PART I.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN PHILIP QUINN.
Early education, family training, and circumstances often apparently accidental are potent influences in the formation and moulding of character. Yet not infrequently an event of seemingly little consequence may overturn the best considered plans for a successful career and alter the entire tenor of a man’s life. The invisible power “that shapes our ends,” to-day, lifts one born in a humble station to a pinnacle of fame and power, while to-morrow, it casts down from his exalted position the man intoxicated by the fumes of the incense of popular adulation. The Scottish bard puts this truth in those oft-quoted words:
“The best laid schemes of mice and men,
Gang aft aglee.”
This aphorism may be significantly applied to the lives of thousands. It is true of my own career. However upright may have been my intentions at the outset of life, they were early turned aside through the influence of my surroundings and of a seemingly inborn propensity for gambling. After a long and eventful experience, I have turned to a better life. My past has not been without interest to those with whom I have been brought in contact. It is here reviewed, not in a spirit of braggart egotism, but with the earnest hope that it may prove a warning to many, who are now bent upon a similar journey.
Biography is usually a simple and suggestive record, pointing its own moral, and treating, as a rule, of the scenes and actions of that everyday life, of which the subject forms a part. An autobiography should be, of all others, sincere and candid, and its writer should
“Naught extenuate nor aught set down in malice.”
To those who may think that the publication of the life of so obscure an individual as myself, and one, too, who for so many years has been a social pariah, can be productive of neither interest nor profit, I would say, that the eye of the fly is in many respects a more interesting study than that of the eagle, and the light-house of more service to humanity than the pyramids. A great artist once painted a wonderful picture. Of one of the faces in that immortal work, it was said, to him: “that countenance is ugly and revolting.” Thoughtfully gazing upon it, the artist replied: “There is more of beauty in every human face than I can comprehend.” So, in the life of every human being, there is at once more of tender charity and vicious selfishness than can be portrayed in words.