[A Letter]
3.
[A LETTER]13
Gentlemen! [XIII 467]
I have gotten into a very awkward situation, and I hope you will be kind enough to help me out of it. As you know, I was deeply disturbed by a story reported in the Saturday issue of your paper14 about a criminal interrogation of court bailiffs, and I wrote the editor of the Berlingske Tidende “a letter” that was printed there in the Sunday issue.15 In that letter, I used your comments in the first instance as pertinent to another story about a billfold regarded as lost but later found in the lining of the loser’s coat, a story you were so kind as to consider in your Monday paper,16 accompanied by several remarks, some of which, it is true, were very flattering to me, but which, on the other hand, made me fear for myself. From these remarks I learned something that I must not have understood clearly when I wrote my letter, that I had accused the police of extreme irresponsibility when I related that the criminal inquiry into the presumed theft was instituted without having made a search of Mr. Poulsen’s servant’s coat, in whose pocket the aforementioned billfold had been put. Since I am somewhat loath to incur, because of my insults to public officials, rebuke and a fine etc., which, after all, are the honorarium easiest for frank and truth-loving people to obtain in this country (if you find this statement too bitter, I beg you for God’s sake to strike it from the manuscript), and for certain [XIII 468] private reasons I would rather not run afoul of the police, so as soon as I had read your respected paper for Monday, I hurried to gather more information about the story I had related, hoping to make it look less serious for the police. I did actually manage to find such information, and I made haste to correct in “Another Letter,”17 printed in yesterday’s issue of Berlingske Tidende, the “little inaccuracy” it contained, namely, that the billfold had not, as I reported, been found in the lining of the servant’s coat but “had fallen through a hole in the lining onto the street and was brought to the police station by the honest finder on the evening of the same day the interrogation ended.” But, although the element in the story that I corrected or changed is very important, and although the whole story is altered by this correction and has become different from the report given in my first letter, you will still readily perceive—all of which I pointed out yesterday in the Berlingske Tidende, but, regrettably, when I wrote the comment I did not comprehend how pertinent it was in every respect—“that this does not change anything in the case itself.” A good friend of mine who is very interested in me and what I do came running over to me last evening an hour after my second ill-starred letter had come out into the world and called my attention to the fact that the insult to the police in the story was by no means removed or appreciably diminished by my ingenious correction. “For,” he said, “in the first place, the facts as you first related them do not change the case; it was just as much the police’s duty to search Poulsen’s servant’s coat before instituting a criminal interrogation, because in all great likelihood it would then have been disclosed that the billfold had not been stolen but had been lost on the street, inasmuch as the pocket and the coat lining were found to have burst their seams, making the probability of discovering a crime by means of a criminal hearing very poor, and, as a result, they undoubtedly would have waited a few days for some finder to come forward and also have advertised the billfold in Adresseavisen before taking further steps. So you see that the irresponsibility of which you accuse the police remains just about as great whether the billfold is found in the lining of the coat or on the street, provided it remains fixed that no search of the coat was made, because, given that omission, [XIII 469] the irresponsibility stands. In the second place, you said in your first letter that the ‘criminal interrogation’ was instituted by ‘a police-court judge,’ thereby making your charge of police irresponsibility even more serious. The usual procedure is as follows: when someone reports that he suspects a crime has been committed, the police assign a couple of their officers or, in more important cases, a lieutenant or a captain to gather preliminary evidence from all the persons who may be assumed capable of giving any information on the case, and they give their report to the police chief. If this report shows proof or a high degree of probability that a crime was committed, he refers the case, according to its nature, either to a court or through the bailiff to the criminal court. When you said that a police judge had instituted the criminal interrogation in this case, you thereby declared that proof or at least the probability of the presence of a crime had been procured. Thus you declared that the police chief had instituted a court case, and although it certainly was the police officers’ or the police lieutenant’s or the police captain’s duty to search the servant’s coat before making their report, you nevertheless do see that it was far more excusable for them to have omitted this than for the police chief, as you said, to refer the case to the police court without undertaking the most preliminary of all preliminary investigations—therefore, it is the chief of police whom you have harshly attacked; he is the one you have charged with serious misconduct.”
You can well imagine that my friend’s words, the well-founded truth of which I dare not doubt for a moment, agitated me greatly, for now I saw that my correction did not correct what I wished to correct but that my wretched story contained an even grosser insult to the police and that I therefore could expect unpleasantness to arise from it very soon. After a bad night, I have been out this morning looking for new and better information on the true shape of the case. Thank God, I was fortunate enough to find what I was searching for, and although I know that the Berlingske Tidende has nothing against repeated corrections of the same mistake in other newspapers, I dare not assume that it is equally willing to correct a second time one of its own mistakes. So I beg you, who in fact have indicated your interest in the case by the praise you have conferred on me, to correct one more “little inaccuracy” in my letter.
As I said in yesterday’s correction, the billfold did fall [XIII 470] through a hole in the lining of the servant’s coat onto the street and was delivered to the police station by the honest finder—but not, as I wrote yesterday, on the evening of the same day the criminal interrogation ended, but on the morning before the criminal interrogation was held, with the result that no judge had held any interrogation. Consequently the story, as I now—and I hope for the last time—correct it, is briefly this: A servant lost a billfold on the street; it was found, taken to the police station, and returned to the rightful owner. It is easy to see that the remaining similarity between my corrected story and the one reported on Saturday by you is only very meager, but also that my unmistakably good intentions must all be sufficient excuse for the inaccuracies that slipped in. Therefore, I must continue without the slightest change or correction to insist on one of the opinions expressed in both letters, that Stampe, Colbjørnsen, and Ørsted18 are great jurists, lawyers, and I think it is good that this has been stated. I further add the perhaps unnecessary assurance that I myself am no lawyer but a job-holding citizen who honestly supports himself by molding candles, but I am very sorry that the last thing I molded is held by the Berlingske Tidende.
I have the honor to be
The Writer of the Letter