e it is well ascertained that the
extremity of physical want, as reached on rafts at sea, has driven human
beings to deeds as barbarous as ever shark was accused of. The worse a
human being is, the more he deserves our pity. Hang him, if _that_ be
needful for the welfare of society; but pity him even as you hang. Many
a poor creature has gradually become hardened and inveterate in guilt
who would have shuddered at first, had the excess of it ultimately
reached been at first presented to view. But the precipice was sloped
off: the descent was made step by step. And there is many a human being
who never had a chance of being good: many who have been trained, and
even compelled, to evil from very infancy. Who that knows anything of
our great cities, but knows how the poor little child, the toddling
innocent, is sometimes sent out day by day to steal, and received in his
wretched home with blows and curses, if he fail to bring back enough?
Who has not heard of such poor little things, unsuccessful in their
sorry work, sleeping all night in some wintry stair, because they durst
not venture back to their drunken, miserable, desperate parents? I could
tell things at which angels might shed tears, with much better reason
for doing so than seems to me to exist in some of those more imposing
occasions on which bombastic writers are wont to describe them as
weeping. Ah, there is One who knows where the responsibility for all
this rests! Not wholly with the wretched parents: far from _that_.
_They_, too, have gone through the like: they had as little chance as
their children. _They_ deserve our deepest pity, too. Perhaps the deeper
pity is not due to the shivering, starving child, with the bitter wind
cutting through its thin rags, and its blue feet on the frozen pavement,
holding out a hand that is like the claw of some beast; but rather to
the brutalized mother who could thus send out the infant she bore.
Surely the mother's condition, if we look at the case aright, is the
more deplorable. Would not you, my reader, rather endure any degree of
cold and hunger than come to this? Doubtless, there is blame somewhere,
that such things should be: but we all know that the blame of the
most miserable practical evils and failures can hardly be traced to
particular individuals. It is through the incapacity of scores of public
servants that an army is starved. It is through the fault of millions of
people that our great towns are what they ar