essings which many of us know, and from which we would not be
separated without keen regret. But penury is hard. When poverty
pinches like winter's night, when fuel fails, and hunger is our
company, then poverty becomes harsh and unpalatable, and not to be
boasted of; though even penury has spurred many a sluggish life to
conquering moods. When a man lies with his face to the wall,
paralytic, helpless, useless, a burden to himself and others, and hears
the rub of his wife washing for a livelihood--and he loves her so; took
her to his home in her fair girlhood, when her beauty bloomed like a
garden of roses, and promised to keep her, and now she works for him
all day and into the dark night, and loves to; but he turns his face to
the wall, puts his one movable hand against his face, sobs so that his
tears wash through his fingers and wet his pillow as with driving
rain,--then poverty is pitiful. Or, when one sees his children hungry,
tattered, with lean faces and eyes staring as with constant fear; sees
them huddling under rags or cowering at a flicker meant for
flame,--then poverty is hard; and then, "The poor always ye have with
you," said our Christ, which remember and be pitiful!

But such penury, even, does not require crime. Valjean became a
criminal from poverty; but himself felt now, as the days slipped from
his life-store, that crime was not necessary. Theft is bad economics.
The criminals on the dockets are not those pinched with poverty, as one
may assure himself if he gives heed to criminal dockets. People prefer
crime as a method of livelihood. These are criminals. The "artful
dodger," in "Oliver Twist," is a picture of the average criminal.
Honest poverty need not steal. In the writer's own city, the other
day, a man accused of theft pleaded his children's poverty as
palliative of his crime; but in that city was abundant help for worthy
poverty. That man lacked an absolute honesty. He and his could have
been fed and clothed, and himself maintained his manly dignity and
uncorrupted honesty. To blame society with criminality is a current
method, but untrue and unwise; for thus we will multiply, not decimate,
criminals. The honest man may be in penury; but he will have help, and
need not shelter in a jail. Thus, then, these two items of modernity
paint background for Jean Valjean's portrait; and in Jean Valjean,
To-day has found a voice.

This man is a criminal and a galley slave, with yellow p