THE teller of strange tales is not the least among benefactors of men. His cup of Lethe is welcome at times even to the strongest, when the tÆdium vito of the commonplace is in its meridian. To the aching victim of evil fortune, it is ofttimes the divine anaesthetic.

To-day a bitter critic calls down to the storyteller, bidding him turn out with the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, for the reason that there is no new thing, and the pieces with which he seeks to build are ancient and well worn. "At best," he cries, "the great one among you can produce but combinations of the old, some quaint, some monstrous, and all weary." But the writer does not turn out, and the world swings merrily on.

Perhaps the critic forgets that if things are old, men are new; that while the grain field stands fast, the waves passing over it are not one like the other. The new child is the best answer.

The reader is a clever tyrant. He demands something more than people of mist. There must be tendons in the ghost hand, and hard bones in the phantom, else he feels that he has been cheated.

Perhaps, of all things, the human mind loves best the problem. Not the problem of the abacus, but the problem of the chess-board when the pieces are living; the problem with passion and peril in it; with the fresh air of the hills and the salt breath of the sea. It propounds this riddle to the writer: Create mind-children, O Magician, with red blood in their faces, who, by power inherited from you, are enabled to secure the fruits of drudgery, without the drudgery. Nor must the genius of Circumstance help. Make them do what we cannot do, good Magician, but make them of clay as we are. We know all the old methods so well, and we are weary of them. Give us new ones.

Exacting is this taskmaster. It demands that the problem builder cunningly join together the Fancy and the Fact, and thereby enchant and bewilder, but not deceive. It demands all the mighty motives of life in the problem. Thus it happens that the toiler has tramped and retramped the field of crime. Poe and the French writers constructed masterpieces in the early day. Later came the flood of "Detective Stories" until the stomach of the reader failed. Yesterday, Mr. Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, and the public pricked up its ears and listened with interest.

It is significant that the general plan of this kind of tale has never once been changed to any degree. The writers, one and all, have labored, often with great genius, to construct problems in crime, where by acute deduction the criminal and his methods were determined; or, reversing it, they have sought to plan the crime so cunningly as to effectually conceal the criminal and his methods. The intent has always been to baffle the trailer, and when the identity of the criminal was finally revealed, the story ended.

The high ground of the field of crime has not been explored; it has not even been entered. The book-stalls have been filled to weariness with tales based upon plans whereby the detective, or ferreting power of the State might be baffled. But, prodigious marvel! no writer has attempted to construct tales based upon plans whereby the punishing power of the State might be baffled.

The distinction, if one pauses for a moment to consider it, is striking. It is possible, even easy, deliberately to plan crimes so that the criminal agent and the criminal agency cannot be detected. Is it possible to plan and execute wrongs in such a manner that they will have all the effect and all the resulting profit of desperate crimes and yet not be crimes before the law?

There is, perhaps, nothing of which the layman is so grossly ignorant as of the law. He has grown to depend upon what he is pleased to call common sense. Indeed his refrain, "The law is common sense," has at times been echoed by the judiciary. There was never a graver error. The common sense of the common man is at best a poor guide to the criminal law. It is no guide at all to the civil law.

There is here no legal heresy. Lord Coke, in the seventeenth century, declared that the law was not the natural reason of man, and that men could not, out of their common reason, make such laws as the laws of England were. The laws have not grown simpler, surely, and if they could not be constructed by the common reason of men, they could certainly not be determined by it. That men have but indistinct ideas of the law is to be regretted and deplored. For their protection they should know it; and there is need of this protection. The voices of all men were not joined in the first great cry for law and order, nor are they all joined now. The hands of a part of mankind have ever been set against their fellows; for what great reason no man can tell. Maybe the Potter marred some, and certainly evil Circumstance marred some. But, by good hap, industry has always, and intelligence has usually, been on the law's side. Ofttimes, however, the IshmÆlites raise up a genius and he, spying deep, sees the weak places in the law and the open holes in it, and forces through, to the great hurt of his fellows. And men standing in the market-places marvel.

We are prone to forget that the law is no perfect structure, that it is simply the result of human labor and human genius, and that whatever laws human ingenuity can create for the protection of men, those same laws human ingenuity can evade. The Spirit of Evil is no dwarf; he has developed equally with the Spirit of Good.

All wrongs are not crimes. Indeed only those wrongs are crimes in which certain technical elements are present. The law provides a Procrustean standard for all crimes. Thus a wrong, to become criminal, must fit exactly into the measure laid down by the law, else it is no crime; if it varies never so little from the legal measure, the law must, and will, refuse to regard it as criminal, no matter how injurious a wrong it may be. There is no measure of morality, or equity, or common right that can be applied to the individual case. The gauge of the law is iron-bound. The wrong measured by this gauge is either a crime or it is not. There is no middle ground.

Hence is it, that if one knows well the technicalities of the law, one may commit horrible wrongs that will yield all the gain and all the resulting effect of the highest crimes, and yet the wrongs perpetrated will constitute no one of the crimes described by the law. Thus the highest crimes, even murder, may be committed in such manner that although the criminal is known and the law holds him in custody, yet it cannot punish him. So it happens that in this year of our Lord of the nineteenth century, the skilful attorney marvels at the stupidity of the rogue who, committing crimes by the ordinary methods, subjects himself to unnecessary peril, when the result which he seeks can easily be attained by other methods, equally expeditious and without danger of liability in any criminal tribunal This is the field into which the author has ventured, and he believes it to be new and full of interest.

In order to develop these legal problems the author appreciated the need for a central figure. This central figure must of necessity be a lawyer of shrewdness and ability. Here a grave difficulty presented itself. No attorney, unless he were a superlative knave, could be presumed to suggest the committing of wrongs entailing grievous injury upon innocent men. On the other hand, no knave vicious enough to resort to such wrongs could be presumed to have learning enough to plan them, else he would not be driven to such straits. Hence the necessity for a character who should be without moral sense and yet should possess all the requisite legal acumen. Such a character is Randolph Mason, and while he may seem strange he is not impossible.

That great shocks and dread maladies may lop off a limb of the human mind and leave the other portions perfect, nay, may even wrench the human soul into one narrow groove, is the common lesson of the clinic and the mad-house. An intellect, keen, powerful, and yet devoid of any sense of moral obligation, would be no passing wonder to the skilled physician; for no one knows better than he that often in the house of the soul there are great chambers locked and barred and whole passages sealed up in the dark. Nor do men marvel that great minds concentrated on some mighty labor grow utterly oblivious to human relations and see and care for naught save the result which they are seeking. The chemist forgets that the diamond is precious, and burns it; the surgeon forgets that his patient is living and that the knife hurts as it cuts. Might not the great lawyer, striving tirelessly with the problems of men, come at last to see only the problem, with the people in it as pieces on a chess-board?

It may be objected that the writer has prepared here a text-book for the shrewd knave. To this it is answered that, if he instructs the enemies, he also warns the friends of law and order; and that Evil has never yet been stronger because the sun shone on it.

It should not be forgotten that this book deals with the law as it is and with no fanciful interpretation of it. The colors are woven into a gray warp of ancient and well settled legal principles, obtaining with full virtue in almost every state. The formula for every wrong in this book is as practical as the plan of an architect and may be played out by any skilful villain. Nor should it be presumed that the instances dealt with are exhaustive. The writer has presented but a few of the simpler and more conspicuous; there is, in truth, many another. Indeed the wonder grows upon him that the thief should stay up at night to steal.

Wheeling, W. Va., June 1, 1896.