ly one tooth, a blackened yellow
stump, and every time he opened his mouth to laugh he was nearly choked
with coughing. He leaned out over the palisading and reached with both
his arms eastward. 'There,' he cried, frantically, 'you have seen one.
There are thousands and tens of thousands of houses like this, a million
crawling vermin who were born into the world in your likeness, as you
were born, my fine gentleman. Day by day they wake in their holes, fill
their lungs with foul air, their stomachs with rotten food, break their
backs and their hearts over some hideous task. Every day they drop a
little lower down. Drink alone keeps them alive, stirs their blood now
and then so that they can feel their pulses beat, brings them a blessed
stupor. And see over there the sun, God's sun, rises every morning,
over them and you. Young man! You see those flaming spots of light?
They are gin-palaces. You may thank your God for them, for they alone
keep this horde of rotten humanity from sweeping westwards, breaking up
your fine houses, emptying your wine into the street, tearing the silk
and laces from your beautiful soft-limbed women. Bah! But you have
read. It would be the French Revolution over again. Oh, but you are
wise, you in the West, your statesmen and your philanthropists, that you
build these gin-palaces, and smile, and rub your hands and build more
and spend the money gaily. You build the one dam which can keep back
your retribution. You keep them stupefied, you cheapen the vile liquor
and hold it to their noses. So they drink, and you live. But a day of
light may come.'"

Lord Arranmore ceased speaking, stretched out his hand and helped
himself to wine with unfaltering fingers.

"I have tried," he continued, "to repeat the exact words which the old
man used to me, and I do not find it so difficult as you might imagine,
because at that time they made a great impression upon me. But I
cannot, of course, hope to reproduce to you his terrible earnestness,
the burning passion with which every word seemed to spring from his
lips. Their effect upon me at that time you will be able to judge when
I tell you this--that I never returned to my rooms, that for ten years I
never set foot west of Temple Bar. I first joined a small society in
Whitechapel, then I worked for myself, and finally I became a
police-court missionary at Southwark Police-Court. The history of
those years is the history of a slowly-growing madness. I commen