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?
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 God 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.
"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?"