Well,
I want to know how these legislators can go to church and repeat certain
prayers, while they continue to make profit by retailing Death at so
much a gallon; and I want to know how some scores of other godly men go
out of their way to back up a traffic which is very well able to take
care of itself. A wild, night-roaming gipsy like me is not expected to
be a model, but one might certainly expect better things from folks who
are so insultingly, aggressively righteous. One sombre and thoughtful
Romany of my acquaintance said, "My brother, there are many things that
I try to fight, and they knock me out of time in the first round." That
is my own case exactly when I observe comfortable personages who deplore
vice, and fill their pockets to bursting by shoving the vice right in
the way of the folks most likely to be stricken with deadly precision by
it.
It is not easy to be bad-tempered over this saddening business; one has
to be pitiful. As my memory travels over England, and follows the tracks
that I trod, I seem to see a line of dead faces, that start into life if
I linger by them, and mop and mow at me in bitterness because I put out
no saving hand. So many and many I saw tramping over the path of
Destruction, and I do not think that ever I gave one of them a manly
word of caution.
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