Excerpt from The Metaphysical Magazine, Vol. 21: Punishment or Reform; May, 1907
Take the cases of two men, each of whom has been convicted of forgery. One is a laboring man of but small intellectual grasp and little education. Owing to long sickness of members of his family and the death of one of them he has been reduced to dire straits. His money and his credit are both exhausted; his surviving sick child needs medicine, nourishing food and care; the funeral of the deceased one must be paid for. His needs, his suffering, his dumb despair are such that none who have not drunk of the bitter cup of poverty can consciously appreciate. Leaving his home one morning with all these troubles weighing like lead on heart and mind, on his way to work he found a pocketbook containing some valueless papers and a check for a small amount (In the real case I quote it was $16.) All through the hours of the forenoons labor he was thinking of how much that sum would mean, not to himself, for he would not have used one penny of it for self-gratification, but for those at home. At noon he wrote the indorsement of the payee upon that check and cashed it This was of course foolish, dishonest, criminal; but let us pray that we may never, under like conditions, be subjected to like temptation. So clumsy was the forgery, so foolish the whole transaction, that ere he left his work that afternoon he was arrested and imprisoned. Brought to trial he pleaded in forma pauperis, and the court appointed a young lawyer to defend him. He was convicted as a matter of course, as the owner of the check, who had lost nothing by the transaction as the proceeds had been returned to him, was obliged, very unwillingly, to testify that he had not indorsed it. The prisoner was sentenced to three years in the penitentiary. As this is an illustration of a condition, not a story, I leave the results of this sentence upon the distressed family of this man to the imagination of the reader.
The other case is that of a man whose liberal income was amply sufficient to assure to himself and family a comfortable and rather luxurious existence. For the indulgence of depraved and vicious tastes and habits this man desired to have more money, and in order to secure it he forged warrants to the amount of several thousand dollars.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Metaphysical Magazine, Vol. 21 (Charles Edward Cumming)