Part 38 (2/2)

Think--be careful--be not uncharitable--good mother. Would you let it go with those who saved its life to be reared with them--taught their creed--perhaps to hate yours? Certainly if taught the principles of temperance--virtue--neatness--her child could not love its drunken mother, in her rags and dirt and life of sin.

”But then the child would be brought up by religious teachers, and taught to be a Christian.”

Yes, a Protestant Christian; she is a good Catholic. Would you willingly give up your child if it were to be reared a Pagan, a Mahometan, or even a Jew?

”No! I would let it die.”

There spoke the Five Points mother. Sooner than it should go into a Protestant house, she would see it die.

Alas! poor human nature; yes, poor human nature, sunk down into those depths of misery and degradation, yet every one of them are our brothers and sisters, who are rearing up children like themselves, as true as like produces like, while we look on, shrug our comfortably-wrapped shoulders, and ”Thank G.o.d we are not like one of these,” and yet never give, out of our abundance, one cent to make one of them like one of us.

”Well, what of her husband?”

”My husband, is it?” she said, as she stood glaring at us; ”my husband?

Go, look in your city prison, you old gray-headed villains, where ye or the likes of ye, murdered him without judge or jury. Did you try him for his life? No. Had he been a murderer? No. Had he done any crime? No. You licensed him to sell liquor, and he drank too much--I drank too much--what else can you expect, when you set fools to play with live coals, but they will burn themselves? What next? What is the natural consequence of getting drunk? A quarrel. I know it. Don't ask me what I get drunk for; I know you did not speak, but I saw it in your eye--yes, your eye--turn it away--I cannot bear it, it looks right into my soul.

Don't look at me that way, or I shall cry, and I had rather die than do that. It would kill me to cry for such as you, who murdered my poor husband. You licensed him to sell rum, in the first place, to make other wives miserable with drunken husbands--mine was not drunken then, and I did not have to live in such a hole as this--look around you, ye murdering villains. What do you see?--poverty, filth, and rags; starvation, misery, crime--on that bed is my dying boy--that is nothing.

Let him die, I am glad of it--the priest has made it all right with him.

Now, look in that bed, rum-selling, licensing whelps that you are--that is worse than the dying boy in the other--see what we have bought with our money paid to your excise office. See what a mother is sunk to by rum. Yes, I do drink it--why do your eyes ask the question? I do drink, and will again. What else have I got to live for? What lower hole can I sink to? Me, a mother. A mother! Mother of that shameless girl, do you see her, there in that bed, before her mother's eyes?”

”Yes, and a pretty looking, bright-eyed girl she is.”

”Bright-eyed. Yes, bright-eyed. I would to Heaven she had none--that she had been born blind. Her bright eyes have been her ruin--a curse to her and the mother that bore her--they are a curse to any poor girl among such villains as you are. Ye are men--how many hearts have you broken?--withered, trampled on?--there, go, go. I hate the sight of all men.”

”Who is this man I see with your daughter; is he her husband?”

”Husband! husband! Do the like of her get husbands? Where is my husband?”

”We cannot tell, can you?”

”Tell! who can tell where a man is that died drunk--died--murdered in your man-killing city prison, and the priest not there to give him absolution. What had he done? What crime? Drank rum that you licensed him to sell--beat me because I drank too. What next? Next come your dirty police--the biggest scoundrels in the city--mad at my husband because he would not 'touch their palms,' and drag him to the Tombs--a right name--good name--true name--Tombs indeed--a tomb to my husband.”

”Did he die there?”

”No! he was murdered there. Look here. Can you read? Yes, yes, I know ye can. So can I. Do you see that account of prisoners dying by suffocation--poisoned by carbonic acid gas--there, read it,”--and she thrust a crumpled paper before us--”read how ye reform drunkards--shut them up in prison cells, and in spite of their prayers, and groans, and dying cries for air, ye let them die. Are ye not murderers? Do you see that name? That is--that was my husband. Ha, ha, ha! Now, what is he, where is he? Don't answer--I know your answer; but if he is in h.e.l.l, who sent him there? Who, who, who?”

And she sank down upon one of the pallets which were spread over the floor, in a paroxysm of wild, delirious grief and rage, speechless as her dying boy, lying unheeded and unheeding, by her side. What could we do? Nothing here; much elsewhere; and we looked up and registered a vow, that much as she hated us for what we had not done, yet had permitted our fellows to do without crying out against them, that she should be avenged. If we could do nothing here--if we could not pull down the st.u.r.dy oak by taking hold of its topmost branches, yet, although its mighty strength defies our weak efforts thus applied, we can and will dig around its roots--we will take away the life-sustaining earth--and that strong tree shall be made to feel our power--it shall wither, dry up, and die, and time shall rot down its strong trunk, and the place that once knew it, shall know it no more.

This then is our pledge, made over that dying boy, and, worse than by murder, widowed mother, and here now we redeem it. Here we expose the hydra-headed monster--the orphan and widow-maker--the property, health, and virtue-destroyer. Sad, harrowing as these scenes of wretchedness and misery are, they must be laid open to the gaze of the world. ”Wounds must be seen to be healed.” Weak nerves tremble at the idea that physicians cut and carve the dead, talking, aye laughing, as freely over the quiet heart and still nerves in the dissecting-room, as the butcher over his beef upon the market house block; yet without the dissecting of one and butchering of the other, how should the maimed be healed, or meat-eating mult.i.tude be fed? So let us on with our panorama of scenes from life in New York.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD PLATO COOKING HOT CORN.--_Page 321._]

Let us open this door. Ah! we have been here before.

The room is seven by twelve feet, under the roof, which comes down at one end within a foot of the floor. There is a broken, dirty, window in the roof, at the right hand of the door as we enter on the side. No fire-place or stove, no table, only two broken chairs--a very old bureau--a dilapidated trunk--a band-box--a few articles of female apparel--some poor dishes and a few cooking utensils--used upon a little portable furnace standing in the room--a poor old bedstead and straw bed in one corner--a child's cot and a doll; and yet the only occupant of the room is an old negro man, who sits of nights upon cold stones, crying Hot Corn. We look about wonderingly, peering in here and there, but except the old man we see no one.

”She gone, ma.s.sa, clean gone--cry old eyes out when I come home next day arter dat one, you know ma.s.sa, which one dis child mean--sad day--don't like to mention him, ma.s.sa--give me chaw terbacca, ma.s.sa--come home and find her and little sis--nice child dat--”

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