THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT.
ONE of the ablest moralists we ever knew, a man much sterner to himself than to the world around him, used to say that of all crimes theft was the one which showed the basest heart. It was absolutely selfish, it never excused itself by momentary pas- sion, and it required nine times out of ten the coolest calculation and foresight. There is no provocation to forgery, as there may be to murder; no sudden, overmastering temptation to swindle, as there may be to many other equally evil acts. If that is true, and it is at all events only an exaggerated truth, the state of England is a bad one ; for there cannot be a doubt that the master vice of the middle class, we had almost written their master pas- sion, is thieving. We doubt if a race ever existed among whom pecuniary dishonesty was so general or so deeply affected the structure of society. We consider ourselves a virtuous people, the salt of the earth, and it is not too much to say that at this moment the basis of half our laws, the cause of half or more than half our administrative weakness, the root of three-fourths of our com- mercial difficulties, is the well founded belief that a middle-class Englishman, if he gets anything like a chance, will thieve, wilt expend his brain, his time, and his energies in able efforts to steal money which is not his. What is the dry rot which is destroying English administration, its directness, its simplicity, and its force, but the certainty of the nation that every official, if left to himself and unwatched, will steal? Our Departments are- hampered and shackled with checks till they can hardly work, till individual power, and, therefore, individual genius, are sup- pressed; and the object of all the checks is not to prevent ineffi- ciency—that in England is not a crime, though elsewhere it is among the greatest—or to obviate the chance of oppression, but to prevent direct fraud, assaults of the vulgarest kind upon the national till. We cannot get a Navy, because it is understood that in great establishments like Dockyards, everybody not specially selected for honesty will thieve. Our Army arrange- ments break down incessantly, because contractors, sub-con- tractors, and purveyors generally are supposed to be steeped to' the lips in fraud. There is not a contract given in a Government office in which some one has not secured a "perquisite," or an "advantage," or a " profit," of which he would not, for the world, have his employers formally conscious ; which has not, in fact, given some one, usually a gentleman, the opportunity of thiev- ing. Our whole system of providing for State needs by "open' tender," the stupidest of all conceivable systems—for its theory" is that Jones is Robinson's equal as a manufacturer, which Jones is not—is openly based on the assumption, an assumption perfectly true, that without open tender the department will sell' the contract, will, in fact, steal a large sum out of the National Treasury. Our municipal difficulty is jobbery, that is, theft,—the practice every municipality is certain unless watched to indulge' in, of robbing the citizens to enrich its own members or other- favoured individuals. Even Parliament, even the Cabinet, the flower, or supposed flower, of Parliamentary life, is not beyond the same suspicion. We dare not let the Chiefs of Departments act for themselves in a most important function, that of making the great contracts, choosing, in fact, the agents they think ablest, because we are certain that they will thieve, not indeed for them- selves, but for their party. They will give Jones 1,000,000/. to do what Robinson would do for 750,0001., because Jones votes for them,—that is, they will misappropriate 250,000/. of the money for which they are trustees. Look at our Railway system. It is the greatest and most important business organization ever devised by a nation, and it is breaking down under habitual theft. Directors, animated by the hope of "high quotations for shares,"—that is, of robbing buyers, by selling plated goods for silver,—are declaring in all directions fictitious dividends ; shareholders, animated by the same thirst for plunder, are winking at directors' acts ; contractors are sending in ficti- tious tenders at absurd prices ; lawyers selling the companies, their own clients, to the vermin who eat their capital up; trail& managers making preferential, that is, fraudulent bargains for car- riage; every petty official taking bribes to grant privileges his employers have not sold. Look at our commerce, shattered at this moment by every variety of elaborate and carefully devised plunder ; by Companies whose prospectuses are drawn up with the intention of robbing the ignorant; by Banks which make over shareholders' money to directors ; by manufacturers who will sell shoddy for cloth; by tradesmen who cannot be trusted to avoid actual stealing of pennies from women and children, actual theft of coppers out of a blind man's tray; by false weights and measures. Is there a trade left in which half the trades- men do not live by petty imposition, that is, theft, by selling goods as bargains which are really dear, by enormous adultera- tions—by, in fact, direct robberies of one kind or another? Agri- culture is the most honest ; and ask a really God-fearing dealer of Mark Lane what he thinks of the morals of his trade, whether he could remit his watchfulness for an instant, a watchfulness directed wholly against theft, without being ruined. What is a Bear com- bination to unduly depress the price of goods but an elaborate theft? We cannot, in London, send goods to auction without a certainty of robbery, and we are bitter, all of us, against "knock- outs ;" but who whips the worst form of knock-outs, the circula- tion of rumours intended to make worthless shares seem valuable, so that their holders may plunder the unwary? When Bears run
down shares there is indeed an outcry, but when they run them up, who cares for the plundered public ?
The very dislike of theft, unless committed by violence, seems to have died out of the national mind. City editors denounce search into robberies as a "vindictive proceeding," and advise compromise as the only mode by which anything can be saved. Transactions which are thefts of the most unblushing kind bring to their perpetrators no rebuke, to the sufferers no sympathy. If a man stands on London Bridge selling brass rings for gold, the police ultimately, and as an extreme measure, make him walk on ; but if he robs a thousand widows successfully, by a prospectus deliberately framed to deceive, he goes at once into Parliament. That, we shall be told, has always been so ; but the new evil is, that we are becoming conscious of such things, and still permit them and waste half our national energy in endeavours not to pat them down, but to prevent their occuring on too broad a scale. Every organization we contrive is cumbrous to decrepitude, and the reason is that we dare trust no one ; that we know if the workhouse master is left absolute he will thieve ; if he is only in- spected, the inspector will be "made pleasant;" if the Department is left to look after the inspector, it will sell him immunity, not, indeed, for cash, but for political support. There is not a depart- ment in England in which one-third of the expense might not be saved if men could be assumed to be barely "law-honest," or in which, if we did assume it, the nation would not lose twice as much as it does. There is not a great shop in London whose pro- prietor is not paying a third of his gross aggregate of salaries to persons whose real work is to prevent plunder—a plunder now so dreaded, from its universality, that immense brain has been exerted, and is being exerted, to prevent salesmen ever touching cash at all, to enable children to do that part of the work, as they do in managing lotteries. Every public amusement is becoming an organized arrangement for plunder, every invention of science, from the telegraph to the patent office, is a device to aid the quiet garrotter, every need of humanity is a new help to the dishonest to grow rich. Apart altogether from the injury to the national morals, the waste of all this is becoming prodigious, and will ultimately become unbearable, will either produce a cure, or, by engaging half society to watch the other half, will paralyze it for progress, and even for exertion. At this moment, the country, as a whole, is paying, or rather begin- ning to pay, a sum in one department of work alone which would ruin any other land. We do not hesitate to say that the habitual dishonesty of the English middle class, their habit of thieving whenever they get the chance without actually taking silver spoons, will cost England one-half of the four or five hundred millions it has expended on the Railway system ; that the country is now pay- ing millions a year in the mere effort—a resultless effort—to check official corruption ; that it is losing sums to which even these are trifles, because great improvements cannot be made, for fear of universal plunder. If Parliament but knew where to find decently honest agents it could rebuild our cities, re- arrange our tenures, suppress pauperism by insurances, pay half the National Debt by absorbing the nearly ruined Railway system. What stops, to take a single example, a State management of the Railways, which, by halving the gross cost of communication, might double the national power ? Simply the openly expressed conviction in men's minds that if the State had the Railways, Mr. Gladstone is the only man who could be trusted not to " job " them, that is, to thieve ; and the still frightfuller latent thought that Mr. Gladstone shows weakness,—" purism,"—in being so absolutely beyond suspicion The worst of all this is, that we see no cure for it. Every nation suffers from periods of violence or of licentiousness, or of bigotry, or of apparent weakness, and after a time they pass away, to reappear at more and more distant intervals ; but the habit of theft is in its nature chronic. The desire for " comfort " without work, which is its root, is one which civilization every year intensifies, and there are no barbarians left to bid civilization halt for centuries, that its poisonous vapours may have time to blow off from the face of the world. Punishment does little, as we see, for we already punish offences against property more than offences against life, and the only effect is to change burglary for swindling, robbery for forgery, " dacoity " by professional ruffians for " dacoity " by smooth respectables banded together to rob the ignorant by plausible prospectuses. If Claude Duval were alive now he would not be fool enough to rob coaches. He would get up a tea company. The single remedy, we fear, is national poverty, which, by making all men watchmen, prevents the very inception of crime; and as retribution comes for all things evil, we may rely on it that sooner or later, if this utter demoralization
lasts, poverty will be the national portion. One grand evil of our villages is larceny, an evil so widespread that it seems beyond the correction of those who suffer ; but let a thief go into a poor country—Bengal or Berne—and-try to steal the husks of the rice or the fallen grapes, 'and he will learn once for all that there is one, and a bitter, preventive for habitual theft, the conversion of every man with a shilling into a savage watchdog over his pennies. It is poverty, through loss of trade and over-taxation, which, if this contemptible crime spreads further, will be upon AB ; and when it comes, we warn officials, contractors, directors, and the like, they will have a bad quarter of an hour. When the Convention sent army contractors by the dozen to the guillotine, soldiers' shoes ceased to be made of brown paper.
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