There are professional criminals of a different grade, like the forger
and the confidence man. Both of these have generally had some education
and a fair degree of intelligence, and have had some advantages in life.
The forger, as a rule, is a bookkeeper or an accountant who grows expert
with the pen. He works for a small salary and sees nothing better. He
grows familiar with signatures. Sometimes he is a clerk in a bank and
has the opportunity to study signatures; he begins to imitate them,
often with no thought of forging paper. He does it because it is an art
and probably the only thing he can do well. Perhaps some hard luck or an
unfortunate venture on the Board of Trade, or in a faro bank, makes him
write a check or note. He easily convinces himself that he is not
getting the salary he earns and that less worthy men prosper while he is
poor. Then too his business calls for better clothes and better
surroundings than those of the workingman, and gives him many glimpses
of easy lives. For a time he may escape. If the amount is not too large
it is often passed by without an effort to detect. Sometimes it escapes
notice altogether. Some business men write so many checks that they take
no pains at the end of the month to figure up their account and examine
every check, and never notice it unless the balance given by the bank is
so far out of the way that it attracts attention. After a forger grows
to be an expert, he can move from town to town. If he is taken and put
in prison and finally released, he is hard to cure. Forgery is too easy
and he knows of no other trade so good. A large percentage of these men
never would have forged, had their wages been higher. Many others are
the victims of the get-rich-quick disease; they haunt the gambling
houses, brokers' offices and the like. Often when they begin they expect
to make the check good; generally, they would have made good if the
right card had only turned up in the faro bank, or the right quotation
on the stock exchange.