Criminals when not actually plying their vocation generally go to large cities, for two reasons; first, to spend their ill-gotten gains in pleasure, and secondly, that as a rule cities are the best hiding-places. For the same reason that causes desperate criminals to hide in the larger cities, all persons who have in their lives any features which they wish to conceal, find the cities preferable places of residence. One man of large property and some national prominence died a few years ago in the city in which he had been doing business for thirty years, and after he died it was discovered that he had nine wives living, from no one of whom had he ever separated through the formality of a divorce. Each of these nine women imagined herself his one and only wife. Any man, who has formed an undesirable alliance in business or in love or otherwise, knows that with very little trouble he can hide all traces of his mischief by going to a large city to live. An inevitable consequence is that the number of able but undesirable characters who exist in the cities, having left other places for the good of those who are left behind, have a depressing influence upon the moral atmosphere of other classes of residents. Men meet men whom they never saw before, and whom they are obliged to judge entirely by appearance and professions. It is the same in business as it is in society. Not a year passes in which some adventurer does not impose himself for a time upon the best society of New York and of other cities. And although it would seem that his antecedents might easily be discovered upon the basis of such information as he may feel obliged to give about himself, the fact remains that society is “taken in” quite as often as banks and business men and private individuals. Several years ago a notorious scamp, who had been in several State-prisons, came to New York, organized a business firm, took a large store, was discovered in the course of time to be carrying on operations closely akin to stealing, and when his record was thoroughly searched and sifted by the police, it was discovered that his victims were principally the largest wholesale establishments in the city of New York--establishments which employed a number of men for the sole purpose of investigating the character and resources of any one applying to them for credit or for any business relations beyond ordinary purchases for cash.