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. It was not my place, I thought, and thus their bones
are bleaching, and the memory of their names has flown away like a
mephitic vapour that was better dispersed. Are there many like me, I
wonder, who have not only done nothing to battle with the mightiest
modern evil, but have half encouraged it through cynical recklessness
and pessimism? We entrap the poor and the base and the wretched to their
deaths, and then we cry out about their vicious tendencies, and their
improvidence, and all the rest. Heaven knows I have no right to
sermonize; but, at least, I never shammed anything. When I saw some
spectacle of piercing misery caused by Drink (as nearly all English
misery is) I simply choked down the tendency to groan, and grimly
resolved to see all I could and remember it. But now that I have had
time to reflect instead of gazing and moaning, I have a sharp conception