It is significant that the general plan of this kind of tale has never once been changed to any degree. The writers, one and all, have labored, often with great genius, to construct problems in crime, where by acute deduction the criminal and his methods were determined; or, reversing it, they have sought to plan the crime so cunningly as to effectually conceal the criminal and his methods. The intent has always been to baffle the trailer, and when the identity of the criminal was finally revealed, the story ended. The high ground of the field of crime has not been explored; it has not even been entered. The book-stalls have been filled to weariness with tales based upon plans whereby the _detective_, or _ferreting_ power of the State might be baffled. But, prodigious marvel! no writer has attempted to construct tales based upon plans whereby the _punishing_ power of the State might be baffled. The distinction, if one pauses for a moment to consider it, is striking. It is possible, even easy, deliberately to plan crimes so that the criminal agent and the criminal agency cannot be detected. Is it possible to plan and execute wrongs in such a manner that they will have all the effect and all the resulting profit of desperate crimes and yet not be crimes before the law? There is, perhaps, nothing of which the layman is so grossly ignorant as of the law. He has grown to depend upon what he is pleased to call common sense. Indeed his refrain, "The law is common sense," has at times been echoed by the judiciary. There was never a graver error. The common sense of the common man is at best a poor guide to the criminal law. It is no guide at all to the civil law. There is here no legal heresy. Lord Coke, in the seventeenth century, declared that the law was not the natural reason of man, and that men could not, out of their common reason, make such laws as the laws of England were. The laws have not grown simpler, surely, and if they could not be constructed by the common reason of men, they could certainly not be determined by it. That men have but indistinct ideas of the law is to be regretted and deplored. For their protection they should know it; and there is need of this protection. The voices of all men were not joined in the first great cry for law and order, nor are they all joined now. The hands of a part of mankind have ever been set against their fellows; for what great reason no man can tell. Maybe the Potter marred some, and certainly evil Circumstance marred some. But, by good hap, industry has always, and intelligence has usually, been on the law's side. Ofttimes, however, the Ishmælites raise up a genius and he, spying deep, sees the weak places in the law and the open holes in it, and forces through, to the great hurt of his fellows. And men standing in the market-places marvel.