FROM THE ARCHIVES:This editorial paean of praise for the newsboys and other children who sold goods on the streets of Dublin had a Dickensian air about it. -
JOE JOYCE
IT IS impossible not to be struck, during this Christmas season, by the admirable virtues of our Dublin newsboys. With the newsboys we would include the children – boys and girls – who press the sale of commodities other than newspapers. Their chief characteristic is their incurable optimism.
Everyone knows the hardships endured by these children. It is sufficient to look at them. The meagre outline of their emaciated anatomy, their peaked faces, their features blue with cold, their bare feet, their ragged and ill-fitting clothes – all tell the sinister tale. But nothing can break their spirit.
The newsboy urges the purchase of his paper with the assurance and aplomb of one who is conferring a benefit. So great is the exuberance of his vitality that sometimes, even after a succession of reverses, he kisses hands impetuously at the recalcitrant customer, and goes merrily off in search of other opportunities. If this is not heroism, we wonder what is.
The newsboy shares the emotions which are common to human nature. Each setback strikes, as it were, a physical blow at our well-being. If the misadventure be more serious, it is felt like a grievous bodily injury. This must be doubly true of the classes to which the newsboy belongs.
He stakes his fortune, as it were, on a single throw. He has no reserves on which to fall back in emergency. He lives from day to day, and his failures and successes are reckoned ruthlessly in terms of food and lodging, or their absence.
But it is just this which makes his cheerfulness so admirable. Hundreds of people pass him by in stolid indifference, blind to his presence, deaf to the importunity of his appeal. And yet his voice never falters.
Truly marvellous is the spirit of these Dublin street arabs, and stony-hearted beyond telling is the passer-by who can for long turn a deaf ear to their vociferated litanies. Yet we must not be unduly sentimental in their regard. They are learning the lesson of life in a hard school, but the lesson is worth learning. The ebb and flow in their small fortunes is even more baffling to them than it is to their so-called betters. But they probably reap a larger share of moral benefit.
They understand that the only real reverse is not defeat, but despair. We cannot say how many of the gallant soldiers of which this city has such reason to be proud, whose monument stands at the Grafton Street corner of Stephen’s Green, and whose gallantry is associated so imperishably with the Tugela and with Pieter’s Hill – we cannot say how many of the Dublin Fusiliers were trained in the hard school.
Some of them, doubtless, had in their boyhood fought the hard fight which is waged daily by the child-traders in Dublin. If they did, then the miracle of their heroism stands to a large extent explained.
http://url.ie/dpem