"To be sure, to be sure," answered Mingy Bowes; "that's all fair. I don't want more than a quarter; and I'll manage it so, if you'll let me, that I'll answer for it my quarter shall be more than ever I took in three months out of the shop--the bank into the bargain."
His companion merely gave a grunt, for the policeman was by this time near; and they walked on together, across various streets and through various alleys which led into Oxford Street.
It is curious and sad that in some of the most fashionable parts of the town of London, within a stone's throw of the mansions of the opulent and great, are, or at least were some twenty years ago, an immense mass of the lowest and most squalid houses in the metropolis. Close by Grosvenor and Manchester Squares, and lying between them and Bond Street, are a number of places in which it was dangerous, as the writer once found to his cost, for a respectably-dressed person to set his foot. There, congregated tier above tier, in small, dark, unwholesome rooms, are whole classes of people, in comparison with whom the denizens of Saint Giles's may be looked upon as aristocracy. If you walk along one of these courts or alleys, the first things you remark, on the right hand and the left, are the two confederates in demoralization and degradation, the pawnbroker's and the gin-shop, both tolerated and encouraged by the British government on account of those iniquitous and burdensome taxes grouped under the name of excise--taxes which, whatever they may do for the revenue, tend more to hamper industry, to debase the people, to make rogues of honest men, to prevent the employment of the poor, to give monopoly to the rich, to obstruct salutary laws, and to disgrace the legislature, than any imposts that ever were invented by the great British demon, Taxation.
The fact is, ministers dare not deal with the gin-shop nuisance as they would with any other nuisance, for fear of diminishing the revenue; and when they come before parliament and boast of an increased revenue from the excise--which they call the barometer of commercial prosperity--they boast, in fact, of how much they have been able to wring from the vices, the follies, or the hard labours of the industrious classes. They say neither more nor less than this: there must have been more demand for labour, because the labouring classes have been able to drink more gin, to smoke more tobacco, and to swill more beer.
This is a very irrelevant tirade, but it would be written.
Beyond the pawnbroker's and the gin-shop, you enter into the heart of the den; probably meeting, at the first two or three steps, some half-clad women, with foul matted hair, strange-shaped caps which were once white, and yellowish handkerchiefs loosely spread over the otherwise uncovered bosom. Perhaps there is a short pipe in the mouth; but there is gin in every hue of the face, and the eyes are bleared and inflamed with habitual intoxication.
There may be a miserable baby in the arms, or on the back, the naked feet and legs appearing from beneath the rags that cover it--sallow, sickly, sharp-faced, keen-eyed--the nursling of misery, despair, and vice--the destined victim of every evil passion and every degrading crime. Above, below, around, from every window in cellar, in attic, in the middle floors, come forth the varied murmurs, in different tongues and tones: the slang and cant of English rogues and vagabonds; the brogue of Ireland, or the old Irish language itself; the shouts of wrath or merriment; the groans of anguish; the cries of pain or sorrow; the gay laugh; the dull buzz of tongues consulting over deeds of evil, telling tales of despair and woe, or asking counsel how to avoid starvation.
As you go on, innumerable are the different forms you meet, in every shape of degradation: the fierce bludgeoned bully, the dexterous pickpocket, the wretched woman who acts as their decoy, the boys and girls serving an apprenticeship to vice, the hoary prompters of all evil, who, in the shape of receivers, profit by the crimes of the younger and more active.
Look at that girl there in the tattered chintz gown. She can scarcely be sixteen; and yet, see how she reels from side to side in beastly intoxication! And then that elderly man in the shabby brown coat, with the venerable white hair, who goes walking along by the side of the gutter, and every now and then stops and gazes in, as if he saw something exceedingly curious there. He is a respectable-looking man, with a gentlemanly air and carriage. A thief, and a man suspected of murder, are just passing him; but he is quite safe: they know he has nothing to lose, and his emaciated body would not fetch two pounds at the anatomist's.
What is it has brought him to this state? Look in his face; see the dull, meaningless eye, the nose and lips bloated with habitual sottish tippling. That man can boast that he never was drunk in his life, but for more than forty years he has never been quite sober. Hark to the screams coming forth from that house where one-half of the windowpanes at least are covered up with paper. They are produced by a drunken scoundrel beating his unhappy wife. She was once an honest, cheerful, happy country girl, and now--I must not stay to tell the various stages of degradation she has gone through, till she is here, the wife of a drunken savage, in one of the lowest and vilest dens of London. Hark how the poor thing screams under the ruffian's blow, while one of his brutal companions sits hard by and witnesses it, laughing! Three days hence, by one too-fatally-directed blow, that man will murder the wretched woman in the presence of her two children, and then will go to end his own days on a scaffold, leaving those wretched infants to follow the same course in after years.