“He deserved no better fate!” the reader may exclaim. Possibly so, but it is hard for a fellow-creature to be in the most opulent city in the world without being able to obtain the common necessaries of life. Nevertheless, this is of almost daily occurrence.
The reports of similar cases in our public newspapers furnish us with proofs of this.
We have no desire to enlist anybody’s sympathy for wretches like Charles Peace, or Bill Rawton, or others who figure in this work; but starvation in a land of plenty is a melancholy fact which every right-minded person must of necessity deplore.
Starving, homeless, friendless, despised, and desperate, Bandy-legged Bill wandered through the streets of the metropolis.
It was a cold winter’s night, and the gipsy’s teeth chattered, and his limbs trembled.
“Nothing remains for me but death,” he ejaculated, “for most assuredly my life must soon come to an end if things go on in this way. The crimes and injustice of others have brought me to this, not my own.”
This is the specious way scoundrels of this type invariably delude themselves by false reasoning.
“It aint been my fault,” he repeated. “I always acted on the square with all my pals. Curse it!—but it’s hard lines to be in this sorry plight. I’ll cast all conscience scruples in one scale hereafter, and will be an outlaw as well as an outcast. A man gets no thanks for being honest in this world. I am at war with the world, even as mankind are at war with me.”
Bill crawled towards a street lamp as if he could derive warmth from its flickering flame.
“I aint a bit like myself,” he exclaimed. “Am as weak as a rat, and as down-hearted as a man just sentenced to a ‘lagging.’ Peace is better off than I am; he has food and shelter, such as it is, at the expense of Government. I should like to be in his place just now, and the chances are I shall be before long.”