In most things I claim to be no wiser than my fellow-men, but in this I
knew myself wiser; I knew where I was cheated. I knew that the
schoolmaster who cost me thirty pounds a year was a licensed footpad;
half the money spent in restaurants and tea-shops was blackmail paid to
respectability; the landlord who took his forty-five pounds a year from
my pocket was a mere robber, who took advantage of the need I had to
live in a certain locality that I might attend to my vocation. Not
only were my brains exploited that my employer might maintain a
sumptuous house at Kensington, but the wage he paid me was exploited by
a host of other people, who had houses of their own to maintain.
Before I could feed my children I must help to pay for and cook the
dinner of the folk who lived on the dividends of railways and omnibus
companies. On the way to my office the tailor took toll of me by
forcing me to wear a garb which I detested, simply because I dared wear
no other garb. I could not even drink plain water but that some one
was the richer. I was the common gull of the thing called convention.
I was plucked to the skin, and if my skin had been worth turning into
leather, some one would have put in a claim to that. Even for my skin,
poor asset as it was, some one did wait, when it had ceased to be of
use to me, for London cemeteries declare dividends upon the dead. My
case reminded me of an old gentleman I once knew, who wore so many
coats, waistcoats, and shirts to keep warmth in a body of singular
attenuation, that it was commonly said that by the time James Smith
undressed at night there was very little James Smith that was
discoverable. Certainly by the time London had done wringing gold out
of me there was very little gold left that was my own.

There was, however, one kind of comfort to be deduced from these
reflections; if I was not nearly so well off as I appeared to be, I had
all the less to lose. Rightly considered it would not be 250 pounds