James Ewing Ritchie - The Night Side of London стр 5.

Those who know London life will know that I have not glanced at its darkest side: any man of the world will tell you infamies which I may not name here. I do not go so far as Mr Patmore, and affirm that in the higher ranks of life a young man is obliged to keep a mistress to avoid being laughed at; but I can conceive of no city more sunk in licentiousness and rascality than ours. Paris, Hamburgh, Vienna, may be as bad, but they cannot be worse. The poor are looked after by the police visited by the city missionary; their wants and woes are worked up into newspaper articles, and they live as it were in houses of glass. It is true that one half the world does not know how the other half lives; but it is not true in the sense in which it is generally affirmed. Who ever has an idea that a pious baronet, taking the chair at a religious meeting in Exeter Hall, will prove a felon; that that house, eminent in the mercantile and philanthropic world, will sanction the circulation of forged Dock warrants; that that manager, about to engage in prayer at a meeting of directors, will turn out to be the manager of the greatest swindle of modern times? Who sees a dishonoured suicide in the patriotic Sadleir, or in the philanthropic Redpath a convict for life, or in the dashing Robson a maniac? If I tell you that respectable old gentleman now coming out of his club is going to inspect a fresh victim, whom some procuress has lured with devilish art, you will tell me that I am uncharitable; or if I point you to that well-appointed equipage in the Park, and tell you that that fair young girl that sits within has crushed many a young wifes heart, and has sent many a man to the devil before his time, you will tell me I exaggerate: I do nothing of the kind. If I were to tell what most men know what everyone knows, except those whose business it is to know it, and to seek to reform it I should be charged with indelicacy, as if truth could be indelicate, and my book perhaps suppressed by the Society for the Suppression of Vice if that abortion exists still. We are choked up with cant; almost everything we believe in is a lie. The prayer of Ajax should be ours,  Light more light.

What are we to do?  to stand stock still, looking to heaven with a frenzied air, as if to ask if a God were there? One can almost believe, with George Gilfillan, that the earth needs a new gospel and a new manifestation of divine power. From this low estate who is to rescue us? Not the aristocracy, a barbarous institution, perpetrating barbarous ideas in our midst,  that work is not honourable; whereas all true civilization points us to the fact, that man is only happy and virtuous as he is steadily industrious; and thus our most uncivilized classes are our upper and lower,  our lords and ladies on one side, and our rogues and prostitutes on the other. Not our law-makers, who imprison our young lads in costly jails, where the criminals have luxuries denied to the poor; and then in Newgate, or at the public works, mix them all up together, that the comparatively innocent may learn to be adepts in crime. Not our religious, I fear, when, from the Archbishop of Canterbury down to Dr Cumming, the cry is, If you have a proper translation of the Bible you will destroy the faith of the people. Not our trading classes, becoming richer and more sunk in flunkeyism every day. But it may be that these

Whom am I to blame? Not the victims, but the fathers, and mothers, and divines, and schoolmasters, and governing classes. Father, you have given your bold, manly son an emasculated religion,  a religion that wilfully shuts its eyes, and will not look upon life as it is; and, immediately he goes into the world, away vanish all the pasteboard defences with which you childishly sought to guard him; and yet you will not confess that in inculcating religious creeds,  that in teaching children catechisms,  that in vaguely telling them to be good,  that in leading them to believe in forms rather than truths, you are only damming up for a while the passionate impulses of young blood, that they may ultimately exert a more tumultuous and irresistible sway. You take the little Arab of the streets, and, for acts of levity and wantonness which all boys commit, you send him to prison, at an age when you confess he is not a responsible creature, and then idiotically wonder that he turns out a criminal, and that he wars with society till he is hanged. You are surprised that woman, fond of praise, of dress, and pleasure, should prefer to walk the street in silk and satin, to have a short life and a merry one, rather than slave and drudge, and end her days after all in a workhouse. You tone down your fashionably educated daughters into automatons, and then wonder that hot youth finds domestic life tame and dull. Above all, do not go away with the idea that we have reached the utmost height of civilization,  that we are a model people,  that it is our mission to set up as teachers of religion to all mankind. Let us remember that the increase of crime and dissipation are facts; that there can be no corrupter city than London, and that it must be so, so long as we make professions our practice so scandalously denies. I have heard Her Majestys proclamation against vice and immorality read at quarter-sessions by men in whose reading it became a farce which the most ignorant bumpkin in court could relish. Now we are going to do wonders, the policeman is to supplement the parson, the wicked are to be hunted down. Is this the way seriously to set about moral reform? Routine and officialism in church and state have made the outside of the sepulchre white enough; do we not need a little cleansing within? How long will men look for grapes from thorns?

SEEING A MAN HANGED

I am not about to give an opinion as to the propriety or impropriety of capital punishments. On this point good men have differed, and will differ, I dare say, for some time to come. What I wish to impress upon the philanthropic or Christian reader is the horrible nature and atrocious effect of a public execution.

A few Sunday evenings since I was passing by Newgate, along the outside of which a considerable crowd had been collected. Respectable mechanics, with their wives and children, were staring at its dreary stone walls. Ragged boys and girls were romping and laughing in the streets. All the neighbouring public-houses were filled with a tipsy crowd. Here and there a few barriers had been erected, and workmen were engaged in putting up more. Why were these preparations made? For what purpose had this crowd collected? A man was to be hung, was the reply. I resolved for once to see the tragedy performed. To me or the living mass around, that man was an utter stranger. I had never seen him or heard the sound of his voice; all I knew was that he had led an outlaws life, and was to die as outlaws ofttimes do. How strange the mysterious interest with which death clothes everything it touches! Is it that looking at a man so soon to have done with life we fancy we can better pry into the great secret? Do we deem that seeing him struggle we shall die more manfully ourselves, or is it merely the vague interest with which we regard any one about to travel into distant regions, all unknown to him or us, and the secrets of which he can never return to tell? Be this as it may, I went back at twelve. The public-houses had been closed, decent people had gone home to bed; but already the crowd had become denser, already had the thief and the bully from all the slums and stews of the metropolis been collected together. You can easily recognise the criminal population of our capital. The policeman knows them instinctively, as with their small wiry figures, restless eyes, and pale faces, they pass him by. One can tell them as easily as one knows the child of Norman origin by his noble bearing, or the Anglo-Saxon by his blue eyes and rosy cheeks. There is generally something fine, and genial, and hearty about an English mob. On the night of the peace-rejoicing you might have taken a lady from one end of London to the other, and she would not have heard an objectionable word, or been inconvenienced in the least; but the mob of which I now write seemed utterly repulsive and reprobate; all its sympathies seemed perverted. It is a hard world this, I know, and it has but little mercy for the erring and the unfortunate; but that they should regard it with such evil eyes, that they should be so completely estranged from all its recognised modes of thought and action, that it should seem to them such a complete curse, was what I was not prepared to expect. It really made ones blood run cold to hear the mob around me talk. The man to be hung had rushed into a jewellers shop as it was being closed, beaten the shopman, who tried to defend his masters property, with a life-preserver, and then left him for dead. But he had not said one word about his accomplices, and the crowd evidently admired him rather than not. The ticket-of-leave man was out on starvation, as one of them informed me. The Government, I drop the expressive adjective by which the noun was prefixed, dodges him, and if he steals it is only what he must do, and if murder follows it is not his fault, and Government is unjust in hanging him for it. Such was the popular notion of the subject in my immediate neighbourhood. Government seemed to have planned the opportunity for the holders of such opinions to ventilate them. Till eight oclock these men were to be formed into one compact mass; and how were they to pass their time if they did not talk? and here who was there to lift up his voice on behalf of law and order? and if there were such, who would have listened? Realise the state of the case. Look around! Where do you see the clear front and unabashed presence of honesty and virtue? The virtuous and the honest have long been in bed. Here there is a fight. That bundle of rags, with matted hair covering all the face so that you cannot clearly see a feature, is the Clare Market Pet, and she has just encountered Slashing Sal, between whom and herself there has been mortal enmity for years. Both women yes, they are women, nor so fallen are they but that the temperance agent or the city missionary may yet lead them to a diviner life, and He may smile on them who never yet turned away repentant son or daughter of sin and shame are very tipsy, very dirty, and very red. Shrieking and cursing, the Clare Market Pet rushes on Slashing Sal, who is by no means loth for the encounter. A ring is formed, men and boys halloo and encourage, and the battle rages furiously, though both women are far too drunk to do each other any serious harm. At length the Clare Market Pet is vanquished and order is restored, just as we are told tranquillity reigns at Naples. Please give me a penny, says a girl of about fourteen, and I find myself in the midst of a group of youthful costermongers and their wives, who have come here for a lark, just as they frequent the penny gaff, or crowd the gallery in the Victoria. I listen to their slang till I feel sick, as I think for what a future of crime and its result they are now rapidly ripening. In this Christian land can no agency be formed that shall save these young heathens? Again, I find a female standing by my side; she is horridly dirty; she stinks of gin; her face is that of the confirmed sot of one who has given up home and husband, and comfort, and decency, for the accursed drink. She looks very piteously in my face. And so they are going to hang the poor man, she exclaims; they have no mercy on him. You forget, I reply, the poor man whom he murdered, and on whom he had no mercy. No, I dont, she exclaims with tipsy gravity; he had no right to kill the man, and ought to be punished; but aint we all morally bad? but here the conversation ends, for she has sunk down, maudlin, stinking with gin, and overcome by it and weariness, on the doorstep. Ah, these doorsteps, let us look at them. To-night the police dont bid the habitués move on. What crowds are collected on them,  ragged boys, who, perhaps, have nowhere else to sleep, wild-looking women unbonnetted and shoeless, with red, uncombed hair, faces very much marked with the small pox, only seen on such occasions as these old men crouch on them for whom home has no charm, and life no lustre, and girls whose rouged cheeks and shabby finery tell to what wretchedness and degradation, though young in years, they have already come. Let them sleep on, if they can, on their stony mattress, beneath this inclement sky, out in this cold December night; they are happier now than they can be in their waking hours! But look at the windows, all lighted up and filled with gay company. Those two beautiful girls let us hope they are not ladies not English mothers or wives who have just stepped out of the brougham, and are now gazing from a first-floor on the wild human sea beneath, will sit playing cards and drinking champagne all night; yet scarce have the sounds of Sabbath bells died away, and in a few hours a man is to be hung, and these girls, all sensibility and tears, will sit with their opera glasses during the fearful agony, as if merely Grisi acted or Mario sang.