A Hero and Some Other Folks | Page 7

cause of crime,
and poverty, and not Valjean, must be indicted; so runs the argument.
This conclusion we deny. Let us consider. Poverty is not unwholesome.
The bulk of men are poor, and always have 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