him back again. ‘Just Heaven!’ cries the Society for the
protection of remonstrant Ruffians. ‘This is equivalent to a
sentence of perpetual imprisonment!’ Precisely for that reason it
has my advocacy. I demand to have the Ruffian kept out of my way,
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
and out of the way of all decent people. I demand to have the
Ruffian employed, perforce, in hewing wood and drawing water
somewhere for the general service, instead of hewing at her
Majesty’s subjects and drawing their watches out of their pockets.
If this be termed an unreasonable demand, then the tax-gatherer’s
demand on me must be far more unreasonable, and cannot be otherwise
than extortionate and unjust.
It will be seen that I treat of the Thief and Ruffian as one. I do
so, because I know the two characters to be one, in the vast
majority of cases, just as well as the Police know it. (As to the
Magistracy, with a few exceptions, they know nothing about it but
what the Police choose to tell them.) There are disorderly classes
of men who are not thieves; as railway-navigators, brickmakers,
wood-sawyers, costermongers. These classes are often disorderly
and troublesome; but it is mostly among themselves, and at any rate
they have their industrious avocations, they work early and late,
and work hard. The generic Ruffian – honourable member for what is
tenderly called the Rough Element – is either a Thief, or the
companion of Thieves. When he infamously molests women coming out
of chapel on Sunday evenings (for which I would have his back
scarified often and deep) it is not only for the gratification of
his pleasant instincts, but that there may be a confusion raised by
which either he or his friends may profit, in the commission of
highway robberies or in picking pockets. When he gets a policeconstable
down and kicks him helpless for life, it is because that
constable once did his duty in bringing him to justice. When he
rushes into the bar of a public-house and scoops an eye out of one
of the company there, or bites his ear off, it is because the man
he maims gave evidence against him. When he and a line of comrades
extending across the footway – say of that solitary mountain-spur
of the Abruzzi, the Waterloo Road – advance towards me ‘skylarking’
among themselves, my purse or shirt-pin is in predestined peril
from his playfulness. Always a Ruffian, always a Thief. Always a
Thief, always a Ruffian.
Now, when I, who am not paid to know these things, know them daily
on the evidence of my senses and experience; when I know that the
Ruffian never jostles a lady in the streets, or knocks a hat off,
but in order that the Thief may profit, is it surprising that I
should require from those who ARE paid to know these things,
prevention of them?
Look at this group at a street corner. Number one is a shirking
fellow of five-and-twenty, in an ill-favoured and ill-savoured
suit, his trousers of corduroy, his coat of some indiscernible
groundwork for the deposition of grease, his neckerchief like an
eel, his complexion like dirty dough, his mangy fur cap pulled low
upon his beetle brows to hide the prison cut of his hair. His
hands are in his pockets. He puts them there when they are idle,
as naturally as in other people’s pockets when they are busy, for
he knows that they are not roughened by work, and that they tell a
tale. Hence, whenever he takes one out to draw a sleeve across his
nose – which is often, for he has weak eyes and a constitutional
cold in his head – he restores it to its pocket immediately
afterwards. Number two is a burly brute of five-and-thirty, in a
tall stiff hat; is a composite as to his clothes of betting-man and
fighting-man; is whiskered; has a staring pin in his breast, along
with his right hand; has insolent and cruel eyes: large shoulders;
strong legs booted and tipped for kicking. Number three is forty
years of age; is short, thick-set, strong, and bow-legged; wears