“All the traffic will bear!” is the slogan of this jobbing Shylock, who presses for the usurer’s pounds of flesh money, e’en to the point of taking the very heart out of the mass of his countrymen.
The bitterness of such meanest of wholesale thievery consists in the fact that it is commonly engineered to the end that the thieves and their retainers may flaunt brassy symbols of ill-gotten gain in the faces of those whose bent backs are about all that is left them to show for their having been the primary producers of those symbols.
There’s a faultlessly-clothed and groomed crook whose soft palm reaches for what he knows to be of value its weight in paper: the which he is about to exchange obligingly for what he knows to be the bulk of a life’s savings, won by patient toil against great odds.
Down to the depths, along with his dupe, go the wife and children of the “poor fish.” The man and his mate must retrace, retrench, and take up the old grind at a time when the inevitable toll takes of both spirit and flesh. But what’s a little thing like that to him who must have his old wine, young things, and “dough” with which to double his bets while he makes the grand rounds of the sporting sentry boxes? This thinly-veneered, mulcting type of parasite pirouettes debonairly over the spaces of the “movie” screen, where he takes up his abode in the indiscriminating hearts of younglings.
Watch that bull-jowled “promotor” of the pug-ugly sport—another type of human cuckoo. Get the ghoulish glint in his eyes as he “spills” vernacular of the gutter telling an instinctively fine buckra of a “boy” what a “chump” he’d be to go on playing the mule at productive work, when he “packs a double punch” with which to land him in the midst of “easy pickin’.” Observe the war within the lad as between innate decency and, in a sense, laudable desire for the limelight and “soft” money.
Follow the lad in the prize ring six months later. Note his unerring judgment of distance; his containedness and resourcefulness under whirlwind assault; his chloroforming blow, held coolly for the “opening” he seeks, then delivered lightning-like to the part of the body of his adversary he had been patiently “playing” for; see his battered, bleeding, and befuddled foe borne from the ring, supported by his “seconds”; and then think on high qualities of gameness and skill, matched by a fine mentality and piston-power and reaction of muscle, given over, as an occupation, to the spilling of his brother’s blood, for a price accursed in the sight of every good thing.
You couldn’t miss the practical “side kick” of such as the “professor” pug; you couldn’t, from church portal to the padded cell of a convict prison. He’s no low-down mixer with mud larks—not he! Should you suggest such a thing, he’d bristle and bark. And had you the temerity to propose introduction to his sister of even a pugilistic “champeon” he’d probably sink his mental teeth into you. Agreeably with the social ear, he avoids war of words over his Maker’s edict: “The meek shall inherit the earth”; but by nature he craves action of the kind that left the Roman amphitheatre a stench in the nostrils of a dawning civilization such as the Christ envisaged. And so, you will find him enthusiastically back of the kind of “Big Brothering of Boys” that pits mere bantams of kids against each other in a brutal “bout” to a “finish.”
The covered lie comes easy, of course; hence, the bestial business is euphemistically touted as “boxing exhibitions”; boxing, mark you, that leaves a pigmy of a lad cut and slashed, stretched senseless, face downward, with the blood trickling from his nose and ears to the canvas.
Probably in just one “go” the lad had taken on external marks that will seriously handicap him for all of his earthly time; very possibly he had suffered internal injury that will rise up along about the medial line of life, and cut him off; and surely he had been imbued with instincts which, more than all other instincts, impelled purblind mortals to rush for the late shambles as for a barbecue.
School lads ruthlessly spill human blood for amusement, and at the same time seek to establish in the souls of men “a peace that passeth understanding”? Every man who thinks beyond the tip of his nose, knows that the two propositions are preposterously antithetic; that historians of the future will have so declared them; and that Almighty God puts his curse upon the doubled fist, let the doubling take what form it may, other than in defense of sacred rights.