There are few subjects more curious than the relations between detective police-officers and those whom, for want of a better word we may perhaps call their prey ; but there is something even more curious in the contrast between the opinions entertained about both classes by the lower section of London society and by that upper portion which takes so many of its ideas from literature. The crowd which daily surrounds Sir James Ingham's police court regularly receives with cheers a series of convicts in their prison dress who admit themselves to have been guilty of one of tho most impudent of modern frauds, and the same mob is said to be kept with difficulty from roughly handling four as yet unconvicted detectives and a solicitor associated with them. But everybody who reads a novel is aware that until the other day it was difficult to get to the end of the third volume without coming upon a detective officer who walked among criminals like the lady among Comus and his crew — chaining them, however, to their seat instead of being chained himself. The literary apotheosis of the detective appears to have been of French origin. A great French novelist, who had employed supernatural agency with great effect in his earlier books, found afterwards a substitute for it in the administration of French justice and in the secrets of Parisian medicine. In several of Balzac's romances the police agent or the doctor is as much a wizard as ever was Michael Scott. The forces by which he acts are absolutely mysterious and inscrutable. Other French writers since Balzac have so worn threadbare the subject of police investigation that its interest is nearly gone ; but we have seen it remarked by French writers of another stamp that Balzac and Gaboriau have caused sensible mischief to the community by encouraging the tyranny of French inquisitorial procedure before trial. Dickens is the undoubted parent of the fictitious English detective characterised by a number of homely virtues and a never failing sagacity, but he probably got the hint from France. A crowd of copyists have vulgarised the type, and one eminent writer tried to reverse current notions by creating a detective who was positively stupid, but on the whole nobody till the other day thought it was possible to bring a charge against the morality or incorruptibility of detective policemen. It would be very unjust to the officers whose case is under investigation to assert that any such charge has as yet been established, but much which is undisputed in the evidence shows that the literary conception of detectives and of their relations with criminals has been singularly wide of the truth.
The view taken of policemen, and especially of detective policemen, by classes which have not yet risen to the perusal of Dickens is manifestly of a wholly different kind from that of the novelist. Probably we should pretty accurately express the fact by saying that these classes look upon a policeman much as those socially above them look upon an executioner, A moment's thought will show that this distaste for policemen is extremely natural. A poor man may be perfectly honest, but he necessarily lives in much closer contact with dishonesty than a rich man. If a scandal arises in a family belonging to the class conventionally known as respectable, it is very rarely through a breach of the sixth or the eighth commandment. But it must constantly, or not unfrequently, happen to a working man that somebody nearly connected with him gets into " trouble." Thus the intervention of the law, to investigate, try, and punish theft for violence seems to him an evil, though it be an intelligible and necessary evil. It may be true that, as some political writers have contended, the poor man receives a greater amount of protection from the law than the rich; but the arguments by which the conclusion is reached are not by any means obvious, and certainly not obvious enough to make the agents of the law a popular class of men. Possibly, too, that ready obligingness which has made the English policeman the admiration of travelling foreigners fails him not a little in poor neighbourhoods, where the drunken rowdy with a bludgeon is apt to lie in wait for him. However that may be, if the ordinary policeman (as Colonel Henderson's Report broadly hints) is not by any means a popular personage among the lower class of Londoners, the detective police man may well be believed to have their strong detestation. Not only does he seem an adversary, but an adversary who never fights fairly. All the labyrinthine contrivances and ingenious disguises which charm the novel-reader must seem to the criminal classes like explosive bullets in war, and to those necessarily in some degree of contact with criminals like so much foul play. In higher spheres of society one of the most heinous of offences is to cheat at cards ; but there are men who have never been forgiven for successfully worming themselves into the confidence of the person they wished to expose. In point of fact the agent of justice is always unpopular when the justice is of such a kind that we or our associates may conceivably come into contact with it; and when this agent works by means which (but for their object) would be gross deceptions, he is quite sure to be heartily hated. The true reason why the French agent de surete and the English detective have at some time or other interested us so profoundly in books is that their proceedings are so far removed from us. But to the class which furnishes the crowd that surrounds the police court the frauds of Kurr and Benson are rather brilliant samples of the offences into which a friend or a connection may be betrayed. These frauds like all others of similar distinction, were traced to their authors by the wiles of detective policemen ; and now a gallant attempt is being made to get the biter bit.
Besides suggesting these contradictions of opinion in that miscellaneous body called the British public, the inquiry before Sir James Ingham throws a great deal of light on some portions of British character not always understood. Have any of us quite realized the depth of the interest which (as these proceedings show) great multitudes of Englishmen take in gambling and betting ? It would be foolish to suppose that the taste is confined to the parts of English society which had their weaknesses exposed in the police-court. Common rumor must be unusually mendacious if the loss or gain of great sums on games of chance, or of mixed chance and skill, is rarer than it was among men who no doubt can on the whole afford to lose their money ; in fact, there is no reasonable doubt that Englishmen gamble very nearly as much as they ever did, though there is a larger element of skill in the games on which they stake their ventures. But comparatively few of us have been aware how widely the passion for gambling spreads among the classes on whose tastes and sympathies a whole flood of light has been thrown by the case of the detectives. It would seem as if the great mass of Englishmen below the decorous dissenting portion of the middle class cared for nothing so heartily as a race and a bet. One cannot help asking oneself what has been the real effect on national morality of the series of enactments by which the Legislature, apparently in all honesty, has aimed at suppressing what it must think a great public and private vice. So far as the upper classes are concerned, the merely mechanical apparatus of gambling has ceased to exist, or, if it exists, hides in the darkest corners. The rouge-et-noir, roulette, and hazard tables have disappeared ; dice are all but unknown. The public gaming-room, kept for the profit of its owner, has dropped out of English recollection. A gentleman started on the road to ruin must confine him self to his own or his friend's house, or to the club in which he has the interest of a quasi-partner. And he can only lose his money by backing his own or somebody else's skill at cards, or by venturing to have an opinion on the law of heredity as manifested in racehorses, But perhaps he contrives to lose in this way quite as much as his grandfather lost after the fashion of that time. As respects the part of the population which cannot by any straining of language be included in the upper classes, the organization of gambling by betting agencies seems to have been effectually put down or prevented by the law ; and this we suspect to have been the sole clear gain from a long course of legislation. It is rather more difficult for the city clerk or apprentice to lose money than it would be if gambling were legal, and he is now better protected than he once was against the rapacity of persons who,like the convicts just examined, have sharper wits than his. But in one great object, perhaps the greatest of its objects, the law has wholly failed. It has not succeeded, as many penal laws have succeeded, in creating a popular sentiment adverse to the practice, at which it is aimed. The Englishmen of our day strongly reprobate duelling, and their disapproval dates from the time when the law against it was really enforced. But though the whole law against gambling seems to be put in force, neither the British public nor, as would appear, the British, police can be brought to regard it as seriously immoral. — Pall Mall Budget.
Herald (Melbourne, Vic. ), 1877 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article244523168
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