the whole world meet for mutual instruction in vice.

They were men who, as a rule, had never known, a day of honesty and
cleanliness in their misspent lives; whose fathers, brothers and constant
companions were roughs, malefactors and, felons; whose mothers, wives and
sisters were prostitutes, procuresses and thieves; men who had from
infancy lived in an atmosphere of sin, until it saturated every fiber of
their being as a dweller in a jungle imbibes malaria by every one of his,
millions of pores, until his very marrow is surcharged with it.

They included representatives from all nationalities, and their
descendants, but the English and Irish elements predominated. They had
an argot peculiar to themselves. It was partly made up of the "flash"
language of the London thieves, amplified and enriched by the cant
vocabulary and the jargon of crime of every European tongue. They spoke
it with a peculiar accent and intonation that made them instantly
recognizable from the roughs of all other Cities. They called themselves
"N'Yaarkers;" we came to know them as "Raiders."

If everything in the animal world has its counterpart among men, then
these were the wolves, jackals and hyenas of the race at once cowardly
and fierce--audaciously bold when the power of numbers was on their side,
and cowardly when confronted with resolution by anything like an equality
of strength.

Like all other roughs and rascals of whatever degree, they were utterly
worthless as soldiers. There may have been in the Army some habitual
corner loafer, some fistic champion of the bar-room and brothel, some
Terror of Plug Uglyville, who was worth the salt in the hard tack he
consumed, but if there were, I did not form his acquaintance, and I never