Vigilante

“ If, on the contrary, I take no kind of notice of the man I fancy guilty, if I do not have him arrested, if I in no way set him on his guard—but if the unfortunate creature is hourly, momentarily, possessed by the suspicion that I know all, that I do not lose sight of him either by night or by day, that he is the object of my indefatigable vigilance—what do you ask will take place under these circumstances? ”

“ Vigilance, readiness and promptness must be our watchwords. Might I ask you to remember my family motto, 'He who guards never sleeps.' Even to-morrow may bring surprises—such stormy weather as we are having seems strangely suitable for covering an attack. ”

“ The sudden sense of exposure after the re-established sense of safety came—not to the coarse organization of a criminal but to the susceptible nerve of a man whose intensest being lay in such mastery and predominance as the conditions of his life had shaped for him. ”

“ Any other robber and murderer, who was known to be on the watch to attack our houses, would be the subject of free discourse: his habits, his haunts, his usual plans, his successful and his baffled assaults in former cases, would be talked over, and thus a salutary fear would be kept alive, influencing us to bolt and bar, and watch and ward with unfailing vigilance, to avert a surprise. ”

“ There is no other way, my child. 'On guard' is the watchword of safety for us all, young and old. But the harm that comes from the outside is of small account compared with the harm that comes from within. ”

“ We then relax our vigor, and resolve no longer to be terrified with crimes at a distance, but rely upon our own constancy, and venture to approach what we resolve never to touch. We thus enter the bowers of ease, and repose in the shades of security. ”

“ When necessity or propriety requires your presence in society, somewhat brilliant, where you must inevitably come in contact with young men whom perhaps you do not know; then you should guard the senses, the mind and the heart with vigilant care; without ceasing on that account to be simple and natural in your whole demeanor; for the most vigilant are neither troubled nor embarrassed on account of their vigilance ”

“ In no other profession is eternal vigilance so surely the price of safety. There is nothing more certain than the fate of the trainer who once relaxes the intensity of his vigilance. Just as surely as he throws himself off guard the animal he is working will get him. ”

“ Guard, on the other hand, against that spirit of continual fretting and moping over fancied ills; that temptation to exaggerate the real or supposed disadvantages of our condition, magnifying the trifling inconveniences of every-day life into enormous evils. ”

“ Individually you want to protect yourself, your life number one -- I am not saying whether you should or should not -- or your little property you have. So, you need the help of the policeman to protect it. ”

“ Divested of all complications, our task is to defend ourselves against the criminal population,—the professional criminals; to guard society against their outrages and depredations in the most prompt, effectual, and enduring fashion we can devise. ”

“ Where may we hope to find the criminal in his most natural state of body and mind—in confinement, a balked and disappointed man, or in the open, faring forth on his plundering errands, seeking whom and what he may devour? ”

“ To think the fellow should be so bold! But out here, with miles upon miles of open, and no police protection, anything is possible. We might all be murdered, and no one be the wiser for days—perhaps weeks. ”

“ A desire to test one’s immunity to detection by mingling with people under the noses of the very police looking for one. Also a feeling of insecurity. Yes, a criminal would feel the suspense of insecurity, and in order to make certain that he was as yet not suspected he might seek out the presence of his pursuers. As for the scene of the crime idea itself, a crime which created a sense of satisfaction in its perpetrator might lure him to enjoy its memory more vividly by a return to the scene. ”

“ All conduct which we class as wrong or criminal is, or we suppose it to be, an attack upon some vital interest of ourselves or of those we care for, (a category which may include the public, or the whole human race) : conduct which, if allowed to be repeated, would destroy or impair the security and comfort of our lives. We are prompted to defend these paramount interests by repelling the attack, and guarding against its renewal; and our earliest experience gives us a feeling, which acts with the rapidity of an instinct, that the most direct and efficacious protection is retaliation. ”

“ There must have been a more than ordinary feeling of awe inspired in the mind of the criminal by ascending heights covered with a multitude, to whose gaze he was exposed, as he drew nigh and looked upon these massive rocks, the seat of divine authority and judgment. ”

“ You don't know how I suffer—of all the terror—all the dread that haunts me night and day. Each ring at the door I fear may be the police—every man who passes the house I fear may be a detective watching. ”

“ It is the common lot from which no one can escape. Now place yourself ‘On guard’; the words explain themselves:—to be on guard, to protect yourself, that is to say to hold yourself equally ready for attack or defence. ”

“ If we were in a house surrounded by a band of robbers, and especially if we knew there were persons in it who held a secret correspondence with them, we should be continually on our guard. Every moment we should be watching, both within and without. ”

“ So the criminal and the savage were to be judged by their deeds, though, through no fault of their own, they were born under circumstances which precluded any glimmer of light to shine in on their darkness. ”

“ Thus fortified, but still fearful of further vacillation on the part of one whose mind, once so strong, seemed now to veer this way or that with every influence brought to bear upon it, what more natural than, given a criminal’s heart, he should think of the one and only way of ending this indecision and making himself safe from this very hour. ”

“ The vigilant hind flies to the labour-giving field; he guides with careful pleasure the earth-piercing plough; in the meantime his ears are delighted by the lightsome band of minstrels, which sweeten the air and the woods with their melodious notes. Thus doth benignant Heaven lighten the heavy pressure of toilful industry! O Creator! all that I see are the effects of thy power! thou art the soul of nature and doth actuate every part! ”

“ Sure—we know the criminal, but to squelch him we have to learn his hangouts, study his modus operandi, and learn how to make his victims secure from his activities. Unless we do that, we can treat individuals from now to infinity and all we’ll have is more cases. ”

“ The cautious, upright, model young man, with a tender regard for a whole skin and a Glorious Future? Or the poor devil who's lost all, and doesn't care a d——n? We tackle the world's dangerous, dirty criminal work and—swank and all—Society don't want to forget it. ”

“ After a few years as a guard, the man is quite as incompetent as are the prisoners—and more so—because the prisoner [26] works and the guard does nothing but guard. ¶ And for the man who works there is a chance; but the man who doesn’t is damned, body and soul. ”

“ Sleeping or waking, man or woman, God or the devil, keep your guard over yourself. Keep your guard over yourself, lest worse befall you. No man is robbed unless he incites a robber. No man is murdered unless he attracts a murderer. ”

“ When the trap is set, however, right in the business center of the town by daylight, what safety have we? Whenever I look into the face of an eager, bright, curious, thoroughly alive boy I feel like shaking every other duty of life and going forth to do battle with the devil for that lad's soul. ”

“ First: the determined and persistent criminal who lives by crime, desires to live by crime, and to whom no other life has any attraction.
Against these men, after being adjudged by a jury to be habitual criminals, we ought to be safeguarded even as we protect ourselves against known madmen. ”

“ If they perceive that you are careful, prepared for any contingency, and always on your guard, they will hesitate about making any attack with ten times your force, especially if your party does not offer sufficient inducement in the matter of plunder. But if they observe the least neglect, or want of precaution on your part, you will be assaulted at the very moment, in the very place, and under circumstances when least expected, with every probability of success in their favor. ”

“ In a highly disciplined body, like the police, excellent rules for hunting criminals, hearing witnesses, and drawing up processes are transmitted traditionally, and fortify the mind of the individual in its reliance on a higher reason. ”

“ In the meantime, be on your guard. You must not play; you will be robbed if you do. Remember, you are surrounded, here, by plausible swindlers and villains of all kinds, who subsist by devouring strangers. ”

“ This consideration should make us careful to look into all our customs and principles, that we may not overlook any one which we may retain for our moral good. And as we learn the lesson of becoming vigilant to discover every good spring, and not to neglect the least of these, however subtle its operation, so we learn the necessity of vigilance to detect every spring or cause, and this even the least, whether in our customs or our principles, if it should in its tendency be promotive of vice. ”

“ Will we have the courage to do what this man hesitated to ask of us—allow ourselves to be bound and when the Monitors question us say that we struggled to defend ourselves but were overpowered by this man's criminal strength? ”

“ Yet I would urge the necessity of impressing them with a knowledge of good and evil, with a detective perception sufficient for your protection against their revengeful instincts, that you may not become the victims of misplaced confidence for the malicious injuries inflicted by our race. ”

“ I sometimes wonder what a man conscious of talent, like the Master Thief, would have thought if the simple criminologists of his day—who knew no subtler remedy than hanging—had confronted him with clinics, and laboratories, and pamphlets on the “disease of crime.” ”

“ I was in a position of great difficulty and responsibility and had to decide on a course of action. What ought I to do? Should I maintain the professional secrecy to which I was tacitly committed, or ought I to convey a hint to the police? ”

“ The born criminal who has a congenital predisposition for crime; the insane criminal suffering from some clinical form of mental alienation, and whom even our existing penal code had to recognize; the habitual criminal, that is to say one who has acquired the habit of crime mainly through the ineffective measures employed by society for the prevention and repression of crime. ”

“ The last class is that of occasional criminals, who without any inborn and active tendency to crime lapse into crime at an early age through the temptation of their personal condition, and of their physical and social environment, and who do not lapse into it, or do not relapse, if these temptations disappear. ”

“ These secure alarmists and dreaming guardians of the state are like superannuated watchmen enclosed in a sentry-box, that never hear ‘when thieves break through and steal.’ They put an oil-skin over their heads, that the dust raised by the passions and interests of the countless, ever-moving multitude, may not annoy or disturb the clearness of their vision. ”

“ The chances of detecting desperate characters, or of tracing them to their haunts, were thus rendered very few, and their offences naturally increased in boldness, as the consciousness of comparative security became the more impressed upon them by daily experience. ”

“ Some times the whole detail for guard—first, second and third relief—would make it a point of honor to sit up the entire night, and watch and listen as though the enemy might pounce on them at any moment, and hurry them off to prison. ”

“ But if you should—and if you should have the misfortune to croak a citizen or a policeman, remember the safest hiding-place is as near the unfortunate victim of your temper as possible. The police will search everywhere, except in the immediate vicinity of the body. ”

“ It is only when the startling head-lines in his favorite morning paper call his attention to some frightful crime committed, that he learns either of its character, or location, or the causes which produced it. ”

“ In plain terms, here, as in other small communities, the condition, and character of individuals, are constantly subjected to the microscopic investigations of the vigilant, and not over scrupulous retailers of flying news, and interesting on dits. ”