Chapter 70

The newsboys who had stopped William discovered only after killing the boss that hard days did not improve simply because one man who oppressed and exploited them had disappeared.

A great many people were always saying that the pain of life was like a rock hanging over one’s head, and that once the rock was moved away, life would become better. They even deliberately told everyone, in a tone edged with seduction, that the ones exploiting them were precisely the people paying them wages, the ones putting money in their hands so they could feed their families.

Perhaps that was true, but not entirely.

The boss was dead, yet the children’s circumstances had not become any better, because the thing truly oppressing and exploiting them was not the boss, but this society built around profit.

It might even be said that the boss’s disappearance made their lives harder. Without his social ties, without the intimidation he exercised over outsiders, the children could no longer enjoy the resources he had once been able to secure, resources that, in the children’s eyes, had seemed ordinary, perhaps even the very source of their suffering.

They could no longer buy newspapers. In this age, when print media still firmly occupied the main channels of mass communication, newspaper offices had no worries at all about sales. Most of what they printed every day sold out, which also meant that a portion of the market was always left open.

Once the boss disappeared, other bosses naturally wanted to swallow up his share. They took his portion and used it to push into his territory and his market, and through the kind of collusion the children still did not understand, the papers were sold off to other bosses.

Newsboys the children had never seen before began appearing in the neighborhood. Waving fresh papers still rich with the smell of ink, they pulled one payment after another from other people’s pockets, payments that ought to have belonged to them.

And not only that, the scrap stations, high and low, had for one reason or another enjoyed a good relationship with the boss. Now that he was gone, they began cutting scrap prices without restraint in order to seize more profit for themselves.

After all, these children had no way to fight them. They could calmly enjoy the money squeezed out of others without any fear of consequences.

The children had always thought the boss was the source of their nightmare, but at this moment they discovered that their understanding of society had been laughably shallow.