They come
each year in hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands, crowding
the crowded trades, crowding closer the crowded dens in which human
beings whelp and stable as beasts. They leave friends and neighbours
who love them, leave earth for hell, and still they come. The
tenement, huge monster of modern greed, engulfs them, and the word
home is stricken from their tongue.
"They tell us that yesterday a man in a fit of insanity murdered
his wife and two daughters. Insanity? Love has its hours when
death becomes beautiful. Poets sing of old Virginius who slew his
daughter to save her from dishonour. May it not be better to die
a man than live a beast?
"There are conditions about us where suicide is a luxury and the
death of a child a joy. They are gathered to the Potters' Field,
but they rest. We pile them one on top of the other in big black
trenches, but the dawn does not call them to beastly toil. Their
little forms moulder, but they no longer cry for bread and their
pinched faces no longer try to smile. They are safe in Death's
land-locked harbour.
"Last year the deaths on this island numbered forty thousand. Ten
thousand--one in four--were buried from hospitals, jails, almshouses,
asylums and workhouses.
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