Connecticut western news., 1893-06-08

alone-an army of 00,000 that do not know where they will lay their heads to- night. I read the other day of man who in fit of insanity murdered his wife and three children. How do we know it was insanity? They say he be- came maniac. And yet the poet tells us of how the old hero Virginius could slay his child rather than see her dis honored. Is it not possible, in view of these frequent horrors, they have been prompted not by insanity, but by the de- spair of love, by the father and mother that stood on the brink and peered over the awful abyss and preferred to kill their own rather than to deliver them to the hell they saw open before them?
 Such poverty Is necessarily the mother of despair-despair grim and sullen and stupefying. The man who fights with hunger becomes an animal. Is it not bet ter to die man than to die a brute? Shall these desperate people reason? Suicide becomes 8 luxury. The death of child under such conditions is a joy, not 8 sor- row. They are gathered to the potter's field, but they rest. They are crowded
 
 black trenches, but they will not be reused in the gray twilight of the morn ing to dull, ceaseless toll. Their little bodies molder together in the egrave, but their little stomachs do not cry for bread and for meat and for drink. Their little faces do not grow pinched and wan any longer. There are some things worse than death There are some things worse than the potters field. It is the living potter's field-it is the living death.
 A pitiful case of destitution recently came to light near New York. A police man of the Thirty-third precinct was pa trolling his beat on the outskirts of the cfoy when in lonely spot in the woods near Hunts point he came upon man and woman and three children stretched on the bare ground. The man and the woman were asleep, but the children were awake and grooming.
 When the man was awakened, he said he had no home, no means of subsistence. During the winter and spring he had earned a scanty living as an oyster open CT, but at the close of the season was thrown out of work. He fell sick, and the little money he had saved was soon spent. Then the owner of the house in which he lived turned him out. He tramped round, trying to find work, but failed His wife and children had no shelter, and he had not cent to find them lodging. Not knowing where to go, they went into the woods, where they slept for three nights. It was three days since they had eaten scrap of food. They were taken by the policeman to the station house and given food, which they devoured ravenously.
 THE SUBMERGED SIXTH.
 In year in New York city there were 89, 679 deaths; 7,059 died in hospitals, in- sane asylums and warehouses. That is to say, more than one person in every six who died in this great city died in pub lie institution, and nearly 4,000 of them who thus died were thrown in the pot ter's field for burial Talk about your submerged tenthr' This is the sub merged sixth. And this only represents those who actually die. Those who are living ill death cannot be numbered. In the great city of London there are more than 300, 900 souls that hang on the brink of this gulf, whose life is nightmare. Beneath them opens the pit of starva- tion. Still further down are 300, 1000 more, actually starving, where hunger gnaws day and night and every hour in the day is an agony. No one is better entitled to speak on this subject from actual life than is Mrs. Campbell. She | |. IL 4l~s- H.