A Hero and Some Other Folks | Page 7

been. Poverty is no new condition. Man's history is not one of affluence, but one of indigence. This is a patent fact. But a state of lack is not unwholesome, but on the contrary does great good. Poverty has supplied the world with most of the kings it boasts of. Palaces have not cradled the kings of thought, service, and achievement. What greatest poet had luxury for a father? Name one. Poverty is the mother of kings. Who censures poverty censures the home from whose doors have passed the most illustrious of the sons of men. Christ's was a poverty so keen and so parsimonious that Occidentals can not picture it. More, current social reformers assume that the poor are unhappy; though if such reformers would cease dreaming, and learn seeing, they would reverse their creed. Riches do not command joy; for joy is not a spring rising from the depths where gold is found and gems gathered. Most men are poor, and most men are happy, or, if they are not, they may trace their sadness to sources other than lack of wealth. The best riches are the gifts of God, and can not be shut off by any sluicing; the choicest riches of the soul, such as knowledge and usefulness and love and God, are not subject to the tariff of gold. Poverty, we conclude, is not in itself grievous. Indeed, there are in poverty blessings which many of us know, and from which we would not be separated without keen regret. But penury is hard. When poverty pinches like winter's night, when fuel fails, and hunger is our company, then poverty becomes harsh and unpalatable, and not to be boasted of; though even penury has spurred many a sluggish life to conquering moods. When a man lies with his face to the wall, paralytic, helpless, useless, a burden to himself and others, and hears the rub of his wife washing for a livelihood--and he loves her so; took her to his home in her fair girlhood, when her beauty bloomed like a garden of roses, and promised to keep her, and now she works for him all day and into the dark night, and loves to; but he turns his face to the wall, puts his one movable hand against his face, sobs so that his tears wash through his fingers and wet his pillow as with driving rain,--then poverty is pitiful. Or, when one sees his children hungry, tattered, with lean faces and eyes staring as with constant fear; sees them huddling under rags or cowering at a flicker meant for flame,--then poverty is hard; and then, "The poor always ye have with you," said our Christ, which remember and be pitiful!
But such penury, even, does not require crime. Valjean became a criminal from poverty; but himself felt now, as the days slipped from his life-store, that crime was not necessary. Theft is bad economics. The criminals on the dockets are not those pinched with poverty, as one may assure himself if he gives heed to criminal dockets. People prefer crime as a method of livelihood. These are criminals. The "artful dodger," in "Oliver Twist," is a picture of the average criminal. Honest poverty need not steal. In the writer's own city, the other day, a man accused of theft pleaded his children's poverty as palliative of his crime; but in that city was abundant help for worthy poverty. That man lacked an absolute honesty. He and his could have been fed and clothed, and himself maintained his manly dignity and uncorrupted honesty. To blame society with criminality is a current method, but untrue and unwise; for thus we will multiply, not decimate, criminals. The honest man may be in penury; but he will have help, and need not shelter in a jail. Thus, then, these two items of modernity paint background for Jean Valjean's portrait; and in Jean Valjean, To-day has found a voice.
This man is a criminal and a galley slave, with yellow passport--his name, Jean Valjean. Hear his story. An orphan; a half-sullen lad, reared by his sister; sees her husband dead on a bed of rags, with seven orphans clinging in sobs to the dead hands. Jean Valjean labors to feed this motley company; denies himself bread, so that he may slip food into their hands; has moods of stalwart heroism; and never having had a sweetheart--pity him!--toils on, hopeless, under a sky robbed of blue and stars; leading a life plainly, wholly exceptional, and out of work in a winter when he was a trifle past twenty-six; hears his sister's children crying, "Bread, bread, give bread;" rises in sullen acerbity; smites his huge fist through a baker's window, and steals a loaf; is arrested, convicted, sent to the galleys, and herded