the Ginxes and their neighbors preserved any semblance of health
in this place, the most popular guardian on the board must own it
a miracle.  They, poor people, knew nothing of "sanitary reform,"
"sanitary precautions," "zymotics," "endemics," "epidemics,"
"deodorizers," or "disinfectants."  They regarded disease with
the apathy of creatures who felt it to be inseparable from
humanity, and with the fatalism of despair. 
 
Gin was their cardinal prescription, not for  cure, but for
oblivion: "Sold everywhere."  A score of palaces flourished
within call of each other in that dismal district--garish, rich-
looking dens, drawing to the support of their vulgar glory the
means, the lives, the eternal destinies of the wrecked masses
about them.  Veritable wreckers they who construct these haunts,
viler than the wretches who place false beacons and plunder
bodies on the beach.  Bring down the real owners of these places,
and show them their deadly work!  Some of them leading
Philanthropists, eloquent at Missionary meetings and Bible
Societies, paying tribute to the Lord out of the pockets of dying
drunkards, fighting glorious battles for slaves, and manfully
upholding popular rights.  My rich publican--forgive the
pun--before you pay tithes of mint and cummin, much more before
you claim to be a disciple of a certain Nazarene, take a lesson
from one who restored fourfold the money he had wrung from honest
toil, or reflect on the case of the man to whom it was said, "Go
sell all thou hast, and give to the poor."  The lips from which
that counsel dropped offered some unpleasant alternatives,
leaving out one, however, which nowadays may yet reach you--the
contempt of your kind. 
 
III.--Work and Ideas. 
 
I return again to Ginx's menace to his wife, who was suckling her
infant at the time on the bed.  For her he had an animal
affection that preserved her from unkindness, even in his cups. 
His hand had never unmanned itself by striking her, and rarely
indeed did it injure any one else.  He wrestled not against 
flesh and blood, or powers, or principalities, or wicked spirits
in high places.  He struggled with clods and stones, and primeval
chaos.  His hands were horny with the fight, and his nature had
perhaps caught some of the dull ruggedness of the things
wherewith he battled.  Hard and with a will had he worked through
the years of wedded life, and, to speak him fair, he had acted
honestly, within the limits of his knowledge and means, for the
good of his family.  How narrow were those limits!  Every week he
threw into the lap of Mrs. Ginx the eighteen or twenty shillings
which his strength and temperance enabled him continuously to
earn, less sixpence reserved for the public-house, whither he
retreated on Sundays after the family dinner.  A dozen children
overrunning the space in his rooms was then a strain beyond the
endurance of Ginx.  Nor had he the heart to try the common plan,
and turn his children out of doors on the chance of their being
picked up in a raid of Sunday School teachers.  So he turned out
himself to talk with the humbler spirits of the "Dragon," or
listen sleepily while alehouse demagogues prescribed remedies for
State abuses. 
 
Our friend was nearly as guiltless of knowledge as if Eve had
never rifled the tree whereon it grew.  Vacant of policies were
his thoughts; innocent he of ideas of state-craft.  He knew there
was a Queen; he had seen her. Lords and Commons were to him vague
deities possessing strange powers.  Indeed, he had been present
when some of his better-informed companions had recognized with
cheers certain gentlemen,--of whom Ginx's estimate was expressed
by a  reference to his test of superiority to himself in that
which he felt to be greatest within him--"I could lick 'em with
my little finger" --as the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the
Prime Minister.  Little recked he of their uses or abuses.  The
functions of Government were to him Asian mysteries.  He only
felt that it ought to have a strong arm, like the brawny member
wherewith he preserved order in his domestic kingdom, and
therefore generally associated Government with the Police.  In
his view these were to clear away evil-doers and leave every one
else alone.  The higher objects of Government were, if at all,
outlined in the shadowiest form in his imagination.  Government
imposed taxes--that he was obliged to know.  Government
maintained the parks; for that he thanked it.  Government made
laws, but what they were, or with what aim or effects made, he
knew not, save only that by them something was done to raise or
depress the prices of bread, tea, sugar, and other necessaries.
Why they should do so he never conceived--I am not sure that he
cared.  Legislation sometimes pinched him, but darkness so hid
from him the persons and objects of the legislators that he could
not criticise the theories which those powerful beings were
subjecting to experiment at his cost.  I must, at any risk, say
something about this in a separate chapter. 
 
IV.--Digressive, and may be skipped without mutilating 
the History. 
 
I stop here to address any of the following characters, should he
perchance read these memoirs:  
You, Mr. Statesman--if there be such; 
  Mr. Pseudo-Statesman, Placeman, Party Leader, Wirepuller; 
  Mr. Amateur Statesman, Dilettante Lord, Civil Servant; 
  Mr. Clubman, Litterateur, Newspaper Scribe; 
  Mr. People's Candidate, Demagogue, Fenian Spouter; 
or whoever you may be, professing to know aught or do anything in
matters of policy, consider, what I am sure you have never fairly
weighed, the condition of a man whose clearest notion of
Government is derived from the Police!  Imagine one who had never
seen a polyp trying to construct an ideal of the animal, from a
single tentacle swinging out from the tangle of weed in which the
rest was wrapped!  How then any more can you fancy that a man to
whose sight and knowledge the only part of government practically
exposed is the strong process of police, shall form a proper
conception of the functions, reasons, operations, and relations
of Government; or even build up an ideal of anything but a
haughty, unreasonable, antagonistic, tax-imposing FORCE!  And how
can you rule such a being except as you rule a dog, by that which
alone he understands--the dog-whip of the constable!  Given in a
country a majority of creatures like these, and surely despotism
is its properest complement.  But when they exist, as they exist
in England to-day, in hundreds of thousands, in town and country,
think what a complication they introduce into your theoretic free
system of government.  Acts of Parliament passed by a
"freely-elected" House of Commons, and an hereditary House of
Lords under the threats of freely-electing citizens, however pure
in intention and correct in principle, will not seem to him to be
the resultants of every wish in the community so much as
dictations by superior strength.  To these the obedience he will
render will not be the loving assent of his heart, but a
begrudged concession to circumstance.  Your awe-invested
legislature is not viewed as his friend and brother-helper, but
his tyrant.  Therefore the most natural bent of his
workman-statesmanship--a rough, bungling affair--will be to tame
you--you who ought to be his Counsellor and Friend.  When he
finds that your legislative action exerts upon him a repressive
and restraining force he will curse you as its author, because he
sees not the springs you are working.  Should he even be a little
more advanced in knowledge than our friend Ginx, and learn that
he helps to elect the Parliament to make laws on behalf of
himself and his fellow-citizens, he will scarce trust the
assembly which is supposed to represent him.  Will he, like a
good citizen and a politic, accept with dignity and self-control
the decision of a majority against his prejudices: or will he not
regard the whole Wittenagemote with suspicion, contempt, or even
hatred?  See him rush madly to Trafalgar Square meetings, Hyde
Park demonstrations, perhaps to Lord George Gordon Riots, as if
there were no less perilous means of publishing his opinions! 
There wily men may lead his unconscious intellect, and stir his
passions, and direct his forces against his own--and his
children's good. 
 
Did it ever occur to you, or any of you, how many voters cannot
read, and how many more, though they can read, are unable to
apprehend reasons of statesmanship?--that even newspapers cannot
inform them, since they have not the elementary knowledge needed
for the comprehension of those things which are discussed in
them; nay, that for want of understanding the same they may
terribly distort political aims and consequences? 
 
Might it not be worth while for you, gentlemen--may it not be
your duty to devise ways and means for conveying such elementary
instruction by good street-preachers on politics and economy, or
even political bible- women or colporteurs, and so to make clear
to the understanding of every voter what are the reasons and aims
of every act of Legislation, Home Administration, and Foreign
Policy?  If you do not find out some way to do this he may turn
round upon you--I hope he may-- and insist on annually-elected
parliaments, and thus oblige ambitious state-mongers, in the
rivalry of place, to come to him and declare more often their
wishes and objects.  Other attractions may be found in that
solution: such as the untying of some knots of electoral
difficulty, and removing incitements to corruption.  Ten thousand
pounds for one year's power were a high price even to a
contractor.  Think then whether at any cost some general
political education must not be attempted, since there is a
spirit breathing on the waters, and how it shall convulse them is
no indifferent matter to you or to me.  Everywhere around us are
unhewn rocks stirred with a strange motion.  Leave these chaotic
fragments of humanity to be hewn into rough shape by coarse
artists seeking only a petty profit, unhandy, immeasurably
impudent; or dress them by your teaching--teaching which is the
highest, noblest, purest, most efficient function of Government,
which ought to be the most lofty ambition of statesmanship--to be
civic corner-stones polished after the similitude of a palace. 
 
V.--Reasons and Resolves. 
 
Ginx has been waiting through three chapters to explain his
truculence upon the birth of his twelfth child.  Much explanation
is not necessary.  When he looked round his nest and saw the many
open mouths about him, he might well be appalled to have another
added to them.  His children were not chameleons, yet they were
already forced to be content with a proportion of air for their
food.  And even the air was bad.  They were pallid and pinched.  
How they were clad will ever be a mystery, save to the poor woman
who strung the limp rags together and Him who watched the noble
patience and sacrifice of a daily heroism.  Of her own
unsatisfied cravings, and the dense motherly horrors that
sometimes brooded over her while she nursed these infants, let me
refrain from speaking, since if as vividly depicted as they were
real, you, Madam, could not endure to read of them.  Her poor,
unintelligent mind clung tenaciously to the controverted
aphorism, "Where God sends mouths he sends food to fill them." 
Believing that there was a God, and that He must be kind, she
trusted in this as a truth, and perhaps an all-seeing eye reading
some quaint characters on her simple heart, viewed them not too
nearly, but had regard to their general import, for, as she