Part 2
He left the army a hero, and became a policeman.
He was the Police Inspector of Charing Cross Station.
The home was in Deptford. It was comfortable, respectable, and religious. The children were sent in best clothes to Sunday-school, and were apprenticed to the Band of Hope. On Sunday evenings company was received. The entertainment was religious. They sang sacred songs and hymns; they discussed life from the religious standpoint. Whisky and water helped this flow of soul, the men smoked cigars in a deliberate and philosophical fashion. Many great problems were left unsolved at these discussions.
There were several quite young children in this household when the head died. The hero of Balaclava left behind him, in addition to his medals and the record of a useful life, a wife and family who needed bread for their existence. The burden of this responsibility fell upon the wife. She went out to work, and became a cloak-room attendant at Charing Cross Station. She is there to this day.
The long life of this woman's devotion is typical of London. The number of poor women who go out to work for the sake of their children, who toil from early morning to late at night, and who manage, in spite of this, to keep the home respectable and cheerful, to endear themselves to their children and permanently to influence the characters of those children towards honesty, uprightness, and selfrespect, is legion. Into whatever poor parish of the town you may enter, the clergyman, the doctor, the district nurse, or the local Salvationist will tell you that the best of the inhabitants are working mothers, whose lives are one incessant struggle for the mere necessities of existence.
With such blood in his veins, with such memories in his young heart, with such noble and sacred influences on his soul, the hero of this story left home at the age of fourteen to enlist in a line regiment, of which an elder brother was one of the colour-sergeants.
The life of a boy in the Army at that time, particularly a boy in the band, was hard and cruel. It took either a genius to dodge its hardships, or a giant to withstand its cruelties. The private soldier appeared to take a savage pleasure in hardening the heart of a boy; it was the tyranny of a lad for a cat; there was in it the element of sport. It seemed to my hero, from the outset, that he must fight for his hand. He was strong, proud, high-spirited. Moreover, his brother was a colour-sergeant. In a few weeks he was swearing, smoking, drinking, and fighting like a man. At fifteen he went to Ireland; at sixteen he was in India. In India he was as good as any man in the regiment. What does this mean? It means that he was smart in his appearance, knew his drills, and could appear on parade full of beer without detection. He was famous for this ability, and he was proud of it. Much of the talk in a canteen concerns the capacity of a man to carry liquor on steady legs. It is a useful topic of conversation. It makes for pleasurable disputation, it leads to wagers, it creates exciting contests. Who can drink the most, Jack or Joe, A company or B, ours or the Shropshires? A man who can stand up to beer is a hero who will certainly stand up to shot and shell. Who fears one barrel will fear
two. The fanatic says that there is no barrel without an enemy. But the soldier stands to his gun and his beer, able to pot in two senses of the phrase a man.
But there was something in the mind of my hero which was not satisfied by beer. He does not know what it was. It manifested itself, this unrest, in several ways. For instance, he would go to the library and pore over Queen's Regulations. He wanted to pick a quarrel. He was a barrack-room lawyer. He made sure of his ground, and then 'raised hell.' He claimed his rights in the face of colour-sergeant, company officer, adjutant, and colonel. The trouble was, for these authorities, that the lawyer in this case was perhaps the best soldier in the regiment exceedingly smart, handsome, energetic, and keen. Furthermore, he was a marksman the company shot.
But Queen's Regulations did not satisfy him any more than success at the butts, or smartness on parade, or beer. There was still something wanting. He was sufficiently educated to feel dissatisfied with the scope of his existence; there was that in his nature which made him an inquirer, a barrack-room lawyer considering the affairs of the universe a man whose grudge was not against the service, but against life. Somewhere in the cosmos there was a person or a thing he desired to meet face to face; if necessary with naked fists.
At Conoor he fell in with a corps of the Salvation Army. The universe seemed at last to have answered his inquiries. He was conscious of a call. He used to go down to the services and prayer-meetings, always in a state of liquor, sometimes very drunk, and throw out those of the worshippers who failed to reach the standard of that which he deemed a seemly religious propriety. It was a curious condition of mind. He felt himself to be protecting the weak, championing the derided, reproving the mockers. He approved in a dull way the idea of God, and the thought of heaven and hell, the religious thesis of a struggle between good and evil. These great thoughts enlarged the boundaries of existence. They gave his soul a little more room in which to turn round, a little better air to breathe. So he stood up for the Salvation Army in barrack-room and canteen, pot in hand; he
rattled those who derided it with a crackle of oaths; he was ready to fight for it.
The mystery of this state of mind can be easily explained. There is no subject in the world like religion for argument, controversy, and dispute. The Bishop of London told me that on one occasion in Victoria Park, when he was waiting to answer an atheist lecturer, a little greasy-haired man suddenly planted a box on the ground, mounted it, and exclaimed, with a pathetic anxiety to be heard, 'Ladies and gents, 'alf a mo' about that ole 'umbug General Booth!' It is religion which draws the crowd of listeners to the parks; it is religion which makes every man an orator. On religion such born barrack-room lawyers as Charles Bradlaugh and the hero of this story will always love to hear themselves speak till the lights go out and the silence falls.
Because he wanted to be in controversy with his fellows, because he wanted to argue and orate and show his superior knowledge, the Tight Handful became a champion of the Salvation Army. If all the regiment had been pious Christians, it is very probable that his fists and his oratory would have been at the service of atheism. But he had found a minority. This was enough. He put himself face to face with the majority, fists raised, his brain singing with beer.
He left India a very much worse man than he arrived. He was made a corporal, well on his way to lance-sergeant, and the highest warrant rank might easily have been his. But he had shipped a devil. His love of controversy had opened a door; one of the worst devils known to the student of human nature had entered; it was the devil of rage. Men truly said of him, 'He has got the devil of a temper.'
This story is really a study in temper. The part played by drink is quite subsidiary. The interest lies in the wild fury which grew gradually in the character of this young soldier till it became a demon uncontrollable, ungovernable his master.
To this day his prominent cheek-bones have that glaze, and his eyes that shining fire, which are so often the outward shows of a temper quick to take flame.
On the night of his arrival in England, he went out of barracks and 'forgot to return' till next morning. He was made a prisoner.
This roused the fury of his temper. It was his first crime. It meant the ruin of his career. He went before the colonel, ready to fight for his life. But he was too good a soldier to be punished. He went out from the orderly-room with the shame of a reprimand burning in his blood.
Three months afterwards he was back again, charged with striking the police. This time a serious crime. He was reduced to the ranks.
Ruin!
Consider him quite a young man, well above the standard of his fellows in education, one of the most efficient soldiers in the regiment, a prize marksman, in appearance handsome, proud, and scornful, a man physically as perfect as any in the British Army slim, tall, broadshouldered, deep-chested, long-armed, with true vision, and a courage that feared nothing one who by the exercise of a little ordinary common sense might have risen to warrant rank and in a few years retired from the service with a comfortable pension; such he was, and he found his career ruined by temper in the very dawn of his manhood. Everything lost. The whole future closed against him.
The regiment tried to do for him all that was possible. He became silverman in the officers' mess, an officer's servant, even a policeman; but every job thus found for him to mitigate the bitterness of reduction to the ranks, he threw away, one after another, in scornful bouts of headlong drunkenness.
Nothing mattered to him now. He had thrown away his chances. He kicked forethought out of his path, and went plunging deeper and deeper into the abyss.
Twice he came near to murder.
In Manchester he found himself mixed up in some sordid brawl between sailors and a public woman. Such a contempt as Shakespeare had for these creatures when they unpack their hearts, took sudden possession of The Handful. The street lamp fell upon her screeching face; her hoarse voice loaded with loathsome words struck rage out of the soldier's soul he sprang upon her, seized her by the throat, bore her to the ground, and was throttling the poor life out of her body, when an old tramp interfered, a man who had served in The Handful's regiment many years before, and whose appeal to the honour of the regiment this ragged old tramp's appeal to the honour of the regiment broke through the rage in the soldier's brain, and just saved him from murder.
Later, at Aldershot, he discovered by an accident that a girl with whom he was accustomed to associate had been seen walking with a man of another regiment. This time, not in hot blood, he deliberately plotted murder. He met the girl, walked with her, taxed her with infidelity, and then set upon her. He left her dying on the lawn, and walked back to barracks to await arrest for murder. He could hardly believe it when he learned that the girl was still living.
Soon after this he left the service. His colonel appealed to him, argued with him, to stay on and earn a pension. He not only resisted these appeals, but suddenly brought a charge against the regiment concerning his kit. A few days before he had been served out with new things. These things had been taken away by the colour-sergeant. According to a new regulation, of which the colonel knew nothing, the kit belonged to the soldier. The Handful, blazing with indignation, claimed justice. It ended, this strange scene of a soldier's departure from his regiment, by the colonel drawing a cheque for six pounds, and giving it to the ex-soldier, with apologies. The Handful carried the cheque to the canteen and 'blew it' in drink. When the cab, which had been waiting for him some hours, left the barracks it was drawn by half the men in his company, mostly drunk.
He became door-keeper at a public-house in Deptford, close to his mother's home. In a single month he had made five appearances before his master for being drunk on duty. Finally, he took off his master's clothes that is to say, his uniform in Deptford Broadway, threw them down, and prepared to fight his employer. There was a scene. And he left.
It would be wearisome to follow him through all his various shortlived employments at this period of his life. He lost them through drink and temper. He could not master his appetite for drink, and when he was censured his temper blazed up and violence followed.
And yet there was something so likeable and commending about him that in spite of his Army record, and in spite of all his subsequent vagaries, he was able to obtain employment as railway policeman at one of the great metropolitan stations.
It was during this employment that he met his future wife a little, pale, soft-voiced, delicate blonde, with hair the colour of pale straw, and eyes like cornflowers one of the meekest, gentlest, quietest little creatures that ever attracted the admiration of a hot-pacing devil. On the morning of his wedding-day he went to meet some friends at Waterloo Station, who were coming up for the event. He met some soldiers instead. They were men of his regiment, and his regiment was going to South Africa. They adjourned to a public-house, and a deal of the honeymoon money went into the pockets of brewery shareholders. The wedding was in Marylebone at eleven; the bridegroom arrived at 12.30, so drunk that it was noticeable. After the service the clergyman advised the poor little timid blonde to take her husband home and reform him. Some few months afterwards, while his experience of a home and domestic happiness was still quite fresh, and when the time that he would become a father was approaching, he was drunk on duty. A man occupying the rank of his father, an inspector of police, rebuked him and ordered him off duty. The Handful knocked him down with a blow in the face.
He arrived home that night in a cab, suspended from duty. It was after midnight, nearly one o'clock. He pulled his wife out of bed, made her dress, and took her out in the streets. There he forced her to walk up and down with him till four o'clock, when some particularly obliging public-houses open their doors. He was like a madman.
A fortnight after his son was born.
It was now that the devil of rage began to possess his whole nature and to rule every minute of his day. Hitherto there had been spells of gentleness, interludes of cheerfulness, in which he played the part of a merry and roystering companion; but now a settled sullenness, a brooding wrath, a simmering exasperation occupied his soul; he felt the blood boiling, the gorge rising, always.
He was at enmity with the whole world, his violent resentment was for life itself; but there was in his dark and wrathful mind one particular and individual animosity it was for his wife. In the phrase of the street, this poor little woman 'got on his nerves.'
As he looks back upon that time, shamefacedly enough, and yet with a certain intelligent interest of inquiry, he comes to the conclusion that it was the exceeding meekness of his wife which filled him with this irrational hate. She never complained of his drunkenness or his idleness; she never replied to his taunts; she never accused him of the suffering he had brought upon her and their child. Very quietly, this little pale-haired woman, who unlike most of her class in England is a skilful cook and an excellent housekeeper, performed the domestic duties with devotion, and kept the home together as well as she could. It was this mildness of her disposition that exasperated the young husband.
He longed, he tells me, longed with all the fury of his brain, to see rebellion flash from her eyes, to hear bitter words pour from her lips, to feel the blow of her fist in his face. Then he might have emptied all the black displeasure of his heart in one great excusable thrashing which would have made him her master, and her his dog.
But her meekness cowered him with the feeling of inferiority.
With hate and murder in his heart he made a hell of that little home. His wife says to me, as she bends over her cake-tins in the kitchen of their basement home, 'He was just like a madman.' She does not look up from her work; there is no energy in her words; she would say in exactly the same tone of voice, 'He was not very well,' or, 'The weather is trying.' And the young husband, sitting on the foot of a sofa occupied by their baby at the other end, laughs quietly, stretches his long legs, and says, 'I was a tight handful.'
How did he treat her?
It was a curious form of tyranny. He never once laid hands upon her. 'I sometimes used to wish that he would,' she says quietly. No; his tyranny took another form. He held over her head a menace the menace that he would murder her. Sometimes he would sit quietly in his chair, regard her with eyes full of hate, and say, 'I'll kill you one day, mark my words!' At another time he would come smashing and swearing into the house, his face scorching red, his eyes burning, and throwing things here and there, kicking this and that out of his way, would swear by God in heaven that he could bear this woman no longer. And again, at other times, when the cry of the baby woke him from sleep and he opened his eyes to see the mother tenderly soothing the child, he would spring out of bed with an oath, and drive her from the room to spend the night no matter how wintry where she could. Sometimes he pursued her, on the very brink of murder. On countless occasions she spent long nights with her baby in the coalcellar, in the little chamber which has a bolt to the door, or in the houses of neighbours, or in the streets.
The child became a cause of exasperation. He hated it almost as much as he did its mother. Again and again he was thrown into a paroxysm of fury by its little querulous cries. He longed to kill it. He had to hold himself back from seizing it up and throwing it out of the window or dashing it to the floor. He abused the mother because of the baby. He fastened upon their baby all the blinding animosity he felt for his wife.
He cursed it; set his teeth, and stood over it with hands trembling in a passion of desire to throttle it. The helplessness of the child filled him with inarticulate fury. He wanted to hurt it, damage it, brutalize it. When he came back at night from the public-house, whose till he helped to load with the money of which his wife went in sore need, and found the child restless and peevish, he was flung into a fit of explosive irascibility which always ended in driving mother and child from the room, and held him in a madness of desire to murder them both and make an end of it all.
This state of things endured for three years. The woman was a Christian. All through those three years of inexpressible horror she continued to pray for the reformation of her husband. But there were times when the burden was too great for her. Twice she attempted to commit suicide. It came to the husband, in the midst of his madness, that the hour was approaching when he would infallibly kill his wife. He lived with this thought, contemplating all that it meant to become a murderer. He became afraid of himself. Tel menace qui tremble.
One night, after a storm in the house, he went out into the streets. On his way he passed a hall occupied by the Salvation Army. The door stood open. A sudden impulse to enter took possession of him. The haunted man turned from the streets and went in. It was the first time he had entered an Army hall in England. They were singing happy hymns, clapping their hands in a rhythmic, almost mechanical, manner, with that strange abandonment of joy which is so difficult for commonplace or phlegmatic people to understand. The room was bright and cheerful. After the hymns followed an address. It was an appeal to the wretched, miserable, and guilty souls in the hall to come out and publicly confess at the penitent form their own helplessness to get right, their need for the love and power of God.
The haunted man, afraid to what ruin this murderous hate in his heart would lead him, yielded to the invitation. He went to the penitent form, kneeled down, and covered his face with his hands waiting for the magic change in his character, waiting to be dishaunted.
They came round him and counselled him, and then inquired, with affectionate pressures of the hand upon his broad shoulders, 'Are you saved?' 'Do you feel that you are saved?'
He answered, 'I am the same as I came in.'
That night he returned home, hating himself and loathing life. When he told me this experience we were in his' home, and his wife was ironing baby-linen on the kitchen table. He paused in his narration to ask her, 'Where was it you slept that night, matey? in the coal-cellar, or with neighbours?' Without pausing in her ironing, the little pale woman answered, 'Oh, that night it was in the coal cellar.' The narration flowed on, the iron had not ceased its journeys over the white linen.
He was worse than ever after this effort to be saved.
At this time he was working on the Twopenny Tube, buried like a rat for long hours, and coming up to the surface at the end of a long day's work with bitterness and resentment and despair in his soul. Not an occupation likely to relieve the oppression of his mind. Once again he turned for help to the Salvation Army. Once again he did the difficult thing of going publicly to the penitent form. And once again he experienced no relief. The blackness in his soul would not lift. He tells me that at this time there was one insistent memory of the past haunting his thoughts in the midst of a deepening despair. The first watch he ever kept in India was at the prison in Secunderabad, and while on that watch he had seen a man flogged; although at the time he was a hard, cold-blooded, and defiant young dare-devil, the sight of that flogging so took effect upon him that he almost fainted at his post. And now the terrible impression revived, a trick of the subconscious self, and he went about envying with all his heart the man who had been flogged.
He says, quite simply, but with the masterful energy of his character, 'My thoughts lived with that man if only I could get it on my back! I seemed to feel the same stripes entering my brain.'
He was also haunted at this time, why he cannot say, by some words in the Bible which he had learned without comprehending their meaning, 'My spirit shall not always strive with man.' They frightened him.
He was conscious, in the words of Professor James, this ex-soldier, this guard opening and shutting doors on the Twopenny Tube, of being wrong, inferior, and unhappy. Is it not a holding thought to consider that some of the servants of the public in London, of whom one takes so little notice, and who appear to be such purely mechanical things in the general life, are concerned with such matters as this? that in the solitude of their souls they feel themselves to be related to the universe, responsible to God?
The Tight Handful, with his gropings into the infinite, and the ungovernable fury of his temper, was now going more confidently to beer for relief than to the penitent form; going more eagerly, and at the same time more desperately, because it did provide him with the escape from himself which alone averted madness and murder.
It was in a condition of drink that he returned one day resolved to drive his wife and child out of the house, to sell up all his furniture, and to go himself out of London, on the tramp, anywhere and anyhow, he cared not what might happen. That was the revelation brought to him by drink. He was not to worry about his soul, but to kick responsibility out of his path, and live bravely, defiantly, to his own pleasure. At all costs he must escape from the deadly monotony of his unintelligent employment, renounce all his domestic responsibilities, escape from the spiritual hauntings which now distracted him, and taste adventure.
What! a man with his vigour and energy and longings, to be sunk all his days in an underground railway, to be tied to a little pale-faced wife, to be forced to provide her with food and clothes, and food and clothes for her baby to spend his days tied to this wretched go-cart of domesticity he who had soldiered in India and lived freely, grandly, riotously, like a gentleman!
So he drove his wife and child from his house.
When they were gone, he found that she had left for him, on the mantelpiece, the money for the rent, with the exception of a few shillings. This last service of faithful love steadied him a little, made him think. He went back to his duty on the railway.
And now we reach a point in the story where mystery, unaccountable to the man himself, enters and hurries the conclusion.
On his first journey that day, from the Bank to Shepherd's Bush, this young guard heard a voice. He tells you quite calmly, and with a resolution of conviction nothing can shake, that as distinctly as ever he heard sound in his life, he heard that morning a voice, which said to him: 'It is your fault, not God's, that you cannot be saved; you won't trust.'
It was the suggestion, which psychologists perfectly understand, of surrender; the clear, emphatic injunction of Christ the stressed idea expressed in so many forms the absolute necessity for losing one's life, laying down one's life, losing one's soul the new birth, being born again - almost, one might say, the sine qua non of Christ's revelation.
To yield, to cease to struggle, to be passive, to be as clay in the hands of the potter utterly to surrender the will to some vast power dimly comprehended and vaguely desired this was the instant and poignant movement in the mind of the man following the sound of the voice.
He surrendered.
'Do you know what it is,' M. de Lamennais said on one occasion to his pupils,' which makes man the most suffering of all creatures? It is that he has one foot in the finite and the other in the infinite, and that he is torn asunder, not by four horses, as in the horrible old times, but between two worlds.'
The whole struggle is there. It does not matter how literate or how illiterate, how great or how ignoble, how religious or how irreligious, every man according to his degree, in the solitude of his thoughts and the silence of his soul, is torn between two worlds. It is a struggle universal and inescapable. I am persuaded that even in the most abandoned and depraved of wretches this struggle never ceases; in some form or another, perverted enough in some cases, the struggle between the one world and the other goes on to the end. It really does not signify whether we call it a struggle between two worlds or between the higher and the lower natures, whether it is the immense conflict of a Hamlet or the effort of a clerk to be more industrious and honest at his duties; the significance of this duality is its universal presence in the human race, and its inexplicable insistence unless there is a spiritual destiny for humankind. The man in this story had hated the one world because his subconsciousness was aware of the other; he had come to loathe his life because he had glimpses in the darkness of his soul of another and a better; he was consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy, and however vaguely, however blindly, he wanted to be consciously right, superior, and happy. Directly this complete surrender of his mind followed upon the voice, he was aware instantly of extraordinary peace. It was as if a typhoon had suddenly dropped to the stillness of a lake, as if a tempest of hail and snow had become instantly a summer day. And in this peace he heard not another voice, not someone from outside of him addressing his conscience, but his own inner consciousness repeating the words, 'Him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out.' These words, he says, repeated themselves with an unbroken iteration, so that while the train roared and shook through the darkness of the Underground he was aware of nothing else. They ceased, only to begin again. They did not set themselves to the rumble of the wheels, they blotted out all other sounds. Standing on the oscillating platform of the train between the doors of the two carriages, and penned in by the trellis gates of rattling iron, he heard these words singing and ringing in his brain with a recurrence which was not monotony, but joy, and with a meaning that was neither a menace nor a despair, but wonderful and emancipating. 'I only knew,' he says, 'that I was saved.'
The miracle had happened. Its effect was obvious immediately. In ten minutes, from the moment when he felt his soul leap suddenly into the light of understanding, he was the centre of a group of mates asking what had happened to him, so changed was his appearance. Curiously enough the humorist, who is always to be found in such crowds, put to him the question, 'Have you joined the Salvation Army?' He answered, 'No, mate, but I'm going to at the first opportunity, for I'm saved.'
The man was completely changed. The overmastering passion for drink which had ruled him like a tyrant, the frightful rage and resentment which had made him a demon, and the disgust and hatred of life which had darkened all his outlook upon existence vanished, ceased to exist, passed out of his life as if they had never been there. He was filled with a delightsome joy. Such an amazing revulsion, such a complete and total transformation of character, is an achievement possible only to religious influences. Hypnotism, as I know, can undoubtedly, after many weeks of operation, cure some men of their vices. Drugs are able in certain cases, after a long and difficult treatment, to remove the taste for alcohol. But it is only a religious force which, in the twinkling of an eye, can so alter the character of a man that he not only then and there escapes and stands utterly free from tyrannical passions, but is filled full of a great enthusiasm, desires to spend his whole life in working for righteousness, and feels as if he had fed on honey-dew and drunk the milk of Paradise. This is the wonder-side of conversion which no theory of psychology can explain. It is also the greatest force in religion. Theology has no proofs; religious experience does not need them. In a few days this man had found his wife, told her his story, and both were agreed to begin their life again, and to begin it by entering the Salvation Army. On the Saturday night of that week they went together to the hall occupied by the Army in the district that knew the tragedy of their former life, and at the form where twice before the young soldier had kneeled half crazed with drink and rage, they both knelt 'not to get saved,' he says, 'but to signify that we intended to serve God in the ranks of the Salvation Army.'
That was six years ago. During those six years, this handsome and striking-looking man as good-looking, shapely, and vigorous a man as you could wish to see has worked for the Army without pay of any kind, has been the life and soul of his corps, and is now, with the Puncher, perhaps the greatest force making for enthusiasm in all its local activities. He does not preach, preaching is not in his line, but when he is forced to it though the ordeal almost terrifies him he will stand up before a crowd and 'testify' that is to say, tell of his shame and of his great deliverance. And his home, well furnished and comfortable, its shelves filled with books that he has bought for a few coppers on stalls in the gutter, is one of the happiest and most respected in all that district. He has advanced to a high place in the hard and laborious work by which he earns daily bread. There is no one among his mates, his acquaintances, or even the poor foul people of the neighbourhood, who does not respect him, think well of him, and like him. His happiness is infectious. His old mother at Charing Cross Station thanks God that she has lived to see the day of her boy's salvation.
He says to me, quite quietly, smiling and shaking his head in perplexity, 'It's a fair marvel; there's no mistake about that; people can get away from a lot of things, but they can't get away from conversion. No! And see what it does for a man! It does give him a new birth. I've still got faults, a lot of them, but I'm absolutely different from what I was before conversion. I've got different ideas about life, everything. I'm happy. I'm keen about helping others. I love the work, I love my home, and I can put up with a baby!'
There is in his little sitting-room, which you would never take to be the room of a labouring man, a cabinet full of a child's old playthings, spelling-books, paint-boxes, and toy animals. It is sacred to these things. They belonged to the child he so often drove from his sight.
'I was pulled up sharp,' he says, mournfully and with tears, 'when the little chap went. He was eight. And I had hated him so in the bad time.'
On another occasion, when we were walking through a street thronged by ragged, foul-faced, barefooted brats, about whose souls nobody appeared to care a jot, he said suddenly, 'When I used to see these children, just after my boy was dead, I couldn't help wondering why he should be taken and they should be left.'
Happily there is another child in the house now, and although he confesses that he is still anything but a baby's man, he does sometimes, anxiously overlooked by the little pale-haired wife, take this infant, who is so much more concerned for the present by teething than by salvation, on his knee and attempt, if not to derive joy from her, at least to relieve his wife of the nursing.
Certainly he will never drive that child and her mother, however fractious she may be, out of his house. Certainly he will one day love that child with all the force of his charming character.
O. B. D.
WHEN a man becomes converted the Salvation Army nurses him carefully until he is strong in the new life; that is to say, experienced officers visit him several times in the day, encourage him in his new purpose and, above all, deepen in his mind the conviction that someone cares for him.
The conversion of the Puncher, which was so important matter to the corps in that quarter of London, was watched over by the angeladjutant. She paid visits to him in his home, dropped in to see him at his work, and waylaid him, with affection, on his way home.
He was at work in a carriage-builder's factory, and the proprietor of the establishment was an infidel. But between this man and the adjutant was one point in common, music; both played the concertina and loved it above all the instruments. 'Oh, I only played in an ordinary way,' the adjutant tells me; adding with enthusiasm, but he was a master.'
It was the concertina which made it possible for the Christian to invade the premises of the infidel. Adjutant and carriage proprietor had many pleasant and quite amiable conversations. In this busy factory in the midst of London, they talked of music, and the angel, watching over the Puncher's conversion, softened the asperities of the infidel's worship of the No-God.
One day she was talking to the Puncher in the carriage factory, when he said to her, 'I wish you'd have a talk with the man who comes round here with the papers; he's proper low; they call him Old Born Drunk; and he looks it. But I was almost like that myself, not so very long ago. No one can be hopeless, after me. I wish you'd speak to him.' Thus early in his conversion did the Puncher that quiet and mysterious personality manifest what one calls his 'passion for souls.' The little adjutant waited one day to see this man who had a newspaper round, and who visited the carriage factory to serve the workmen with betting news.
She had seen many of the lowest and most depraved people in London, but until she saw Old Born Drunk never had she realized the hideousness and repulsive abomination to which vice can degrade the human body.
This man, the child of frightfully drunken parents, had been born in drink, and was almost certainly, as his name declared, actually born drunk. He had been taught to drink and had acquired an insatiable appetite for drink in earliest childhood. He was now, at the age of fiveor six-and-forty, habitually drunk sodden.
The vileness of his clothing and the unhealthy appearance of his flesh did not strike the Adjutant till afterwards. Her whole attention was held in a kind of horror by the aspect of the man's eyes. They were terrible with soullessness. She racks her brain in vain to find words to describe them. She returns again and again to the word stupefied. That is the word that least fails to misrepresent what no language can describe. Stupefied! Not weakness, not feebleness; not cunning, not depravity; but stupor. They were the eyes of a man neither living nor dead; they were the eyes of nothing that had ever lived or could ever die the eyes of eternal stillborn stupor.
These eyes were hardly discernible, for the flaccid lids hung over the pupils, and the bagged flesh of the swollen white face pressed upon them from below. There was just a disc of glazed luminosity showing in each dwindled socket a disc of veiling existence, perishing life, of stupor.
For the rest he was a true Miserable, lower than anything to be found among barbarous nations, debased almost out of humanity. He was short, thick-set, misshapen, vile; clothed in rags which suffocated those who blundered near to him; a creature whom ragged children mocked with scorn as he passed down the street.
Civilization had produced this man. He had his place in London; repulsive as one may find it to contemplate him, he was one of our contemporaries; to the Salvationist he represented a soul.
She said to him, 'You don't look very happy. Are you?' He looked, in his dazed fashion, into her clear eyes and kept silence, as though he had lost both the power of speech and the ability to understand it. She said, 'Perhaps I could be of some service to you; will you let me try? Will you let me come and see you in your home?'
Old Born Drunk could not speak. She approached quite close to him, bent her kind eyes towards those terrible eyes of stupor, and said, 'I want to help you. I know something about your life. They call you Old Born Drunk. Well, Old Born Drunk, let me come and pay you a visit, and make friends with you. There may be many little ways in which I can help you. Let me try.'
She made him at last understand. He told her where he lived. Soon afterwards she called upon him.
He occupied a single room, for which he paid seven shillings a week, in a street more notorious for abject destitution than for crime and degradation. She was not in the least afraid of visiting this place, but when she opened the door of the room good and angelic as she is the little adjutant almost turned and ran away. Such a smell issued from the den as stifled the lungs and made the spirit heave and shudder with disgust.
Guy de Maupassant has described the odours of a peasant's domicile, with a strength and power of truth which are unforgettable. Something of the same old sour reek, but intensified to loathsomeness by London squalor and slum air, hung like a thick curtain in this den of Old Born Drunk. Guy de Maupassant speaks of the smell of milk, apples, smoke, and that indefinable odour of old houses smell of the earth, smell of the walls, smell of the furniture, smell of ancient spilled soup, and ancient washings, and old poor peasants; smell of animals and people living together, smell of things and of beings, a smell of Time the smell of the Past.
In the den of Old Born Drunk there were all these several smells, even the smell of animals, for the place was like a menagerie.
A dog lifted itself up on the vile coverlet of an unmade bed, and growled at the intruder. A litter of guinea-pigs scuttered across the bare and filthy boards of the floor, disappearing under the bed. Rabbit-hutches, with the dusky shapes of their inmates dimly seen behind wire netting, emitted a thick and stifling smell. There were cats on a sack by the hearth. Hanging from the ceiling in front of the closed window was a cage of doves.
This London interior was dark as well as stifling. A fog seemed to pervade it from dirty wall to dirty wall, from dark ceiling to reeking floor. A figure moved out of this fog, while the dog growled on the unmade bed; it became gradually something that suggested a woman a creature thin, emaciated, woebegone, clothed almost entirely in sacking. She stood before the Salvationist, in all her wretchedness and squalor; a thing really lower than the animals among whom she spent her life; a woman the woman who loved Old Born Drunk. Consider the miracle. Imagine to what misery a woman can be brought that she should marry such a man. Reflect that this woman loved him.
The adjutant entered the room and talked to this miracle the woman who loved Old Born Drunk. The birds and animals provided a topic of conversation. She discovered that they belonged to the child of these two poor people. Yes, they had a child, a new life had been born into this den; and these animals and birds were the boy's pets.
The mother fetched a photograph and handed it to the visitor, not without pride. Astonished, the adjutant beheld in this picture a bright, handsome, and well-dressed boy. The intelligence in his face, and the self-respect in his bearing filled her with amazement. She could hardly believe that he was the child of these parents.
'This is your son?' she asked.
Yes,' said the woman, in her weary way. 'He don't look it, do he? But we've been very careful with him, and he's in a good situation, so perhaps he'll be all right. We hope he will, at all events.'
Then the adjutant discovered that these frightful parents in the midst of their destitution and degradation loved this one child with a selfabnegation and devotion quite wonderful in its purity and strength. For him the den reeked, because when he visited them he liked to see his old pets; and for him those pets had been bought, in the first place, out of coppers earned on the newspaper round, and denied, God knows with what struggle, to a publican by a dipsomaniac, by poor Old Born Drunk, who had this one pure passion growing like a white flower in the corruption of his soul. The drunkard and his wife loved their son. The den was his home.
The Salvationist made this boy the lever of her appeal. She came constantly to the vile den, and saw the parents together. They were both easily convinced of her first premiss, that life would be certainly more comfortable for them if Old Born Drunk signed the pledge and kept it. But even the wife, who was not a drunkard, appeared to agree with her husband that such a consummation lay quite in the realms of fantasy. 'You see,' said his wife, 'he's been used to it from a little 'un; it's meat and drink to him; look at his name, Old Born Drunk! I really don't think he'd be good for anything if he was to give it up, I don't really.' As for Old Born Drunk himself, he did not argue the question; he merely left it with a great silence in the region of the impossible. He listened to the chatter of the women as a philosopher might heed for a moment the notes of quarrelling sparrows.
But the adjutant's kindness and humanity did so far appeal to these two Londoners as to induce them to attend some of the services at the local hall. They left their menagerie, and in their poor vile rags came to the evening meetings, and sat with the Miserables at the back of the hall, listening to the band, listening to the hymns, listening to the praying and preaching, feeling the warmth, brightness and cleanness of the atmosphere thinking something in their minds of which we have no knowledge. Both of them appeared stupefied on these occasions. Apparently the service had no meaning for them. In just such a similar manner two owls in a belfry might listen to church music. They came, they sat, they disappeared.
The adjutant began to feel that they had fallen below the depths to which human sympathy can reach. Her officers used to say, in despair, 'They don't seem to understand a word that is said to them.' It was this deep stupor of the two Miserables which made for hopelessness and despair. One did not feel their sins or their wretchedness a bar; but this terrible stupor of the understanding was like a thick impenetrable curtain let down between their souls and the light. No one could reach them. They did not understand.
Just about this time the Puncher and the adjutant conceived the idea of a great and stirring revival. The Puncher and those whom he had influenced it must be carefully remembered that these men were once the terrors of the neighbourhood agreed that they would make a public exhibition of themselves in the worst streets, and afterwards confess the whole story of their lives, man by man, in the hall. Do not let it be thought that any one of these men contemplated the exhibition with delight. They had to screw their courage to the ordeal; remember, there were their wives to be thought of, as well as a vast mob. The Puncher that quiet, pale-faced, sorrowful desirer of souls inspired the little corps with fortitude. 'God has done a lot for us,' he said; 'we oughtn't to mind doing a bit for Him.' The angel-adjutant listened to the ideas of these men, and the revival was planned.
The first effort took the form of a procession through the worst streets of the neighbourhood, at their most crowded hour of the evening, a procession of horse-drawn trolleys, with the converted terrors of the neighbourhood posed in various attitudes suggesting their past lives such, for instance, as a man in convict's dress suffering the penalty of his crimes.
The streets were thronged. While the trolleys made their way through the multitude, the adjutant and her assistants passed among the crowd, inviting people to attend the meeting in the hall. The result was such a pack as never before had filled the large meeting-place. Among this vast audience was Old Born Drunk and his wife, who had come early on the invitation of the adjutant.
The meeting began with a hymn, a reading of the parable of the Prodigal Son, a brief prayer, and then followed testimonies by the converted men. One after another they stood up, told how they had suffered, told how they had sunk to the -gutter, and how their homes were now happy, their lives clean, and their hearts glad. In the words of Professor James, these simple men of the people told their fellows how they had been consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy, and how they were now become, by the mercy of God, consciously right, superior, and happy.
The angel-adjutant then made her appeal. She declared that anybody in that hall, never mind how vile and deserted and shameful, could become in an instant radiant with happiness and peace, by coming to the penitent-form, kneeling there, and asking God to forgive him his sins. She could point to the men on the platform as living proofs of her assurance.
Several people rose from their seats, most of them with that quiet dogged stolidity of the London workman, characteristic of his whole life, and advanced to the penitent form, like men who had to go through with something distasteful and hard. Some of them said, 'God be merciful to me a sinner!' others bowed and were silent; many of the women were crying.
At the back of these penitents came Old Born Drunk and his wife.
The adjutant and her officers were more astonished than all the rest of the people in the meeting. They knew, what the others did not realize, the impenetrable stupefaction of the man's mind, his total obfuscation of soul. For the others, he was only a particularly dirty, particularly vile, particularly drunken one-of-themselves.
The adjutant approached the poor old man as he reached the bench. The small dulled eyes were wet with tears.
She put a hand on his arm, and he said to her, in a crying tone, 'Oh, I want to be like Joe!' one of the men who had testified.
Afterwards he said to her, 'While I was listening to Joe, thinking of what he's been, and seeing what he's become, all of a sudden it took me that I'd find God and get Him to make me like Joe. It took me like that. I just felt, all of a sudden, determined to find God. Determined!' he repeated, with energy astonishing in this broken and hopeless creature of alcoholism. 'And,' he went on, 'while I was kneeling, while I was praying, I felt the spirit of God come upon me. I said, "Oh, God, make me like Joe!" and while I prayed I felt the spirit come upon me. I knew I could become like Joe. I know I am saved.'
He was quite emphatic. But, the adjutant, knowing the power of temptation, realizing the saturation of this man's whole being by alcohol, feared greatly for the stability of his salvation. She feared chiefly on one account. The newspaper round by which he earned daily bread included practically all the public-houses in that quarter. Unless some other work could be found for Old Born Drunk, surely he must fall some day, surely the temptation would one day prove too strong for him. On the other hand, if work of a different kind could be found for him, even this sunken dipsomaniac might, by the grace of God, make fight against his madness. It was just possible. She had seen miracles almost as wonderful.
She went to discuss things with Old Born Drunk.
He sat and listened to all she said with the old dazed stupor in his eyes, apparently not understanding one of the kind and considerate words that were said to him. The adjutant turned to his wife, 'Is there no other work he can do? Doesn't he feel that he would like some kind of work that he has seen other men doing?'
The wife looked at her husband, 'Do you, dear?'
He began to move his lips, considering how to express his thoughts. Then he said, 'I don't want anything else.' He paused a moment, glancing from the guinea-pigs on the floor to the grimy window. 'I must show them,' he said, ' that I am converted.'
The adjutant endeavoured to make him realize his danger. For weeks, for months, he might be able to withstand temptation. But, if the moment came, some day in the future, when, perhaps, he was not well, or felt unhappy might he not fail? She made him, or rather she tried to make him, see that conversion is a long road. The first low dies away; one sees beyond this lifting glory a long straight road running to life's end. One rises from one's knees to trudge that long road. First, one mounts up with wings, like an eagle; then one runs, and is not weary; finally, the grand climax one must walk and not faint. The adjutant laboured to bring this conviction home to the understanding of the dipsomaniac.
The man said, 'I must show them that I am converted.'
The adjutant continued to watch over this brand plucked from the burning. He remained firm. She asked him if he ever felt tempted. He replied, 'The appetite has gone.' They watched him go in and out of the public-houses he was unafraid. The other converts paid him visits in his den; they all asked the same question, Did he feel quite sure that drink had no temptation for him? Always the same answer, 'The appetite has gone.' It seemed true. And yet, how inconceivable!
One day he entered a public-house crowded with workmen. It was Saturday afternoon. Pockets were full of money. Wives and children were forgotten. The place was a din of loud voices and coarse laughter. Old Born Drunk approached the counter with his journals.
There is always a spirit of festivity and good-humour in a public-house on Saturday afternoons. The workmen, after a pot or two of beer, are inclined to horse-play. One of the drinkers exclaimed, 'Hullo, God strike me dead, if this isn't Old Born Drunk! Come here, daddy; I'll stand you a pot. We'll wet the Salvation Army.' Old Born Drunk served out his papers. The workman called for a pot of beer. Here, drink, you old!' he exclaimed, forcing the pot towards the convert.
Old Born Drunk shook his head. 'Come, drink it, like a man! What's a pot to you? Gallons is your mark. Drink it!' 'No.' 'Look here, daddy; you're poor, aren't you?' 'Yes.' 'Got the missus and the kid to feed?' 'Yes.' A bob'd make a Jot of difference to you, wouldn't it? See here, daddy; I'll give you a bob, straight, I will, honour bright if you'll drink this pot. Smell it. Smell it, old cock. Ain't it good? Come along, drink it and earn a bob.' 'Not me. ' 'You won't?' 'No.' 'Not for a bob?' 'Not for thousands. ' 'You mean it?' 'Yes.' 'Then have it outside!' and with that the mocking workman flung the whole pot of beer into the old man's face.
There was laughter at this, laughter, too, at the pitiful figure of the old drenched man, blinking his eyes, shaking the drops from his face, wiping the liquor from his mouth and chin.
'Don't it smell good, daddy?' laughed the tormentor. 'Ain't beer got a lovely smell to it? You silly old fool! Why didn't you take it inside, instead of out? Come here, I'll give you another drop. I'll stand you one. You shan't have the shilling, but you shall have the beer.'
'I don't want it,' said the old man.
His firmness, his quietness under persecution, moved the rough men in the bar. One of them took up a subscription. Old Born Drunk left the place with a pocket full of money. Also, he left it as a hero.
Weeks, months, years passed away. The old fellow remained firm. And he made little economies, in spite of subscriptions to the local corps of the Salvation Army. One day he was rich enough to take a tiny shop in the neighbourhood. His wife and son moved out of the dreadful den, and began a new life, full of happiness. They entered the ranks of respectability.
It was the old fellow's steadfastness and lasting fortitude which made both the wife and the son join the Salvation Army. This represented the height of earthly happiness to Old Born Drunk, because he had all along nursed one great hope in the profound of his being the hope that some day his son would be an officer in the Army, that is to say, would devote all his life to the work. Old Born Drunk was not fit for such high work; it was necessary for him to earn his living; all he could do was to attend the meetings, march behind the band, saying a word or two in private to those of his customers who were sad and unhappy. But his son had book learning, his son was good he might perhaps be one day an officer in this great, merciful, and universal army of salvation.
This once ruined creature was now happy and whole. His conversion appeared so extraordinary to the people in the neighbourhood, extraordinary in its lastingness as well as in its effects, that he became a power for righteousness without exerting any missionary zeal. People looked at him in the streets. Vicious and degraded men at street corners, or at the doors of public-houses, regarded the old man, born again and living in respectability and happiness, with something of the same stirring in their brains as once had made him exclaim, 'I want to be like Joe.' He advertised salvation.
Religion to these people is not a theology. It is a fact. They are not mystical. They are incapable of definitions. Old Born Drunk himself could not have told you anything about the articles of his religion or his conception of the nature of God. He only knew that God had saved him, directly he sought salvation with a determined mind. He only knew that instantly he had been delivered from absolute wretchedness. He only knew that he was now very happy.
And this is also what the outcasts saw in him. They saw that perhaps the very lowest man in the whole neighbourhood, the man, at any rate, most sunken in drunkenness, was now walking in their midst, clean, happy, and respectable. He had got religion. Religion had done the miracle. Religion was a good thing, if only a man could once make up his mind to take the step. Look at Old Born Drunk. What a difference religion had made to him! Before the miracle of Old Born Drunk the arguments of tavern atheists melted into thin air. Facts are stubborn things, and never more stubborn than when they walk the street and breathe human air.
In this way Old Born Drunk made a profound impression in that quarter of the town. Not, of course, such a marvellous and staggering impression as that produced by the Puncher's conversion, but a quiet and very lasting impression. He was discussed in that locality, as a novel or a picture in another quarter of the town. Never a public house argument about religion that did not end with, 'Well, anyhow, what about Old Born Drunk?'
One day the adjutant learned that he was ill. She went at once to see him. He was dying. She sat at his bedside very often while he was waiting for death, and he talked to her then, not more fluently than he had talked heretofore, but with more candour. She said to him once, 'Well, you have fought the good fight, dear old friend. You never looked back. You never fell. It has been a great victory. It has blessed others beside yourself. I can tell you now that many thought you would not be able to last. They thought that the appetite would return, and that it would prove too strong for you. Many, many people have prayed that you might have strength in that moment, if it ever came.' He smiled wistfully, and said to her, 'You used to think as how it was the drink that might come upon me again, it wasn't that. God took all desire for it clean away from me. No; that wasn't the miracle. The greatest miracle was the pipe!'
Then he told her that all through those years, when they thought the temptation to drink was tearing his soul, he was putting up a tremendous fight with the one appetite that would not leave him, the appetite for tobacco.
His struggle had been secret to himself. It had been almost intolerable. At times he felt that he must go mad. There was something in his brain which was like a devil, urging him with the most pitiless and unceasing force to the nulling narcotic of nicotine. Always. Never had it left him. And he had fought it, not because he felt that it was sinful to smoke, not even that he feared it might re-create his appetite for drink, but because he wanted to be as good a soldier as he could, to give up everything for God.
And so, on his dying bed, this old Londoner, picked from the gutter and restored to humanity, contemplated as the great miracle, not his conversion, not his total and mysterious freedom from alcoholism, but the ability with which God had provided him to withstand the passion for his pipe. Always the torture had been present, always strength had been sufficient to withstand it.
Just before the moment of his death, the adjutant said to him, 'You are quite happy? You know that God has forgiven you everything?'
He answered, 'I am without fear.'
In that neighbourhood people still talk about Old Born Drunk, and they like to impress those who will listen with the wonder of his funeral. He was given what is called 'an Army funeral,' that is to say, he was buried with the military honours of salvation, just as a great soldier, a national hero, is buried with martial pomp. Thousands of people lined the streets and followed the procession to the cemetery. The entire district turned out like one man to see the last of Old Born Drunk to stare, perhaps, at the pageant, to be influenced, however, whether they wished it or not, by the good end of a brave fighter. A stranger entering that quarter of the town would have thought that the populace had turned out for the funeral of their prince.
Such is the extraordinary parochialism of London, a truth of the metropolis little realized by the casual observer. A few hundred yards away from that particular quarter of the town, no one had heard of Old Born Drunk. In that particular quarter he was more famous, more watched, more discussed than the greatest heroes of the nation. His death was an event. His salvation was a profound impression. The quarter of the town in which he lived and died feels to this day, an^ will feel through many generations, the effect of his salvation.
THE CRIMINAL
A GREAT step will be taken towards the abolition of crime when the State recognizes that criminals are human beings extremely like ourselves. It is quite a fair thing to say of the mass of civilized mankind that their primary objective in existence is money; and it is no less fair to say that the vast majority desire to get more money than is necessary for their actual needs with as little labour as possible. Indeed, the whole spirit of modern politics and trade organizations, in its ultimate purpose, represents this individual search after as large a reward as possible for as little exertion as may be. Higher wages and shorter hours of employment is the respectable and social formula of that disreputable and anti-social energy which actuates the criminal mind, and expresses itself in the familiar formulae of thieves' philosophy.
But there is something else. The criminal is often heroic in his character, superior to the ruck, a man of daring, romance, and adventure.
Mr. Havelock Ellis quotes endless authorities in his book on The Criminal to prove that those whom we call enemies of society are only following impulses which were praiseworthy in another age, and which are even in this age practised by a great many people who flourish in the front ranks of our industrial civilization. 'Of a very great number of modern habitual criminals,' says one authority, 'it may be said that they have the misfortune to live in an age in which their merits are not appreciated. Had they been in the world a sufficient number of generations ago, the strongest of them might have been chiefs of a tribe. . . . With the disposition and the habits of uncivilized men which he has inherited from a remote past, the criminal has to live in a country where the majority of the inhabitants have learned new lessons of life, and where he is regarded more and more as an outcast as he strives more and more to fulfil the yearnings of his nature.'
Another authority says, 'Some of them at least would have been the ornament and the moral aristocracy of a tribe of Red Indians.' Another, 'The criminal of to-day is the hero of our old legends. We put in prison to-day the man who would have been the dreaded and respected chief of a clan or tribe.' Another exclaims, 'How many of Homer's heroes would to-day be in a convict prison, or, at all events, despised as violent and unjust?'
We may also see with but very little effort of observation that there are a great many public men enjoying the reward of fortune at the present day whose success in financial jugglery has been won by methods exactly similar to the criminal's more blundering attempts after the wealth of other people. Every time a company-promoting case occurs in the law courts, although by his knowledge of the company-law and the difficulty of obtaining evidence in such cases, the defendant may escape prison, every man of affairs knows that he is a blackguard of the lowest kind, a criminal set upon getting other people's money by dishonest means, and a rogue as greatly deserving penal servitude as any burglar or petty larcener in a convict prison.
As to when criminal instincts first manifest themselves, one who had visited juvenile offenders in Tothill Fields wrote: 'On our return ... we consulted with some of our friends as to the various peccadilloes of their youth, and though each we asked had grown to be a man of some little mark in the world, both for intellect and honour, they, one and all, confessed to having committed in their younger days many of the very "crimes" for which the boys at Tothill Fields are incarcerated. For ourselves, we will frankly confess, that at Westminster School, where we passed some seven years of our boyhood, such acts were daily perpetrated; and yet if the scholars had been sent to the House of Correction, instead of Oxford or Cambridge, to complete their education, the country would now have seen many of our playmates working among the convicts in the Dockyards, rather than lending dignity to the senate or honour to the bench.'
The story which I am about to tell in this place is the narrative of a modern criminal which emphasizes everything that has ever been written on the subject by anthropologists and criminologists; but, as the end will prove, it shows that even in a mind penetrated and interpenetrated with anti-social instincts there is some one thing to which appeal may be made, and by which such reform can be effected as to lead to a complete spiritual regeneration. Psychology cannot neglect this regenerating influence and call itself a complete science of the human mind. Criminologists and prison reformers can effect little for the permanent improvement of the habitual criminal without the employment of this force. One power, and one alone, can make the habitual criminal a good man in the loftiest and only lasting sense of that term, and that force is religion.
Born in the slums of London, with parents rather better than the average, the man in this story, whom we will call Joe, found himself with the streets for his only playground, and with bad boys for the only companions worthy of his friendship. He was so enormously strong, so full of daring, so conscious of restriction and limitation in the narrowness of his circumstance, that he must needs fling himself heart and soul into the dare-devil adventures of boys hungry for a big life and bold enough to fight for it.
No Sunday-school could hold such a boy; no second-hand religion in a respectable church could impress his mind with the reality of spiritual things. He found himself surrounded by bricks and walls, and he wanted adventure. He felt himself capable of doing things worthy of a novelette, and he saw a policeman at the street corner. It became evident to him that if he wanted to fulfil the passion of his body, he must dare the police and find his adventures in the streets. To every powerful impulse of his nature society had set up circumambient opposition. It was necessary to make war upon society.
He was in prison at nine years of age.
Before getting into prison he had encountered the social law. He had stolen more clumsily than was his wont a piece of meat, with the result that he got eight strokes with the birch-rod. This punishment did not check him. He aimed at higher game. To be a petty thief did not satisfy his buccaneering ambitions. He conceived the idea of a burglary. The respectable reader, shocked by the thought of a child of nine committing burglary, must ask himself whether at that age he was not stealing sugar from the sideboard cupboard or candied-peel from the larder. He must remember, too, that this child of nine had been marched triumphantly to a police-court, had had the honour of appearing before a magistrate, and had been hardened by a birching. If, after this experience, he had played the lamb, what would the young lions of the slums have thought about him? Be it remembered that this boy was lion-hearted, bold, daring, brave, strong, and indifferent to punishment.