in one case discovering that of the more important detectives employed by a well-known private Anti-Criminal Society in New York, one had been a street vender of frankfurters (otherwise yclept “hot dogs"), and another the keeper of a bird store, which last perhaps qualified him for the pursuit and capture of human game.  There is a popular fiction that lawyers are shrewd and capable, similar to the prevailing one that detectives are astute and cunning.  But, as the head of one of the biggest agencies in the country remarked to me the other day, when discussing the desirability of retaining local counsel in a distant city:  “You know how hard it is to find a lawyer that isn’t a dead one.”  I feel confident that he did not mean this in the sense that there was no good lawyer except a dead lawyer.  What my detective friend probably had in mind was that it was difficult to find a lawyer who brought to bear on a new problem any originality of thought or action.  It is even harder to find a detective who is not in this sense a dead one.  I have the feeling, being a lawyer myself, that it is harder to find a live detective than a live lawyer.  There are a few of both, however, if you know where to look for them.  But it is easy to fall into the hands of the Philistines.

The fundamental reason why it is so hard to form any just opinion of detectives in general is that (except by their fruits) there is little opportunity to discriminate between the able and the incapable.  Now, the more difficult and complicated his task the less likely is the sleuth (honest or otherwise) to succeed.  The chances are a good deal more than even that he will never solve the mystery for which he is engaged.  Thus at the end of three months you will have only his reports and his bill—­which are poor comfort, to say the least.  And yet he may have really worked eighteen hours a day in your service.  But a dishonest detective has only to disappear (and take his ease for the same period) and send you his reports and his bill—­and you will have only his word for how much work he has done and how much money he has spent.  You are absolutely in his power—­unless you hire another detective to watch him.  Consequently there is no class in the world where the temptation to dishonesty is greater than among detectives.  This, too, is, I fancy, the reason that the evidence of the police detective is received with so much suspicion by jurymen—­they know that the only way for him to retain his position is by making a record and getting convictions, and hence they are always looking for jobs and frame-ups.  If a police detective doesn’t make arrests and send a man to jail every once in a while there is no conclusive way for his superiors to be sure he isn’t loafing.