medium of false entries and fictitious claims; he
became the proprietor of two theatres, and lived
an intensely gay life during the hours that
remained to him before ten o'clock in the
morning, and after four o'clock in the afternoon;
his office banking pass-book and his
fire and life loss-book presented a mass of
erasures and alterations, but still he met with
no check or hindrance from the auditing men of
straw. Nor was it through their periodical
vigilance that his frauds were, at last, discovered,
and that he was driven, through a verdict of
ten years' transportation, to hang himself in his
cell.

The fate of Walter Watts, in 1850, was powerless,
so it seems, to deter others from following
in his footsteps, and benefiting by the discoveries
which his keenness and industry had made.
The loss of seventy thousand pounds sterling
by the Globe Insurance Company was also
powerless, so it seems, to improve the character
of auditors, and elevate them into something less
practically worthless than men of straw.

The next fraudulent servant who "helped
himself" to any great extent, was William James
Robson, the forger of Crystal Palace shares.
His operations began in 1853—within three
years of the death of Walter Watts—and ended
in 1856. His private life was very similar to
that of the master he copied, although he
only succeeded in appropriating about thirty
thousand pounds. This was done by taking
advantage of his position in the transfer office of
the Crystal Palace Company, to create shares
and sell them in the market: relying upon the
apathy of the purchasers—a class from whom
auditors are drawn. His calculations—or rather
Walter Watts's calculations—were perfectly
sound, and for two years and more these strips
of paper were frequently bought and sold,
without any purchaser having the prudence to
walk from the Stock Exchange to the transfer
office on the City side of London-bridge, where
he might easily have discovered the fraud.
The amount that Robson secured was small
compared with Watts's abstractions, but it was
large when allowance is made for the inferior
materials with which he had to work. If his
lot had fallen upon happier ground—upon the
banking balances of rich and thriving corporations
—he might have eclipsed his predecessor in
the loftiness and daring of his flight. As it was,
he might have said, in imitation of Jean Paul
Richter, "I have made the most of the stuff that
was given me: no man can do more." He was
transported for twenty years.

Some time before William James Robson rose
and fell, and very shortly after the death of
Walter Watts, a greater man than either in this
peculiar aristocracy of fraud, must have been
already laying his plans. Leopold Redpath, a
clerk in the share office of the Great Northern
Railway, had also learnt the empty character of
auditors, and the hollowness of so-called
business checks. In 1851 or 1852 he must have
begun to issue forged shares. From that period
until 1856, his career was one of clerkly
exactitude and fraudulent success; his life was
one of mingled luxury and philanthropy; and
when he was arrested, to be afterwards
transported for life, he had obtained from the sale
of his forged shares, about two hundred and forty
thousand pounds. His trial took place on the
15th of January, 1857, hardly five months after
the following auditorial certificate of the
company's business regularity, had been issued to
the confiding shareholders:

"Accountant's Department, Aug. 7, 1856.
"To the Chairman and Directors of the Great
            Northern Railway Company.
"Gentlemen,—The accounts and books in every
department continue to be so satisfactorily kept, that
we have simply to express our entire approval of
them, and to present them to you for the information
of the shareholders, with our usual certificate of
correctness.

             " We have the honour, &c.,
                  (Signed)
                       "JOHN CHAPMAN
                                                      } Auditors"
                        "J.CATTLEY

At this period, Leopold Redpath must have
received the bulk of his enormous prize.

The notoriety of this case, the extent of
fraud it disclosed, and the complete verification
it presented of Walter Watts's secret analysis
of auditors, were generally considered sufficient
to check all further development of this class of
crime. The world was disposed to look upon
Leopold Redpath as one who had reached the
top of the criminal tree; as the most eminent
among all modern men of this kind who had
"helped themselves." It was widely understood
that all joint-stock enterprises had undergone
a searching examination and cleaning out;
that insurance offices, railways, and especially
banks, were secured, for ever, from any fraudulent
worms in the bud, and were now to be
happy in having auditors who were something
more than men of straw. Failures might come
(as come they did), and the country might pass
through the financial agony of a commercial
crisis (as it did at the close of 1857), but it was
felt that forging servants of joint-stock companies
had had their day, and that, after all, the wisdom
taught us by their dishonesty was not so dearly
bought.

How little this sense of security was based
upon actual knowledge, has been shown, within
a few weeks, by William George Pullinger, the
last and greatest follower of Walter Watts.
This late chief cashier of the Union Bank of
London pleaded guilty to a charge of having
stolen two hundred and sixty-three thousand and
seventy pounds eight shillings and tenpence, by
means of a false pass-book, and tampering with
a Bank of England account. He entered the
bank, as an ordinary clerk, in 1839, and he
became chief cashier about 1855. Five years
after Watts committed suicide, one year
before Robson was discovered and transported,
two years before a similar punishment was
awarded to Redpath, this fraudulent bank
servant must have begun to abstract the bank
funds. On the very day when the trial of the