An Outcast; Or, Virtue and FaithAdams, F. Colburn (Francis Colburn)
General
An Outcast; Or, Virtue and Faith
Adams, F. Colburn (Francis Colburn)
Conduct of life -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Vice -- Fiction
Indeed the house of the Nine Nations would seem to say within itself: "I
am mother of this banquet of death you behold with your eyes." There it
stands, its stream of poison hurrying its victims to the grave; its
little dark passages leading to curious hiding-places; its caving roof,
and its ominous-looking back platform, overlooking the dead walls of
Murderers' Yard. How it mocks your philanthropy, your regal edifices,
your boasted charities--your gorgeous churches! Everybody but the
corporation knows the house of the Nine Nations, a haunt for wasted
prostitutes, assassins, burglars, thieves--every grade of criminals
known to depraved nature. The corporation would seem either to have a
charming sympathy for it, or to look upon it with that good-natured
indifference so happily illustrated while eating its oysters and
drinking its whiskey. An empty-headed corporation is sure always to
have its hands very full, which is the case with yours at this moment.
Having the people's money to waste, its own ambition to serve, and its
hat to fill with political waste paper--what more would you ask of it?
The man of the house of the Nine Nations, you ought to know, makes
criminals by the hundred, deluges your alms houses with paupers, and
makes your Potters' field reek with his victims: for this he is become
rich. Mr. Krone is an intimate friend of more than one Councilman, and a
man of much measure in the political world--that is, Mr. Krone is a
politician-maker. When you say there exists too close an intimacy
between the pugilist and the politician, Mr. Krone will bet twenty
drinks with any one of his customers that he can prove such doctrines at
fault. He can secure the election of his favorite candidate with the
same facility that he can make an hundred paupers per week. You may well
believe him a choice flower in the bouquet of the corporation; we mean
the corporation that banquets and becomes jubilant while assassins stab
their victims in the broad street--that becomes befogged while bands of
ruffians disgrace the city with their fiendish outrages--that makes
presidents and drinks whiskey when the city would seem given over to the
swell-mobsman--when no security is offered to life, and wholesale
harlotry, flaunting with naked arms and bared bosoms, passes along in
possession of Broadway by night.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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