The Secret Agent

'Poor brute.'
Hanging back suddenly, Stevie inflicted an arresting jerk upon his sister.
'poor! poor!' he ejaculated appreciatively. 'Cabman poor, too. He told me himself.'
..._at the poor cabman beating the poor horse in the name, as it were, of his poor kids at home. And Stevie knew what it was to be beaten. He knew it from experience. It was a bad world. Bad! Bad!
Mrs Verloc, his only sister, guardian, and protector, could not pretend to such depths of insight...'Come along Stevie. You can't help that.'
'Beastly!' he added, concisely...
'Police,' he suggested, confidently.
'The police aren't there for that,' observed Mrs Verloc, curiously, hurrying on her way.
Stevie's face lengthened considerably....
'Not for that?' he murmbled, resigned but surprised. 'Not for that?' He had formed for himself an ideal conception of the cosmopolitan police as a sort of benevolent institution for the suppression of evil...
'What are they for then, Winn? What are they for? Tell me.'
...
'Don't you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn't take anything away from them who have.'
...
'What?' he asked at once, anxiously. 'Not even if they were hungry? Mustn't they?'
The two had paused in their walk.
'Not if they were ever so,' said Mrs Verloc, with the equanimity of a person untroubled by the problem of the distribution of wealth and exploring the perspective of the roadway for an omnibus of the right colour. 'Certainly not. But what's the use of talking about all that? Your aren't ever hungry.' (from Pp 142, 143, 144)