e demanded his discharge, though they told him
he would die on the stairs, and dragged himself, more dead than alive, to
the cobbler's shop. At the moment of writing this, he is dying at the
Temperance Hospital, into which place his staunch friend, the cobbler,
moved heaven and earth to have him admitted.

Poor Dan Cullen! A Jude the Obscure, who reached out after knowledge;
who toiled with his body in the day and studied in the watches of the
night; who dreamed his dream and struck valiantly for the Cause; a
patriot, a lover of human freedom, and a fighter unafraid; and in the
end, not gigantic enough to beat down the conditions which baffled and
stifled him, a cynic and a pessimist, gasping his final agony on a
pauper's couch in a charity ward,--"For a man to die who might have been
wise and was not, this I call a tragedy."

CHAPTER XIV--HOPS AND HOPPERS

So far has the divorcement of the worker from the soil proceeded, that
the farming districts, the civilised world over, are dependent upon the
cities for the gathering of the harvests. Then it is, when the land is
spilling its ripe wealth to waste, that the street folk, who have been
driven away from the soil, are called back to it again. But in England
they return, not as prodigals, but as outcasts still, as vagrants and
pariahs, to be doubted and flouted by their country brethren, to sleep in
jails and casual wards, or under the hedges, and to live the Lord knows
how.

It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the street
people to pick her hops. And out they come, obedient to the call, which
is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs of adventure-lust
still in them. Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them forth, and the
festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are undiminished. Yet they
overrun the country like an army of ghouls, and the country does not want
them. They are out of place. As they drag their squat, misshapen bodies
along the highways and byways, they resemble some vile spawn from
underground. Their very presence, the fact of their existence, is an
outrage to the fresh, bright sun and the green and growing things. The
clean, upstanding trees cry shame upon them and their withered
crookedness, and their rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness
and purity of nature.

Is the picture overdrawn? It all depends. For one who sees and thinks
life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly