The Spike.
The old Spartans had a wiser method; and went out and hunted down their Helots, and speared and spitted them, when they grew too numerous.With our improved fashions of hunting, now after the invention of firearms and standing armies, how much easier were such a hunt!
Perhaps in the most thickly peopled country, some three days annually might suffice to shoot all the able-bodied paupers that had accumulated within the year.
-CARLYLE.
FIRST OF ALL, I MUST BEG forgiveness of my body for the vileness through which I have dragged it, and forgiveness of my stomach for the vileness which I have thrust into it.I have been to the spike, and slept in the spike, and eaten in the spike; also, I have run away from the spike.
After my two unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the Whitechapel casual ward, I started early, and joined the desolate line before three o'clock in the afternoon.They did not 'let in' till six, but at that early hour I was number 20, while the news had gone forth that only twenty-two were to be admitted.By four o'clock there were thirty-four in line, the last ten hanging on in the slender hope of getting in by some kind of a miracle.Many more came, looked at the line, and went away, wise to the bitter fact that the spike would be 'full up.'
Conversation was slack at first, standing there, till the man on one side of me and the man on the other side of me discovered that they had been in the smallpox hospital at the same time, though a full house of sixteen hundred patients had prevented their becoming acquainted.But they made up for it, discussing and comparing the more loathsome features of their disease in the most cold-blooded, matter-of-fact way.I learned that the average mortality was one in six, that one of them had been in three months and the other three months and a half, and that they had been 'rotten wi' it.' Whereat my flesh began to creep and crawl, and I asked them how long they had been out.One had been out two weeks, and the other three weeks.