from a shop-window; he is seized and carried to jail. The day comes for
trial. He is marched through the streets in handcuffs, the companion of
drunkards and thieves, thus deadening the little self-respect which
Nature left even in an outcast's bosom. He sits there chained like a
beast; a boy in irons! the sport and mockery of men vulgar as the common
sewer. His trial comes. Of course he is convicted. The show of his
countenance is witness against him. His rags and dirt, his ignorance,
his vagrant habits, his idleness, all testify against him. That face so
young, and yet so impudent, so sly, so writ all over with embryo
villany, is evidence enough. The jury are soon convinced, for they see
his temptations in his look, and surely know that in such a condition
men will steal: yes, they themselves would steal. The judge represents
the law, and that practically regards it a crime even for a boy to be
weak and poor. Much of our common law, it seems to me, is based on
might, not right. So he is hurried off to jail at a tender age, and made
legally the companion of felons. Now the State has him wholly in her
power; by that rough adoption, has made him her own child, and sealed
the indenture with the jailer's key. His handcuffs are the symbol of his
sonship to the State. She shuts him in her college for the Little. What
does that teach him; science, letters; even morals and religion? Little
enough of this, even in Boston, and in most counties of Massachusetts, I
think, nothing at all, not even a trade which he can practise when his
term expires! I have been told a story, and I wish it might be falsely
told, of a boy, in this city, of sixteen, sent to the house of
correction for five years because he stole a bunch of keys, and coming
out of that jail at twenty-one, unable to write, or read, or calculate,
and with no trade but that of picking oakum. Yet he had been five years
the child of the State, and in that college for the poor! Who would
employ such a youth; with such a reputation; with the smell of the jail
in his very breath? Not your shrewd men of business, they know the risk;
not your respectable men, members of churches and all that; not they!
Why it would hurt a man's reputation for piety to do good in that way.
Besides, the risk is great, and it argues a great deal more Christianity
than it is popular to have, for a respectable man to employ such a
youth. He is forced back into crime again. I say, forced, for honest men
will not employ him when the State shoves him out of the jail. Soon you
will have him in the court again, to be punished more severely. Then he
goes to the State Prison, and then again, and again, till death
mercifully ends his career!
Who is to blame for all that? I will ask the best man among the best of
you, what he would have become, if thus abandoned, turned out in
childhood, and with no culture, into the streets, to herd with the
wickedest of men! Somebody says, there are "organic sins" in society
which nobody is to blame for. But by this sin organized in society,
these vagrant children are training up to become thieves, pirates and
murderers. I cannot blame them. But there is a terrible blame somewhere,
for it is not the will of God that one of these little ones should
perish. Who is it that organizes the sin of society?
* * * * *
Let us next look at the parents of these vagrants, at the adult poor. It
is not easy or needed for this purpose, to define very nicely the limits
of a class, and tell where the rich end, and the poor begin. However,
men may, in reference to this matter, be divided into three classes. The
first acts on society mainly by their capital; the second mainly by
their skill, mental and manual, by educated labor; and the third by
their muscles, by brute force with little or no skill, uneducated labor.
The poor, I take it, come mainly from this latter class. Education of
head or hand, a profession or a trade, is wealth in possibility; yes,
wealth in prospect, wealth in its process of accumulation, for wealth
itself is only accumulated labor, as learning is accumulated thought.
Most of our rich men have come out of this class which acts by its
skill, and their children in a few years will return to it. I am not now
to speak of men transiently poor, who mend their condition as the hours
go by, who may gain enough, and perhaps become rich; but of men
permanently poor, whom one year finds wanting, and the next leaves no
better off; men that live, as we say, from hand to mouth, but whose
hand and mouth are often empty. Even here in Boston, there is little of
the justice that removes causes of poverty, though so much of the
charity which alleviates its effects. Those men live, if you can call it
life, crowded together more densely, I am told, than in Naples or Paris,
in London or Liverpool. Boston has its ghetto, not for the Jews as at
Prague and at Rome, but for brother Christians. In the quarters
inhabited mainly by the poor, you find a filthiness and squalor which
would astonish a stranger. The want of comfort, of air, of water, is
terrible. Cold is a stern foe in our winters, but in these places, I am
told that men suffer more from want of water in summer, than want of
fire in winter.[16] If your bills of mortality were made out so as to
show the deaths in each ward of the city, I think all would be
astonished at the results. Disease and death are the result of causes,
causes too that may for a long time be avoided, and in the more favored
classes are avoided. It is not God's will that the rich be spared and
the poor die. Yet the greatest mortality is always among the poor. Out
of each hundred Catholics who died in Boston, from 1833 to 1838, more
than sixty-one were less than five years of age. The result for the last
six years is no better. Of one hundred children born amongst them, only
thirty-eight live five years; only eleven become fifty! Gray-haired
Irishmen we seldom see. Yet they are not worse off than others equally
poor, only we can more distinctly get at the facts. In the war with
disease which mankind is waging, the poor stand in front of the fire,
and are mowed down without pity!
Of late years, in Boston, there has been a gradual increase in the
mortality of children.[17] I think we shall find the increase only among
the children of the poor. Of course it depends on causes which may be
removed, at least modified, for the average life of mankind is on the
increase. I am told, I know not if the authority be good, that mortality
among the poor is greater in Boston than in any city of Europe.
Of old times the rich man rode into battle, shirted with mail, covered
and shielded with iron from head to foot. Arrows glanced from him as
from a stone. He came home unhurt and covered with "glory." But the
poor, in his leathern jerkin or his linen frock, confronted the war,
where every weapon tore his unprotected flesh. In the modern, perennial
battle with disease, the same thing takes place; the poor fall and die.
The destruction of the poor is their poverty. They are ignorant, not
from choice but necessity. They cannot, therefore, look round and see
the best way of doing things, of saving their strength, and sparing
their means. They can have little of what we call thrift, the brain in
the hand for which our people are so remarkable. Some of them are also
little by nature, ill-born; others well born enough, were abandoned in
childhood, and have not since been able to make up the arrears of a
neglected youth. They are to fight the great battle of life, for battle
it is to them, with feeble arms. Look at the houses they live in,
without comfort or convenience, without sun, or air, or water; damp,
cold, filthy and crowded to excess. In one section of the city there are
thirty-seven persons on an average in each house.
Consider the rents paid by this class of our brothers. It is they who
pay the highest rate for their dwellings. The worth of the house is
often little more than nothing, the ground it covers making the only
value. I am told that twelve or fifteen per cent a year on a large
valuation is quite commonly paid, and over thirty per cent on the actual
value, is not a strange thing. I wish this might not prove true.
But the misery of the poor does not end with their wretched houses and
exorbitant rent. Having neither capital nor store-room, they must
purchase articles of daily need in the smallest quantities. They buy,
therefore, at the greatest disadvantage, and yet at the dearest rates. I
am told it is not a rare thing for them to buy inferior qualities of
flour at six cents a pound, or $11.88 a barrel, while another man buys
a month's supply at a time for $4 or $5 a barrel. This may be an extreme
case, but I know that in some places in this city, an inferior article
is now retailed to them at $7.92 the barrel. So it is with all kinds of
food; they are bought in the smallest quantities, and at a rate which a
rich man would think ruinous. Is not the poor man, too, most often
cheated in the weight and the measure? So it is whispered. "He has no
friends," says the sharper; "others have broken him to fragments, I will
grind him to powder!" And the grinding comes.
Such being the case, the poor man finds it difficult to get a cent
beforehand. I know rich men tell us that capital is at the mercy of
labor. That may be prophecy; it is not history; not fact. Uneducated
labor, brute force without skill, is wholly at the mercy of capital. The
capitalist can control the market for labor, which is all the poor man
has to part with. The poor cannot combine as the rich. True, a mistake
is sometimes made, and the demand for labor is greater than the supply,
and the poor man's wages are increased. This result was doubtless God's
design, but was it man's intention? The condition of the poor has
hitherto been bettered, not so much by the design of the strong, as by
God making their wrath and cupidity serve the weak.
Under such circumstances, what marvel that the poor man becomes
unthrifty, reckless and desperate? I know how common it is to complain
of the extravagance of the poor. Often there is reason for the
complaint. It is a wrong thing, and immoral, for a man with a dependent
family to spend all his earnings, if it be possible to live with less. I
think many young men are much to be blamed, for squandering all their
wages to please a dainty palate, or to dress as fine as a richer man,
making only the heart of their tailor foolishly glad. Such men may not
be poor now, but destine themselves to be the fathers of poor children.
After making due allowance, it must be confessed that much of the
recklessness of the poor comes unavoidably from their circumstances;
from their despair of ever being comfortable, except for a moment at a
time. Every one knows that unmerited wealth tempts a man to squander,
while few men know, what is just as true, that hopeless poverty does the
same thing. As the tortured Indian will sleep, if his tormentor pause
but a moment, so the poor man, grown reckless and desperate, forgets the
future storms, and wastes in revel the solitary gleam of sunlight which
falls on him. It is nature speaking through his soul.
Now consider the moral temptations before such men. Here is wealth,
food, clothing, comfort, luxury, gold, the great enchanter of this age,
and but a plank betwixt it and them. Nay, they are shut from it only by
a pane of glass thin as popular justice, and scarcely less brittle! They
feel the natural wants of man; the artificial wants of men in cities.
They are indignant at their social position, thrust into the mews and
the kennels of the land. They think some one is to blame for it. A man
in New England does not believe it God's will he should toil for ever,
stinting and sparing only to starve the more slowly to death, overloaded
with work, with no breathing time but the blessed Sunday. They see
others doing nothing, idle as Solomon's lilies, yet wasting the unearned
bread God made to feed the children of the poor. They see crowds of idle
women elegantly clad, a show of loveliness, a rainbow in the streets,
and think of the rag which does not hide their daughter's shame. They
hear of thousands of baskets of costly wine imported in a single ship,
not brought to recruit the feeble, but to poison the palate of the
strong. They begin to ask if wealthy men and wise men have not forgotten
their brothers, in thinking of their own pleasure! It is not the poor
alone who ask that. In the midst of all this, what wonder is it if they
feel desirous of revenge; what wonder that stores and houses are broken
into, and stables set afire! Such is the natural effect of misery like
that; it is but the voice of our brother's blood crying to God against
us all. I wonder not that it cries in robbery and fire. The jail and the
gallows will not still that voice, nor silence the answer. I wonder at
the fewness of crimes, not their multitude. I must say that, if goodness
and piety did not bear a greater proportion to the whole development of
the poor than the rich, their crimes would be tenfold. The nation sets
the poor an example of fraud, by making them pay highest on all local
taxes; of theft, by levying the national revenue on persons, not
property. Our navy and army set them the lesson of violence; and, to
complete their schooling, at this very moment we are robbing another
people of cities and lands, stealing, burning, and murdering, for lust
of power and gold. Everybody knows that the political action of a nation
is the mightiest educational influence in that nation. But such is the
doctrine the State preaches to them, a constant lesson of fraud, theft,
violence and crime. The literature of the nation mocks at the poor,
laughing in the popular journals at the poor man's inevitable crime. Our
trade deals with the poor as tools, not men. What wonder they feel
wronged! Some city missionary may dawdle the matter as he will; tell
them it is God's will they should be dirty and ignorant, hungry, cold
and naked. Now and then a poor woman starving with cold and hunger may
think it true. But the poor know better; ignorant as they are, they know
better. Great Nature speaks when you and I are still. They feel
neglected, wronged, and oppressed. What hinders them from following the
example set by the nation, by society, by the strong? Their inertness,
their cowardice, and, what does not always restrain abler men, their
fear of God! With cultivated men, the intellect is often developed at
the expense of conscience and religion. With the poor this is more
seldom the case.
The misfortunes of the poor do not end here. To make their degradation
total, their name infamous, we have shut them out of our churches. Once
in our Puritan meeting-houses, there were "body seats" for the poor; for
a long time free galleries, where men sat and were not ashamed. Now it
is not so. A Christian society about to build a church, and having
$50,000, does not spend $40,000 for that, making it a church for all,
and keep $10,000 as a fund for the poor. No, it borrows $30,000 more,
and then shuts the poor out of its bankrupt aisles. A high tower, or a
fine-toned bell, yes, marble and mahogany, are thought better than the
presence of these little ones whom God wills not to perish. I have heard
ministers boast of the great men, and famous, who sat under their
preaching; never one who boasted that the poor came into his church, and
were fed, body and soul! You go to our churches--the poor are not in
them. They are idling and lounging away their day of rest, like the
horse and the ox. Alas me, that the apostles, that the Christ himself
could not worship in our churches, till he sold his garment and bought a
pew! Many of our houses of public worship would be well named, "Churches
for the affluent." Yet religion is more to the poor man than to the
rich. What wonder then, if the poor lose self-respect, when driven from
the only churches where it is thought respectable to pray!
This class of men are perishing; yes, perishing in the nineteenth
century; perishing in Boston, wealthy, charitable Boston; perishing soul
and body, contrary to God's will; and perishing all the worse because
they die slow, and corrupt by inches. As things now are, their mortality
is hardly a curse. The Methodists are right in telling them this world
is a valley of tears; it is almost wholly so to them; and Heaven a long
June day, full of rest and plenty. To die is their only gain; their only
hope. Think of that, you who murmur because money is "tight," because
your investment gives only twenty per cent. a year, or because you are
taxed for half your property, meaning to move off next season; think of
that, you who complain because the democrats are in power to-day, and
you who tremble lest the whigs shall be in '49; think of that, you who
were never hungry, nor athirst; who are sick, because you have nothing
else to do, and grumble against God, from mere emptiness of soul, and
for amusement's sake; think of men, who, if wise, do not dare to raise
the human prayer for life, but for death, as the only gain, the only
hope, and you will give over your complaint, your hands stopping your
mouth.
What shall become of the children of such men? They stand in the
fore-front of the battle, all unprotected as they are; a people
scattered and peeled, only a miserable remnant reaches the age of ten!
Look about your streets, and see what does become of such as live,
vagrant and idle boys. Ask the police, the constables, the jails; they
shall tell you what becomes of the sons. Will a white lily grow in a
common sewer; can you bleach linen in a tan-pit? Yes, as soon as you can
rear a virtuous population, under such circumstances. Go to any State
Prison in the land, and you shall find that seven-eighths of the
convicts came from this class, brought there by crimes over which they
had no control; crimes which would have made you and me thieves and
pirates. The characters of such men are made for them, far more than by
them. There is no more vice, perhaps, born into that class; they have no
more "inherited sin" than any other class in the land; all the
difference, then, between the morals and manners of rich and poor, is
the result of education and circumstances.
The fate of the daughters of the poor is yet worse. Many of them are
doomed to destruction by the lust of men, their natural guardians and
protectors. Think of an able, "respectable" man, comfortable, educated
and "Christian," helping debase a woman, degrade her in his eyes, her
eyes, the eyes of the world! Why it is bad enough to enslave a man, but
thus to enslave a woman--I have no words to speak of that. The crime
and sin, foul, polluting and debasing all it touches, has come here to
curse man and woman, the married and the single, and the babe unborn! It
seems to me as if I saw the Genius of this city stand before God,
lifting his hands in agony to heaven, crying for mercy on woman,
insulted and trodden down, for vengeance on man, who treads her thus
infamously into the dust. The vengeance comes, not the mercy. Misery in
woman is the strongest inducement to crime. Where self-respect is not
fostered; where severe toil hardly holds her soul and body together amid
the temptations of a city, and its heated life, it is no marvel to me
that this sin should slay its victims, finding woman an easy prey.
Let me follow the children of the poor a step further--I mean to the
jail. Few men seem aware of the frightful extent of crime amongst us,
and the extent of the remedy, more awful yet. In less than one year,
namely, from the 9th of June, 1845, to the 2d of June, 1846, there were
committed to your House of Correction, in this city, 1,228 persons, a
little more than one out of every fifty-six in the whole population that
is more than ten years old. Of these 377 were women; 851 men. Five were
sentenced for an indefinite period, and forty-seven for an additional
period of solitary imprisonment. In what follows, I make no account of
that. But the whole remaining period of their sentences amounts to more
than 544 years, or 198,568 days. In addition to this, in the year ending
with June 9, 1846, we sent from Boston to the State Prison, thirty-five
more, and for a period of 18,595 days, of which 205 were solitary. Thus
it appears that the illegal and convicted crime of Boston, in one year,
was punished by imprisonment for 217,163 days. Now as Boston contains
but 114,366 persons of all ages, and only 69,112 that are over ten years
of age, it follows that the imprisonment of citizens of Boston for crime
in one year, amounts to more than one day and twenty-one hours, for each
man, woman, and child, or to more than three days and three hours, for
each one over ten years of age. This seems beyond belief, yet in making
the estimate, I have not included the time spent in jail before
sentence; I have left out the solitary imprisonment in the House of
Correction; I have said nothing of the 169 children, sentenced for crime
to the House of Reformation in the same period.
What is the effect of this punishment on society at large? I will not
now attempt to answer that question. What is it on the criminals
themselves? Let the jail-books answer. Of the whole number, 202 were
sentenced for the second time; 131 for the third; 101 for the fourth;
thirty-eight for the fifth; forty for the sixth; twenty-nine for the
seventh; twenty-three for the eighth; twelve for the ninth; fifty for
the tenth time, or more; and of the criminals punished for the tenth
time, thirty-one were women! Of the thirty-five sent to the State
Prison, fourteen had been there before; of the 1,228 sent to the House
of Correction, only 626 were sent for the first time.
There are two classes, the victims of society, and the foes of society,
the men that organize its sins, and then tell us nobody is to blame. May
God deal mercifully with the foes; I had rather take my part with the
victims. Yet is there one who wishes to be a foe to mankind?
Here are the sons of the poor, vagrant in your streets, shut out by
their misery from the culture of the age; growing up to fill your jails,
to be fathers of a race like themselves, and to be huddled into an
infamous grave. Here are the daughters of the poor, cast out and
abandoned, the pariahs of our civilization, training up for a life of
shame and pollution, and coming early to a miserable end. Here are the
poor, daughters and sons, excluded from the refining influences of
modern life, shut out of the very churches by that bar of gold,
ignorant, squalid, hungry and hopeless, wallowing in their death! Are
these the results of modern civilization; this in the midst of the
nineteenth century, in a Christian city full of churches and gold; this
in Boston, which adds $13,000,000 a year to her actual wealth? Is that
the will of God? Tell it not in China; whisper it not in New Holland,
lest the heathen turn pale with horror, and send back your
missionaries, fearing they shall pollute the land!
* * * * *
There is yet another class of little ones. I mean the intemperate.
Within the last few years it seems that drunkenness has increased. I
know this is sometimes doubted. But if this fact is not shown by the
increased number of legal convictions for the crime, it is by the sight
of drunken men in public and not arrested. I think I have not visited
the city five times in the last ten months without seeing more or less
men drunk in the streets. The cause of this increase it seems to me is
not difficult to discover. All great movements go forward by
undulations, as the waves of the rising tide come up the beach. Now
comes a great wave reaching far up the shore, and then recedes. The
next, and the next, and the next falls short of the highest mark; yet
the tide is coming in all the while. You see this same undulation in
other popular movements; for example, in politics. Once the great wave
of democracy broke over the central power, washing it clean. Now the
water lies submissive beneath that rock, and humbly licks its feet. In
some other day the popular wave shall break with purifying roar clean
over that haughty stone and wash off the lazy barnacles, heaps of
corrupting drift-weed, and deadly monsters of the deep. By such
seemingly unsteady movements do popular affairs get forward. The
reformed drunkards, it is said, were violent, ill-bred, theatrical, and
only touched the surface. Many respectable men withdrew from the work
soon as the Washingtonians came to it. It was a pity they did so; but
they did. I think the conscience of New England did not trust the
reformed men; that also is a pity. They seem now to have relaxed their
efforts in a great measure, perhaps discouraged at the coldness with
which they have in some quarters been treated. I know not why it is, but
they do not continue so ably the work they once begun. Besides, the
State, it was thought, favored intemperance. It was for a long time
doubted if the license-laws were constitutional; so they were openly set
at nought, for wicked men seize on doubtful opportunities. Then, too,
temperance had gone, a few years ago, as far as it could be expected to
go until certain great obstacles were removed. Many leading men in the
land were practically hostile to temperance, and, with some remarkable
exceptions, still are. The sons of the pilgrims, last Forefathers' day,
could not honor the self-denial of the Puritans without wine! The Alumni
of Harvard University could never, till this season, keep their holidays
without strong drink.[18] If rich men continue to drink without need,
the poor will long continue to be drunk. Vices, like decayed furniture,
go down. They keep their shape, but become more frightful. In this way
the refined man who often drinks, but is never drunk, corrupts hundreds
of men whom he never saw, and without intending it becomes a foe to
society.