A RIGID CASTE

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 117, 20 May 1930, Page 4

A RIGID CASTE

CODE OF UNDERWORLD

Although the underworld is at w.ar with society and declines to recognise its laws, within the limits of its own class the code of the underworld is inexorable. It pays its debts ami grudges to the minute. The "crook,',' like the business man, strengthens his position and credit if ho meets his obligations promptly. Writing in "Harper's5 "Magazine,'' Hi. Jack Black, who for 25 years lived a criminal life in the United. States, discussing codes and laws, states that the "upperworld" knows nothing of caste as compared ■with' the underworld. Honour and opportunity are apportioned on tlie basis of code observance. There is no more caste in tho heart of India than in an American penetentiary. Tho burglar who shoots his partner for having retained .portion of the loot goes up in the social/scale of the underworld. Like a clubman who perjures himself to save a woman's reputation, he has done the right thing intho eyes of his fellows. A thief chooses his working partner far more 'carefully than does a business man his, because his life, and liberty. arc at stake. A business man will carefully eliminate doubtful associates; so will a careful, burglar, only in a different manner. The r case is mentioned; of a safebroaker, who "eliminated"; his partner because he fell asleep while on sentry duty outside a bank. He was applauded by the underworld for hijs promptness.

Turning from this rigid and incxorablo code in which swift death is the only punishment, Mr. Black examines the law and its administration in the United States to-day. Prohibition and motor-cars, ho Bays, have brought hundreds fit thousands of people into conflict with the law and. its tactless and corrupt enforcers, who have never been involved before. Many a mail who has been locked up for the night- forth o violation of a petty ordinance wouldlnot convict a burglar next day if called on a jury. His first glimpse of the legal machine has made a rebel of him./ There* is no longer that sharp demarcation between the "upperworld ■' and the undorworld. The dead lino has been obliterated. Instead there has grown up a nebulous anyinan's land populated by men and women who pay allegiance to no law. Fifty years ago Hope, a bank burglar, took 1,000,000 dollars in bonds from a Boston bank, and could not sell the bonds. To-day ho could easily find a market for them in somo luxuriously furnished office.; The gunman's' pistol to-day is often, only, an echo from, the higher ramparts of graft and corruption. Every unenforcod law brings all laws into contempt. The nonenforcement of tliri 18th Amendment nfFceting the whole- people may destroy a nation's. .allegiance to the whojc legal fabric. . .'