[From an English Magazine]

Chase With an American Detective

Crime is universal. It is the great pioneer and colonist. Cramped in old and dense population, its restless instincts impel it to wild and far off adventure. From the flight of Cain to the exodus of British convicts, the men of sin have been founders of nations. They hew[ed] down the wilderness, throttle[ed] the vipers and slew the savages. Then came better and more timid folks, to establish order and religion; and in the course of time the original knaves are canonized, and sounding degree are traced to them. Just such a transaction is taking place in America, the young Asiatic for the old world’s unworthy and disaffected subjects. The enterprise of the country is a legitimate development of these classes: so likewise in its aggressiveness, its peculation, its recklessness. The new elements is gaining the ascendancy, at least in the older settlements, but a great deal of crime exists, though it is exercised in new and curious modes. Prior to the present civil war, there existed no paper currency in the United States. Thousand of corporations, more or less responsible, issued promises to pay, and the monetary insecurity thus engendered gave license to all descriptions of forging and counterfeiting.

I was sitting in the office of my journal one evening, when Detective Ballagan came in. He had promised to notify me of the first good “case” of which he might have charge, and at the present he was on the track of a notorious offender by the name of Jules Ingraham, a native of Martinique. This man had been chief clerk in the largest produce house of the West India Islands, where he had swindled to the amount of fifty thousand dollars, and had escaped to New York. He had brought with him blank bill heads and drafts of every business firm in the tropics, and had deposited these at a hotel on the quay. After a year of prodigious success,… Read More