I see more. I see the children old before their time, looking up with pale and piteous faces. I see some with blighted bodies, and I know that rounded limbs and happy hearts are not for them. Still more do I see: matronly women, charged with being drunk, holding in their arms little bits of mortality. Puling cries are heard, but soon hushed, for I see the little ones draw from their mothers that leprous distilment that shall blast their lives and wither their bodies. I see more: young men to whom obscenity is the breath of life and immorality the highest good. I see some young in years who have already come to the wayside of life, for their bones are full of their sin. I see young women, sometimes fair and sometimes foul to look upon, but whether fair or foul, half beast and half human. I hear stories of lust, drunkenness, and theft. I see the smartly-dressed harpies who farm them waiting to pay their fines. I see the most despicable of all mankind, the fellows who live upon them, hovering by like beasts of prey. I see old men of threescore and ten and old women of equal age, whose tottering limbs have borne them from the workhouse to the public-house, that they might drink and forget their misery once more before they die.
I see them all; they are around me now. I breathe again the sickening whiff of stale debauch; I am faint with the unspeakable atmosphere; the chloride of lime is again in my throat, and my nostrils tingle with it. But I see more: I see the matter-of-fact way in which all this was received. I see that no one wonders at it. I see that all this is looked upon as perfectly natural, for I see no look of wonder, no divine pity, no burning indignation--all, all received as a perfect matter of course, and all, all quite as it should be.
Now, what I saw, dear reader, on that particular Monday in that particular court you may see on any Monday in any of our Metropolitan police courts, and on any other day, only in a less degree. Year in and year out the procession of the sinning and sorrowing passes through all our courts. Prison and death thin the ranks of the procession; but the public-house is a grand recruiting agency, and neither police nor magistrates are likely to be idle, neither is the procession likely to dwindle, or the ‘yell of the trampled wife’ to cease, while the public-house holds its triumphant sway.