BLACKMAIL.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18428, 8 July 1925, Page 14

BLACKMAIL.

THE WORD AND THE THING. An interested foreigner, trying to glean from tbe daily Press some ideaof "England,' its people, polity, and pursuits," might be excused for coming to the conclusion that one of the chief interests of the more leisured class is blackmail, active or passive (writes Professor Ernest Weekly, in the London "Observer"). The -word and the thing are now so common that it is difficult to realise that the practice, I at any rate in its most efficient form, | is essentially a contemporary featnro of social progress. The Oxford Dictionary's first quotation for "blackmail" in a sense approaching that now current is from Macaulay's essay on Clive. The definition runs, l "any payment extorted by intimidation or pressure, or levied by unprincipled officials, critics, journalists, etc., upon those whom they have it in their power to help or injure." If this definition were.' to be rewritten, in the light of the latest research, I imagine that the "officials, critics, and journalists" would' take second; place, and the "etc." would come into their own. The trifling backsheesn witn wiuch the nineteenth century blackmailer was satisfied would-hardly pay the postal expenses of a modern operator. fcib far as the Oxford Dictionary records go, it would seem that the practice of extorting money by the threat of damaging publicity was first developed in the United States. At any rate, the earliest quotation for the word "blackmailer" is from the New York "Herald" (1868). English travel-' lers in the past have mostly used it in reference to the tribute levied by Arab sheiks and other Eastern potentates for permission to pass, .through their territory unharmed. There 13 a very considerable gap between the contemporary application of the word and its earliest use as a respectable iegal term. Like so much of our administrative vocabulary, "mail" is a Viking; word. It is found 'in various forms in all the Teutonic languages, with the general idea of mee'ting. speech, agreement, contract, etc., and is copiously recorded in English form from the". eleventh century onward in the sense of payment, tax, rent. But it has always been especially a North Country word, preserving its proper sense only in Scotland, where a rent-paving tenant is still in some districts a "mailer." Thero are also compounds descriptive of the type ot tenancy, -such as "grass-mail" and "land-mail." or of the method of paylent, such as "silver-mail" and "blackail " "We do not know the original leaning of the latter. Camden con•ctured that the "black" referred m opper coin, and the fact that we find white-rent" used as equivalent to silver-mail" lends some plausibility r.o this view. But the accepted legal :cnso of "blackmail" was, according to the Oxford Dictionary, "rent reserved .1 labour, produce, etc., «»-s distinguished from 'white-rents,' which were reserved in 'white'money' or silver." Such dues usually come to bo regarded as oppressive and extortionate, and the forbidding adjective "black" would not help to make the word popular. So it was adopted, no doubt by the victims, as the name for the tribute exacted from farmers and landholders by the freebooters of the Border and tiie Highland chiefs neighbouring on the Lowlands. The system -was, compared with modern blackmailing, quite straight business. THe bandit undertook, in consideration of an annual contribution, to guarantee the contributor ! against the exactions of all other bandits. If he failed to do so, he felt j as humiliated as the Arab chief who allows the travellers who have paid him for safe-conduct to be massacred by marauders trespassing on his territory. The contemporary currency of the word remains a problem. As a Highland industry blackmail diect out after the Forty-rive, and in England much earlier. Rose Bradwardine informed AVaverley that riot the boldest 'Highland cateran would "steal a hoof from anyone that pays blackmail to Vich lan Vohr," and. in reply to his puzzled "And what is blackmail?" gave him tiie classic definition :;f the term, liut Scott, writing in 1829, found it necessary to add'one of his historical notes on tbe subject, it is possible that therevival of this archaic word was due, like that of so many others, to the popularity of the "Waverley Novels. An alternative explanation is that the early Scottish adventurers who penetrated deeply into Asia, applied their homegrown description to the exactions of

■the chiefs through whose territory they passed and of the officials they were obliged to bribe, and thus preserved and handed on as a traveller's term a word which' would have become obsolete.