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Only the fences, profiteers, confidence men, defrauders, swindlers, most of the bankrupts and some of the pimps, remained indifferent. In the course of the year, Kuno Kohn had made friends particularly with the youthful burglar Benjamin. The two often sat for hours together. If the guards looked the other way... Benjamin spoke enthusiastically to the humpback. Of sun. And freedom.
Other bafflements tormented him; here alone stood the visible, beautiful emblem of absolute discomfiture. For here was the silent, lifted hand which forbade him pursue his defrauders. Seven times he had halted before them disarmed and dumb, and turned away with a chagrin that burnt his brain and gnawed his very bones.
If there were no question of morals involved, plagiarism is nevertheless most perilous. There are a great many constables out for the arrest of such defrauders. That stolen paragraph that you think will never be recognized has been committed to memory by that old lady with green goggles in the front pew.
Was any criminal action ever instituted against these rich defrauders? None of which there is any record. Not a publicist, editor, preacher was there who did not know either generally or specifically of these great frauds in taxation. Some of them might protest in a half-hearted, insincere or meaningless way.
The suit was a purely civil one; influential defrauders were not inconvenienced by Government with criminal actions and the prospect of prison lodging and fare; this punishment was reserved exclusively for petty offenders outside of the charmed circle.
It professes and is not far from accomplishing the profession to give biographical sketches of notorious public characters, including "murderers, traitors, pirates, mutineers, incendiaries, defrauders, rioters, sharpers, highwaymen, footpads, pickpockets, swindlers, housebreakers, coiners, receivers, extortioners, and other noted persons who have suffered the sentence of the law for criminal offences."
There were laws against defrauders of the revenue; laws against debasing the coin; laws against sacrilege; laws against corrupt State contracts; laws against bribery at elections. Finally, there was a law, carefully framed, De repetundis, to exact retribution from proconsuls or propraetors of the type of Verres who had plundered the provinces.
This prudent consideration, however, did not save him. Such tolerance towards the unfit, the reluctance to strike the individual in the interests of the community, was but a special, and not very flagrant, instance of the sympathy evoked for much worse offenders murderers, and defrauders in civil life.
Then, in these beautiful times, smuggling by night was exquisite; a trade of solitude and of meditation when the mind of the naive and very pardonable defrauders was elevated unconsciously in the contemplation of the sky and of the darkness animated by stars as it happens to the mind of the sea folk watching, on the nocturnal march of vessels, and as it happened formerly to the mind of the shepherds in antique Chaldea.
I will even say that, in my own opinion, an officer of customs, clever and bold, a customs officer like your father, for example, is as worthy as any of us!" After this, the hostess having come to say that it was time to put out the lamp the last lamp still lit in the village they go away, the old defrauders.
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