little children! What obscure
complications of agony they endure and how very dark their odd
convulsive species of existence is made, only that one man may buy
forgetfulness by the glass. If I let my imagination loose, I can hear
the immense army of the young crying to the dumb and impotent sky, and
they all cry for bread. Mercy! how the little children suffer! And I
have seen them by the hundred--by the thousand--and only helped from
caprice; I could do no other. The iron winter is nearing us, and soon
the dull agony of cold will swoop down and bear the gnawing hunger
company while the two dire agencies inflict torture on the little ones.
Were it not for Drink the sufferers might be clad and nourished; but
then Drink is the support of the State, and a few thousand of
raw-skinned, hunger-bitten children perhaps do not matter. Then I can
see all the ruined gentlemen, and all the fine fellows whose glittering
promise was so easily tarnished; they have crossed my track, and I
remember every one of them, but I never could haul back one from the
fate toward which he shambled so blindly; what could I do when Drink was
driving him? If I could not shake off the memories of squalor, hunger,
poverty--well-deserved poverty--despair, crime, abject wretchedness,
then life could not be borne. I can always call to mind the wrung hands
and drawn faces of well-nurtured and sweet ladies who saw the dull mask
of loathsome degradation sliding downward over their loved one's face.
Of all the mental trials that are cruel, that must be the worst--to see
the light of a beloved soul guttering gradually down into stench and
uncleanness. The woman sees the decadence day by day, while the blinded
and lulled man who causes all the indescribable trouble thinks that
everything is as it should be. The Drink mask is a very scaring thing;
once you watch it being slowly fitted on to a beautiful and spiritual
face you do not care over-much about the revenue.

And now the famous Russian's question comes up: What shall we do? Well,
so far as the wastrel poor are concerned, I should say, "Catch them when
young, and send them out of England so long as there is any place abroad
where their labour is sought." I should say so, because there is not a
shadow of a chance for them in this country: they will go in their turn
to drink as surely as they go to death. As to the vagabond poor whom we
have with us now I have no hope for them; we must wait until death weeds