the circumstances of the times were such as to justify him in issuing the fiat. The answer was in the affirmative. “That an undue scarcity of cash now prevails is a truth too obvious for me to attempt to prove. Hence whoever contributes to increase the quantity of cash does not only himself but likewise the community an essential benefit.”
It was in his attempt to benefit the community in this way that he first experienced the ingratitude of republics, being landed in the Northampton jail.
But to see Burroughs at his best one must enter into his thoughts at that crisis in his life when he determined that his true vocation was preaching. He lingers fondly on his emotions at that period. It was at a time when he had been driven out of Hanover for conduct which had outraged the feelings of that long-suffering community.
“One pistareen was all the ready cash I had on hand, and the suddenness with which I departed deprived me of the chance to raise more. Traveling on leisurely I had time for reflection.”
As was usually the case when he reflected, he grew more serene and enjoyed a frame of mind that bordered on the heroic.
“I began to look about me to see what was to be done in my present situation and to what business I could turn my attention. The practice of law, which would have been most to my mind, I could not undertake until I had spent some time in the study, which would have been attended with expense far beyond my abilities; therefore this object must be laid aside. Physic was under the same embarrassments; business in the mercantile line I could not pursue for want of capital.... What can be done? There is one thing, said contrivance, that you can do, and it will answer your purpose—preach.”
The idea came to him as an inspiration, but immediately there was suggested an objection which to a less resourceful mind would have seemed insuperable. “What an appearance should I make in my present dress? which consisted of a light gray coat, with silver-plated buttons, green vest, and red velvet breeches.”
Down the Connecticut valley he trudged, calling to mind his father’s old sermons and gradually working himself into a state of pious rapture. The heart of no young pulpiteer beat with more appropriate emotions than his, when on the next Sunday, under an assumed name, he preached his first sermon in the village of Ludlow. “I awoke with anxious palpitation for the issue of the day. I considered this as the most important scene of my life—that, in a great measure, my future happiness or wretchedness depended on my conduct this day. The time for assembling approached! I saw the people come together. My feelings were up in arms against me, my heart would almost leap into my mouth. What a strange thing,said I, is man! Why am I thus perturbated by these whimsical feelings!”
The moment he began the service these perturbations came to an end. Words came in a steady flow, and he felt sure that he had found his true calling in life. “No monarch when seated on a throne had more sensible feelings of prosperity than what I experienced at this time.”
The neighboring town of Pelham being without a minister, Burroughs presented himself as a candidate, and was enthusiastically accepted. He made a specialty of funeral sermons, and was soon in demand in all the surrounding country. It was at this time also that he became acquainted with the coiner who showed him how he might surreptitiously increase the amount of cash in circulation. All went well till an enemy appeared who called him by name and revealed his antecedents. All Pelham was in an uproar, for the Pelhamites were “a people generally possessing violent passions, which, once disturbed, raged uncontrolled by the dictates of reason, unpolished in their manners, possessing a jealous disposition, and either very friendly or very inimical, not knowing a medium between these extremes.”
In this case they suddenly became very inimical, and Burroughs was again compelled to depart under cover of darkness. His night thoughts were always among his very best.
“Journeying on, I had time for reflection. At the dead of night—all alone—reflection would have its operation. A very singular scene have I now passed through, said I, and to what does it amount? Have I acted with propriety as a man, or have I deviated from the path of rectitude? I have had an unheard-of, disagreeable part to act; I do not feel entirely satisfied with myself in this business, and yet I do not know how I could have done otherwise, and have made the matter better. My situation has been such that I have violated the principle of veracity which we implicitly pledge ourselves to maintain towards each other, as a general thing, in society. Whether my peculiar circumstances would warrant such a line of procedure is the question. I know many things will be said in favor of it as well as against it.”
From this difficult question of casuistry he found relief in reverting to the one instance in which he had been clearly wrong, viz., joining the young men in Hanover in their raid on thefarmer’s beehive. “My giving countenance to an open breach of the laws of the land in the case of the bees was a matter in which I was justly reprehensible; but that matter is now past. I must take things as they are, and under these circumstances do the best I can. I know the world will blame me, but I wish to justify my conduct to myself, let the world think what it may.”
In this endeavor he was highly successful; and as he walked on, his spirits rose. He contrasted his own clear views with the muddled ideas of his late parishioners. “They understand the matter in the gross, that I have preached under a fictitious name and character, and consequently have roused many ideas in the minds of the people not founded on fact. Therefore they concluded from this general view the whole to be founded on wrong. The name impostor is therefore easily fixed on my character. An impostor, we generally conceive, puts on feigned appearances in order to enrich or aggrandize himself to the damage of others. That this is not the case with me in this transaction, I think is clear. That I have aimed at nothing but the bare necessaries of life, is a fact.”
Having thus cleared himself of the charge of imposture, he determined to rest his case on the broad ground of religious liberty. “That I have a good and equitable right to preach, if I choose and others choose to hear me, is a truth of which I entertain no doubt.”
When he was pursued into the borders of the town of Rutland, it was too much for his patience. “I turned and ran about twenty rods down a small hill, and the Pelhamites all after me, hallooing with all their might, ‘Stop him! stop him!’ To be pursued like a thief, an object of universal speculation to the inhabitants of Rutland, gave me very disagreeable sensations, which I determined not to bear. I therefore stopped, took up a stone, and declared that the first who should approach me I would kill on the spot. To hear such language and to see such a state of determined defiance in one whom they had lately reverenced as a clergyman struck even the people of Pelham with astonishment and fear.”
By the way, there follows a scene which makes us suspect that parts of Massachusetts in the good old days may have had a touch of “the wild West.” The two deacons who were leaders of themob drew attention to the fact that besides having come to them under false pretenses Burroughs had absconded with five dollars that had been advanced on his salary. He owed them one sermon which was theirs of right. In the present excited state of public opinion it was obviously impossible for Burroughs to deliver the sermon, but it was suggested that he might give an equivalent. A peacemaker intervened, saying, “Wood keeps an excellent tavern hard by; I propose for all to move up there.” This proposal was accepted by all. “I therefore came down, and we all went up towards the tavern. I called for drink, according to the orator’s advice, to the satisfaction of all.”
After that the career of Burroughs went on from bad to worse, but never was he without the inner consolations that belong to those who are misunderstood by the world. Even when he unsuccessfully sought to set fire to the jail he was full of fine sentiments borrowed from Young’s “Night Thoughts.” He quotes the whole passage beginning
Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne.
Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne.
Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne.
Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne.
This he seems to consider to be in some way ajustification for his action. He is ever of the opinion that a man’s heart can not be wrong so long as he is able to quote poetry.
The various incarcerations to which he was subjected might only have imbittered a less magnanimous mind. They rather instilled into Burroughs a missionary spirit. He felt that he ought to take more pains to enlighten the ignorance of the world in regard to his excellent qualities. “I have many times lamented my want of patient perseverance in endeavoring to convince my persecutors of their wrong by the cool dictates of reason. Error once seen ought to be corrected. The pruning hook should never be laid aside; then we should live up to the condition of our nature, which requires a state of improving and progressing in knowledge till time shall cease.”
But even Burroughs was human. It is easier to bear great misfortunes than to meet the petty annoyances of every-day life. To one who plans his life in such a way as to depend largely on the casual gifts of strangers, their dilatoriness is often a cause of real anxiety.
Here is a painful incident which happened to him in Philadelphia. He applied to a member ofCongress for a small sum of money. The gentleman was not all that he should have been. “The most striking features of his character were his great fondness for close metaphysical reasoning and a habit of great economy in his domestic concerns, and he had so long practiced upon this system that any variation from it in a person’s conduct or any want of success in a person’s undertakings were, in his view, perfectly wrong. This was the man to whom I applied as my ultimatum.”
We can see at a glance that such a man was likely to be disappointing.
“I described my circumstances to him in as clear terms as possible, and afterwards told him of the request I wished to make. Without giving me an answer either in the affirmative or the negative, he went on with a lengthy discourse to prove that my system of economy had been wrong, drawing a comparison between his prosperity and my adversity, and then pointed out a certain line of conduct that I ought then to take up and observe, and offered to assist me in prosecuting such; but as his plan had many things in it which I could not reconcile my mind to, I took the liberty ofreasoning with him upon a better plan which I had marked out in my own mind.”
Upon this, the congressman became obstinate and would do nothing. His depravity came to Burroughs as a sudden shock.
“When I took a view of the world, of the pomp and splendor which surrounded crowds which perpetually passed before my eyes, to see them roll in affluence and luxury, inhabiting lofty houses, with superb equipages, and feasting upon all the delicacies of life, under these affluent circumstances withholding from me what would never have been missed from their superfluity, this brought to my mind a train of ideas that were desperate and horrid.... My eyes lighted up with indignation, my countenance was fortified with despair, my heart was swollen to that bigness which was almost too large for my breast to contain. Under this situation I arose with a tranquil horror, composedly took my hat, and politely bid Mr. Niles farewell. I believe the desperate emotions of my heart were apparently manifested to his view by my countenance; his apparent immovability relaxed, he put his hand in his pocket, and handed me three dollars. This act of kindnessin a moment melted the ferocious feelings of my heart, all those desperate sensations vanished, and I found myself a man.”
Dear reader, have you not often taken a part in such a scene? When instead of handing out your dollars at once you conditioned them upon adherence to some “line of conduct,”—your conscience accuses you that you might have pointed even to the buck-saw,—do you realize what a pitiful spectacle you made of yourself?
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Stephen Burroughs does not at all fulfill our preconceived notion of an habitual criminal. He did not love evil for its own sake. His crimes were incidental, and he mentions them only as the unfortunate results of circumstances beyond his own control. His life was rather spent in the contemplation of virtue. There were some virtues which came easy to him, and he made the most of them. Like an expert prestidigitator, he kept the attention fixed on what was irrelevant, so that what was really going on passed unnoticed. He had eliminated personal responsibility from his scheme of things, and then proceeded as if nothing were lacking. He had one invariable measure forright and wrong. That was right which ministered to his own peace of body and of mind; that was wrong which did otherwise.
We are coming to see that that imperturbable egotism is the characteristic of the “criminal mind” that is least susceptible to treatment. Sins of passion are often repented of as soon as they are committed. Sins of ignorance are cured by letting in the light. Sins of weakness yield to an improved environment. But what are you going to do with the man who is incapable of seeing that he is in the wrong? Treat him with compassion, and he accepts the kindness as a tribute to his own merits; attempt to punish him, and he is a martyr; reason with him, and his controversial ardor is aroused in defense of his favorite thesis.
Sometimes the lover of humanity, after he has tried everything which he can think of to make an impression on such a character and to bring him to a realizing sense of social responsibility, becomes utterly discouraged. He feels tempted to give up trying any longer. In this he is wrong. He should not allow himself to be discouraged. Something must be done, even though nobody knows what it is.
But if the lover of humanityshouldgive up for a time and take a rest by turning his attention to a more hopeful case, I should not be too hard on him. My Pardoner, I am sure, must have some indulgence for such a weakness.