e in
the market poor and desperate criminals eager to commit any crime on the
calendar for a few dollars, is one of the most amazing and incredible
anachronisms of a too self-complaisant Republic.

For some reason not wholly obscure the American people generally have
been kept in such ignorance of the facts of this commerce that few even
dream that it exists. And I am fully conscious of the need for proof in
support of what to many must appear to be unwarranted assertions.
Indeed, it is rare to find anyone who suspects the character of the
private detective. The general impression seems to be that he performs a
very useful and necessary service, that the profession is an honorable
one, and that the mass of detectives have only one ambition in life, and
that is to ferret out the criminal and to bring him to justice. To
denounce detectives as a class appears to most persons as absurdly
unreasonable. To speak of them with contempt is to convey the impression
that detectives stand in the way of some evil schemes of their
detractor. Fiction of a peculiarly American sort has built up among the
people an exalted conception of the sleuth. And it must appear with
rather a shock to those persons who have thus idealized the detective to
learn that thousands of men who have been in the penitentiaries are
constantly in the employ of the detective agencies. In a society which
makes it almost impossible for an ex-convict to earn an honorable living
it is no wonder that many of them grasp eagerly at positions offered
them as "strike-breakers" and as "special officers." The first and most
important thing, then, in this chapter is to prove, with perhaps undue
detail, the ancient saying that "you must be a thief to catch a thief,"
and that possibly for that proverbial reason many private detectives are
schooled and practiced in crime.

So far as I know, the first serious attempt to inform the general public
of the real character of American detectives and to tell of their
extensive traffic in criminality was made by a British detective, who,
after having been stationed in America for several years, was impelled
to make public the alarming conditions which he found. This was Thomas
Beet, the American representative of the famous John Conquest, ex-Chief
Inspector of Scotland Yard, who, in a public statement, declared his
astonishment that "few ... recognize in them [detective agencies] an
evil which is rapidly becoming a vital menace to Am