whatever is, is right, I assert that whatever has
been, is worthy of a record.

Criminals, of nearly all kinds, are great
practical demonstrators. The burglar shows
us, by experiment, the weakest point in our
dwelling; the fraudulent bankrupt has a use
in pointing out the traps and pitfals of trade;
the forging bank-clerk directs the attention
of men to the blindness of business
professors, and the inutility of so-called business
checks. It is not enough, for the purposes of
perfect education, that the career of such great
teachers should only be stamped upon the
ephemeral pages of the daily and weekly press; the
modern Plutarch should seize them, as they rise
to the surface, and hand them down for imperishable
infamy and fame. The compilations of this
character that have been already attempted, are
too wanting in simplicity, too overloaded with
technical details, to stand as the model
histories of "men who have helped themselves."
We want something more concise, more
biographical, and less apologetic—a Newgate
Calendar, in fact, for the use of schools. If, in
addition to teaching wisdom and caution to
ignorant holders of property, it should teach
crime to a few budding criminals, it would work
out a beneficial mission, notwithstanding.

It seems to be a law of social nature that
crimes shall reach a certain point of enormity,
or excellence, before they are put down by the
aroused energies of their victims, or retire upon
the laurels of satisfied ambition. There was a
time when burglary, both with and without,
violence, was the nightly phantom that haunted
the pillows of all who had anything to lose. It
reached its climax in certain murders committed
some twenty years ago, since which period it
has gradually declined, until it may now be
considered almost a lost art.

The leading delinquency of the present day, is
the robbery of joint-stock companies by
confidential servants. From Walter Watts to William
George Pullinger, it shows every sign of a
vigorous and progressive youth. It may have been
cast a little in the shade by the frauds of certain
merchants, private bankers, and bank directors;
by such leviathan "self-helpers" as Strahan and
Paul, as Davidson and Gordon, as J. Windle
Cole, John Sadleir, Hugh Cameron, and
Humphrey Brown of the Royal British Bank; as
Colonel Waugh, and certain directors of the
Liverpool Borough Bank, the Western Bank of
Scotland, and the Northumberland and Durham
District Bank (amongst whom there is upwards
of two millions of sterling money to be accounted
for); it may have been cast a little in the shade
by such colossal monuments of fraud, but, for
all that, it is well able to hold its own. The
relations of master and servant impose many
difficulties in the way of ambitious forgers. Such
men as Walter Watts, as William James Robson,
as Leopold Redpath, and William George
Pullinger, are the purest examples of "men who
have helped themselves." They started from
very humble positions—were born with no
directorial silver spoons in their mouths—were
quick to discover the weakest point of the
trading system in which they were placed—and,
with one exception, almost ended by becoming
convict millionnaires.

Walter Watts, who stands first in the history
of this class of modern fraud, was a humble check-
clerk in the office of the Globe Insurance
Company, at a salary of two hundred pounds a year,
he was the son of a former honourable but
subordinate clerk in the same establishment, and he
entered upon his duties some time about 1844.
When his frauds were discovered in 1850, he
had succeeded in abstracting about seventy
thousand pounds.

He seems only to have discovered who were
in reality the city "men of straw." They were
not the "stays" of Capel-court, the professional
bill acceptors, or the presentable directors who
gained a precarious livelihood by lending their
titled names to boards of management and
prospectuses; but those singularly deceptive beings,
those wooden guardians of property—those Gogs
and Magogs of trading guilds and associations
—the appointed auditors. He seems early to
have analysed one of these highly curious
productions of the mercantile world, and to have
arrived at an exact estimate of its value. He
found it to be composed of a little fussiness, a
great deal of carelessness and trusting simplicity,
a small portion of hurried and divided attention
—the real business and chief interest lying
in another direction—the usual amount of
cloth and linen that goes to the furnishing of a
responsible-looking City merchant, and a pair of
pinch-nose spectacles of faultless magnifying
power. He observed that this half-human, half-
mechanical being had a settled aversion to move
off its chair, and seldom asked to be allowed to
examine any books or documents that were not
voluntarily placed before it. He observed that
it had an almost superstitious reverence for
figures, if they appeared to balance each other,
and showed no marks of erasure; and that
so long as these emblems or signs of things
were provided in liberal quantities, it never
cared to inquire whether the things themselves
had any substantial existence. He found that
the more entangled these figures, emblems,
or signs, were made, the quicker did the
auditor glide through his duty; and he inferred
from this that human nature was asserting its
influence, and that auditors, like other beings,
unwilling to confess their ignorance, were only
too happy to pass rapidly over complications
that they could not understand. He observed
that in those rare cases where a personal survey
of property was added to an empty audit of
figures, the property was never "over the way,"
or "round the corner," but situated in a distant
part of the country, where it gave an excuse for
a pleasant summer journey, and several days'
festivity at leading hotels: of course at the expense
of the audited company.

This being the result of Walter Watts's
analysis of auditors, it can hardly be wondered at,
that he gained courage to "help himself." He
took thousands after thousands, through the