The Project Gutenberg EBook of Cast Adrift, by T. S. Arthur

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Title: Cast Adrift

Author: T. S. Arthur

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4592]
Posting Date: December 8, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAST ADRIFT ***

Produced by Charles Aldarondo

CAST ADRIFT

By T. S. Arthur

Author Of "Three Years In A Man-Trap," "Orange Blossoms," Etc., Etc.

Philadelphia:
Cincinnati:
New York:
Boston:
Chicago, Ills.:
New Castle, Pa.:
San Francisco, Cal.:

1873

TO THE READER.

IN this romance of real life, in which the truth is stranger than the
fiction, I have lifted only in part the veil that hides the victims of
intemperance and other terrible vices--after they have fallen to the
lower deeps of degradation to be found in our large cities, where the
vile and degraded herd together more like wild beasts than men and
women--and told the story of sorrow, suffering, crime and debasement
as they really exist in Christian America with all the earnestness and
power that in me lies.

Strange and sad and terrible as are some of the scenes from which I hare
drawn this veil, I have not told the half of what exists. My book, apart
from the thread of fiction that runs through its pages, is but a series
of photographs from real life, and is less a work of the imagination
than a record of facts.

If it stirs the hearts of American readers profoundly, and so awakens
the people to a sense of their duty; if it helps to inaugurate more
earnest and radical modes of reform for a state of society of which a
distinguished author has said, "There is not a country throughout the
earth on which it would not bring a curse; there is no religion upon the
earth that it would not deny; there is no people upon the earth it would
not put to shame;"--then will not my work be in vain.

Sitting in our comfortable homes with well-fed, well-clothed and
happy-hearted children about us--children who have our tenderest care,
whose cry of pain from a pin-prick or a fall on the carpeted floor hurts
us like a blow---how few of us know or care anything about the homes
in whic