them when assigned to duties, as they
frequently are, involving outlay. The general truth is that these
agencies, being conducted for the avowed purpose of making money, get as
much as possible for doing work, and pay as little as possible for having
it done. In their general business of espionage they may make perhaps
only a moderate profit on each affair they take in hand; but in the more
delicate branches of compounding felonies and manufacturing witnesses
fancy prices obtain, and the profits are not computable. It is plain,
knowing of these patrons and prices, that reasonable profit attends upon
the practice of the convenient science of getting without giving, which,
notwithstanding its prosperity and antiquity, is yet an infant in the
perfection it has attained. Awkward, flimsy, transparent as they ever
were, are yet the tricks and devices of the knaves who never want for a
dollar, never earn an honest one, but never render themselves amenable to
any statute 'in such case made and provided.' To say that the
master-workmen in roguery who do this sort of thing are awkward and
transparent seems to involve a paradox; but whoever so believes has not
been fully informed as to the amazing gullibility of mankind. The
average man of business now, as always before, seems to live only to be
swindled by the same specious artifices that gulled his ancestors, and
which will answer to pluck him again almost before the smart of his first
depletion has ceased. Only by a thorough knowledge of this singular
adaptation of the masses to the purposes of the birds of prey, can we
intelligently account for the vast bevies of the latter which exist, and
are outwardly so sleek as to give evidence of a prosperous condition.
When we know that the 'pocket-book dropper' yet decoys the money even of
the city-bred by his stale device; that the 'gift-enterprises,'
'envelope-game,' and similar thread-bare tricks yet serve to attain the
ends of the sharpers, although the public has been warned scores and
scores of times through the public press, and the swindlers thoroughly
exposed, so that the veriest fool can understand the deception, we need
not be amazed at the success which attends the practice of these arts.
The truth is, that a large proportion of the victims are perfectly aware
that fleecing is intended when they flutter round the bait of the rogues;
but they are allured by the glitter of sudden fortune which it offers,
and bite eagerly