Book of Remarkable Criminals, A
freebooters such as Jack Sheppard or Charley Peace.
But do not let us flatter ourselves. Do not let us, in all the pomp and circumstance of
stately history, blind ourselves to the fact that the crimes of Frederick, or Napoleon, or their
successors, are in essence no different from those of Sheppard or Peace. We must not
imagine that the bad man who happens to offend against those particular laws which
constitute the criminal code belongs to a peculiar or atavistic type, that he is a man set apart
from the rest of his fellow-men by mental or physical peculiarities. That comforting theory
of the Lombroso school has been exploded, and the ordinary inmates of our prisons shown
to be only in a very slight degree below the average in mental and physical fitness of the
normal man, a difference easily explained by the environment and conditions in which the
ordinary criminal is bred.
A certain English judge, asked as to the general characteristics of the prisoners tried
before him, said: «They are just like other people; in fact, I often think that, but for different
opportunities and other accidents, the prisoner and I might very well be in one another's
places.» «Greed, love of pleasure,» writes a French judge, «lust, idleness, anger, hatred,
revenge, these are the chief causes of crime. These passions and desires are shared by rich
and poor alike, by the educated and uneducated. They are inherent in human nature; the
germ is in every man.»
Convicts represent those wrong-doers who have taken to a particular form of
wrong-doing punishable by law. Of the larger army of bad men they represent a minority,
who have been found out in a peculiarly unsatisfactory kind of misconduct. There are many
men, some lying, unscrupulous, dishonest, others cruel, selfish, vicious, who go through life
without ever doing anything that brings them within the scope of the criminal code, for
whose offences the laws of society provide no punishment. And so it is with some of those
heroes of history who have been made the theme of fine writing by gifted historians.
Mr. Basil Thomson, the present head of the Criminal Investigation Department, has said
recently that a great deal of crime is due to a spirit of «perverse adventure» on the part of the
criminal. The same might be said with equal justice of the exploits of Alexander the Great
and half the monarchs and conquerors of the world, whom we are taught in our childhood's
days to look up to as shining examples of all that a great man should be. Because crimes are
played on a great stage instead of a small, that is no reason why our moral judgment should
be suspended or silenced. Class Machiavelli and Frederick the Great as a couple of rascals
fit to rank with Jonathan Wild, and we are getting nearer a perception of what constitutes the
real criminal. «If,» said Frederick the Great to his minister, Radziwill, «there is anything to
be gained by it, we will be honest; if deception is necessary, let us be cheats.» These are the
very sentiments of Jonathan Wild.
Crime, broadly speaking, is the attempt by fraud or violence to possess oneself of
something belonging to another, and as such the cases of it in history are as clear as those
