It
was only a few yards from Broadway, but he had never set foot in that
magnificent thoroughfare of brown stone and white marble,
aristocratic business partner of Fifth Avenue, since he entered a
precinct so different from New York, as his former world knew it,
that he might have been on a convict island in the South Seas.
The past never obtruded itself here. He was surrounded by danger and
degradation, ugliness unmitigated, and a complete indifference to
anything in the world but vice, crime, liquor and the primitive
appetites. Even the children in the swarming squalid streets looked
like little old men and women; they fought in the gutters for scraps
of refuse, or stood staring sullenly before them, the cry in their
emaciated bodies dulled with the poisons of malnutrition; or making
quick passes at the pocket of a thief. The girls had never been
young, never worn anything but rags or mean finery, the boys were in
training for a career of crime, the sodden women seemed to have no
natural affection for the young they bore as lust prompted. Men beat
their wives or strumpets with no interference from the police. The
Sixth Ward was the worst on Manhattan, and the police had enough to
do without wasting their time in this congested mass of the city's
putrid dregs; who would be conferring a favor on the great and
splendid and envied City of New York if they exterminated one another
in a grand final orgy of blood and hate.
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