hundred needy girls, the sons and daughters mainly of the intemperate;
too idle or too thriftless to work; too low and naked for the public
school. They roam about--the nomadic tribes of this town, the gipsies of
Boston--doing some chance work for a moment, committing some petty
theft. The temptations of a great city are before them.[38] Soon they
will be impressed into the regular army of crime, to be stationed in
your jails, perhaps to die on your gallows. Such is the fate of the sons
of intemperance; but the daughters! their fate--let me not tell of that.
In your Legislature they have just been discussing a law against dogs,
for now and then a man is bitten and dies of hydrophobia. Perhaps there
are ten mad dogs in the State at this moment, and it may be that one man
in a year dies from the bite of such. Do the legislators know how many
shops there are in this town, in this State, which all the day and all
the year sell to intemperate men a poison that maddens with a
hydrophobia still worse? If there were a thousand mad dogs in the land,
if wealthy men had embarked a large capital in the importation or the
production of mad dogs, and if they bit and maddened and slew ten
thousand men in a year, do you believe your Legislature would discuss
that evil with such fearless speech? Then you are very young, and know
little of the tyranny of public opinion, and the power of money to
silence speech, while justice still comes in, with feet of wool, but
iron hands.[39]
There is yet another witness to the moral condition of Boston. I mean
Crime. Where there is such poverty and intemperance, crime may be
expected to follow. I will not now dwell upon this theme, only let me
say, that in 1848, three thousand four hundred and thirty-five grown
persons, and six hundred and seventy-one minors were lawfully sentenced
to your jail and House of Correction; in all, four thousand one hundred
and six; three thousand four hundred and forty-four persons were
arrested by the night police, and eleven thousand one hundred and
seventy-eight were taken into custody by the watch; at one time there
were one hundred and forty-four in the common jail. I have already
mentioned that more than a thousand boys and girls, between six and
sixteen, wander as vagrants about your streets; two hundred and
thirty-eight of these are children of widows, fifty-four have neither
parent living. It is a fact known to your police, that about one
thousand two hundred shops are unlawfully open for retailing the means
of intemperance. These are most thickly strown in the haunts of poverty.
On a single Sunday the police found three hundred and thirteen shops in
the full experiment of unblushing and successful crime. These rum-shops
are the factories of crime; the raw material is furnished by poverty; it
passes into the hands of the rum-seller, and is soon ready for delivery
at the mouth of the jail, or the foot of the gallows. It is notorious
that intemperance is the proximate cause of three fourths of the crime
in Boston; yet it is very respectable to own houses and rent them for
the purpose of making men intemperate; nobody loses his standing by
that. I am not surprised to hear of women armed with knives, and boys
with six-barrelled revolvers in their pockets; not surprised at the
increase of capital trials.
* * * * *
One other matter let me name--I call it the Crime against Woman. Let us
see the evil in its type, its most significant form. Look at that thing
of corruption and of shame, almost without shame, whom the judge, with
brief words, despatches to the jail. That was a woman once. No! At
least, she was once a girl. She had a mother; perhaps, beyond the hills,
a mother, in her evening prayer, remembers still this one child more
tenderly than all the folded flowers that slept the sleep of infancy
beneath her roof; remembers, with a prayer, her child, whom the world
curses after it has made corrupt! Perhaps she had no such mother, but
was born in the filth of some reeking cellar, and turned into the mire
of the streets, in her undefended innocence, to mingle with the
coarseness, the intemperance, and the crime of a corrupt metropolis. In
either case, her blood is on our hands. The crime which is so terribly
avenged on woman--think you that God will hold men innocent of that? But
on this sign of our moral state, I will not long delay.
* * * * *
Put all these things together: the character of trade, of the press;
take the evidence of poverty, intemperance, and crime--it all reveals a
sad state of things. I call your attention to these facts. We are all
affected by them more or less; all more or less accountable for them.
* * * * *
Hitherto I have only stated facts, without making comparisons. Let me
now compare the present condition of Boston with that in former times.
Every man has an ideal, which is better than the actual facts about him.
Some men amongst us put that ideal in times past, and maintain it was
then an historical fact; they are commonly men who have little knowledge
of the past, and less hope for the future; a good deal of reverence for
old precedents, little for justice, truth, humanity; little confidence
in mankind, and a great deal of fear of new things. Such men love to
look back and do homage to the past, but it is only a past of fancy, not
of fact, they do homage to. They tell us we have fallen; that the golden
age is behind us, and the garden of Eden; ours are degenerate days; the
men are inferior, the women less winning, less witty, and less wise, and
the children are an untoward generation, a disgrace, not so much to
their fathers, but certainly to their grandsires. Sometimes this is the
complaint of men who have grown old; sometimes of such as seem to be old
without growing so, who seem born to the gift of age, without the grace
of youth.
Other men have a similar ideal, commonly a higher one, but they place
it in the future, not as an historical reality, which has been, and is
therefore to be worshipped, but one which is to be made real by dint of
thought, of work. I have known old persons who stoutly maintained that
the pears and the plums and the peaches, are not half so luscious as
they were many years ago; so they bewailed the existing race of fruits,
complaining of "the general decay" of sweetness, and brought over to
their way of speech some aged juveniles. Meanwhile, men born young, set
themselves to productive work, and, instead of bewailing an old fancy,
realized a new ideal in new fruits, bigger, fairer, and better than the
old. It is to men of this latter stamp, that we must look for criticism
and for counsel. The others can afford us a warning, if not by their
speech, at least by their example.
It is very plain, that the people of New England are advancing in
wealth, in intelligence, and in morality; but in this general march,
there are little apparent pauses, slight waverings from side to side;
some virtues seem to straggle from the troop; some to lag behind, for it
is not always the same virtue that leads the van. It is with the flock
of virtues, as with wild fowl--the leaders alternate. It is probable
that the morals of New England in general, and of Boston in special, did
decline somewhat from 1775 to 1790; there were peculiar but well-known
causes, which no longer exist, to work that result. In the previous
fifteen years, it seems probable that there had been a rapid increase of
morality, through the agency of causes equally peculiar and transient.
To estimate the moral growth or decline of this town, we must not take
either period as a standard. But take the history of Boston, from 1650
to 1700, from 1700 to 1750, thence to 1800, and you will see a gradual,
but a decided progress in morality in each of these periods. It is not
easy to prove this in a short sermon; I can only indicate the points of
comparison, and state the general fact. From 1800 to 1849, this progress
is well marked, indisputable, and very great. Let us look at this a
little in detail, pursuing the same order of thought as before.
It is generally conceded that the moral character of trade has improved
a good deal within fifty or sixty years. It was formerly a common
saying, that "If a Yankee merchant were to sell salt water at high-tide,
he would yet cheat in the measure." The saying was founded on the
conduct of American traders abroad, in the West Indies and elsewhere.
Now things have changed for the better. I have been told by competent
authority, that two of the most eminent merchants of Boston, fifty or
sixty years ago, who conducted each a large business, and left very
large fortunes, were notoriously guilty of such dishonesty in trade, as
would now drive any man from the Exchange. The facility with which notes
are collected by the banks, compared to the former method of
collection, is itself a proof of an increase of practical honesty; the
law for settling the affairs of a bankrupt tells the same thing. Now
this change has not come from any special effort, made to produce this
particular effect, and, accordingly, it indicates the general moral
progress of the community.
The general character of the press, since the end of the last century,
has decidedly improved, as any one may convince himself of, by comparing
the newspapers of that period, with the present; yet a publicity is
now-a-days given to certain things which were formerly kept more closely
from the public eye and ear. This circumstance sometimes produces an
apparent increase of wrong-doing, while it is only an increased
publicity thereof. Political servility, and political rancor, are
certainly bad enough, and base enough, at this day, but not long ago
both were baser and worse; to show this, I need only appeal to the
memories of men before me, who can recollect the beginning of the
present century. Political controversies are conducted with less
bitterness than before; honesty is more esteemed; private worth is more
respected. It is not many years since the Federal party, composed of men
who certainly were an honor to their age, supported Aaron Burr, for the
office of President of the United States; a man whose character, both
public and private, was notoriously marked with the deepest infamy.
Political parties are not very puritanical in their virtue at this day;
but I think no party would now for a moment accept such a man as Mr.
Burr, for such a post.[40] There is another pleasant sign of this
improvement in political parties: last autumn the victorious party, in
two wards of this city, made a beautiful demonstration of joy, at their
success in the Presidential election, and on Thanksgiving day, and on
Christmas, gave a substantial dinner to each poor person in their
section of the town. It was a trifle, but one pleasant to remember.
Even the theological journals have improved within a few years. I know
it has been said that some of them are not only behind their times,
which is true, "but behind all times." It is not so. Compared with the
sectarian writings--tracts, pamphlets, and hard-bound volumes of an
earlier day--they are human, enlightened, and even liberal.
In respect to poverty, there has been a great change for the better.
However, it may be said in general, that a good deal of the poverty,
intemperance, and crime, is of foreign origin; we are to deal with it,
to be blamed if we allow it to continue; not at all to be blamed for its
origin. I know it is often said, "The poor are getting poorer, and soon
will become the mere vassals of the rich;" that "The past is full of
discouragement; the future full of fear." I cannot think so. I feel
neither the discouragement nor the fear. It should be remembered that
many of the Fathers of New England owned the bodies of their laborers
and domestics! The condition of the working man has improved, relatively
to the wealth of the land, ever since. The wages of any kind of labor,
at this day, bear a higher proportion to the things needed for comfort
and convenience, than ever before for two hundred years.
If you go back one hundred years, I think you will find that, in
proportion to the population and wealth of this town or this State,
there was considerably more suffering from native poverty then than now.
I have not, however, before me the means of absolute proof of this
statement; but this is plain, that now public charity is more extended,
more complete, works in a wiser mode, and with far more beneficial
effect; and that pains are now taken to uproot the causes of
poverty--pains which our fathers never thought of. In proof of this
increase of charity, and even of the existence of justice, I need only
refer to the numerous benevolent societies of modern origin, and to the
establishment of the ministry at large, in this city--the latter the
work of Unitarian philanthropy. Some other churches have done a little
in this good work. But none have done much. I am told the Catholic
clergy of this city do little to remove the great mass of poverty,
intemperance, and crime among their followers. I know there are some few
honorable exceptions, and how easy it is for Protestant hostility to
exaggerate matters; still, I fear the reproach is but too well founded,
that the Catholic clergy are not vigilant shepherds, who guard their
sacred flock against the terrible wolves which prowl about the fold. I
wish to find myself mistaken here.
Some of you remember the "Old Almshouse" in Park-street; the condition
and character of its inmates; the effect of the treatment they there
received. I do not say that our present attention to the subject of
poverty is any thing to boast of--certainly we have done little in
comparison with what common sense demands; very little in comparison
with what Christianity enjoins; still it is something; in comparison
with "the good old times," it is much that we are doing.
There has been a great change for the better in the matter of
intemperance in drinking. Within thirty years, the progress towards
sobriety is surprising, and so well marked and obvious that to name it
is enough. Probably there is not a "respectable" man in Boston who would
not be ashamed to have been seen drunk yesterday; even to have been
drunk in ever so private a manner; not one who would willingly get a
friend or a guest in that condition to-day! Go back a few years, and it
brought no public reproach, and, I fear, no private shame. A few years
further back, it was not a rare thing, on great occasions, for the
fathers of the town to reel and stagger from their intemperance--the
magistrates of the land voluntarily furnishing the warning which a
romantic historian says the Spartans forced upon their slaves.
It is easy to praise the Fathers of New England; easier to praise them
for virtues they did not possess, than to discriminate, and fairly judge
those remarkable men. I admire and venerate their characters, but they
were rather hard drinkers; certainly a love of cold water was not one of
their loves. Let me mention a fact or two: it is recorded in the Probate
office, that in 1678, at the funeral of Mrs. Mary Norton, widow of the
celebrated John Norton, one of the ministers of the first church in
Boston, fifty-one gallons and a half of the best Malaga wine were
consumed by the "mourners;" in 1685, at the funeral of the Rev. Thomas
Cobbett, minister at Ipswich, there were consumed one barrel of wine and
two barrels of cider--"and as it was cold," there was "some spice and
ginger for the cider." You may easily judge of the drunkenness and riot
on occasions less solemn than the funeral of an old and beloved
minister. Towns provided intoxicating drink at the funeral of their
paupers; in Salem, in 1728, at the funeral of a pauper, a gallon of wine
and another of cider are charged as "incidental;" the next year, six
gallons of rum on a similar occasion; in Lynn, in 1711, the town
furnished "half a barrel of cider for the Widow Dispaw's funeral."
Affairs had come to such a pass, that in 1742, the General Court forbade
the use of wine and rum at funerals. In 1673, Increase Mather published
his "Wo unto Drunkards." Governor Winthrop complains, in 1630, that "The
young folk gave themselves to drink hot waters very immoderately."[41]
But I need not go back so far. Who that is fifty years of age, does not
remember the aspect of Boston on public days; on the evening of such
days? Compare the "Election day," or the Fourth of July, as they were
kept thirty or forty years ago, with such days in our time. Some of you
remember the celebration of Peace, in 1783; many of you can recollect
the similar celebration in 1815. On each of those days the inhabitants
from the country towns came here to rejoice with the citizens of this
town. Compare the riot, the confusion, the drunkenness then, with the
order, decorum, and sobriety of the celebration at the introduction of
water last autumn, and you see what has been done in sixty or seventy
years for temperance.
A great deal of the crime in Boston is of foreign origin: of the one
thousand and sixty-six children vagrant in your streets, only one
hundred and three had American parents; of the nine hundred and
thirty-three persons in the House of Correction here, six hundred and
sixteen were natives of other countries; I know not how many were the
children of Irishmen, who had not enjoyed the advantages of our
institutions. I cannot tell how many rum-shops are kept by
foreigners.[42] Now in Ireland no pains have been taken with the
education of the people by the Government; very little by the Catholic
church; indeed, the British government for a long time rendered it
impossible for the church to do any thing in this way. For more than
seventy years, in that Catholic country, none but a Protestant could
keep a school or even be a tutor in a private family. A Catholic
schoolmaster was to be transported, and, if he returned, adjudged guilty
of high treason, barbarously put to death, drawn and quartered. A
Protestant schoolmaster is as repulsive to a Catholic, as a Mahometan
schoolmaster or an Atheist would be to you. It is not surprising,
therefore, that the Irish are ignorant, and, as a consequence thereof,
are idle, thriftless, poor, intemperate, and barbarian; not to be
wondered at if they conduct like wild beasts when they are set loose in
a land where we think the individual must be left free to the greatest
extent. Of course they will violate our laws, those wild bisons leaping
over the fences which easily restrain the civilized domestic cattle;
will commit the great crimes of violence, even capital offences, which
certainly have increased rapidly of late. This increase of foreigners is
prodigious: more than half the children in your public schools are
children of foreigners; there are more Catholic than Protestant children
born in Boston.
With the general and unquestionable advance of morality, some offences
are regarded as crimes which were not noticed a few years ago.
Drunkenness is an example of this. An Irishman in his native country
thinks little of beating another or being beaten; he brings his habits
of violence with him, and does not at once learn to conform to our laws.
Then, too, a good deal of crime which was once concealed is now brought
to light by the press, by the superior activity of the police; and yet,
after all that is said, it seems quite clear that what is legally called
crime and committed by Americans, has diminished a good deal in fifty
years. Such crime, I think, never bore so small a proportion to the
population, wealth, and activity of Boston, as now. Even if we take all
the offences committed by these strangers who have come amongst us, it
does not compare so very unfavorably as some allege with the "good old
times." I know men often look on the fathers of this colony as saints;
but in 1635, at a time when the whole State contained less than one
tenth of the present population of Boston, and they were scattered from
Weymouth Fore-River to the Merrimack, the first grand jury ever
impanelled at Boston "found" a hundred bills of indictment at their
first coming together.
If you consider the circumstances of the class who commit the greater
part of the crimes which get punished, you will not wonder at the
amount. The criminal court is their school of morals; the constable and
judge are their teachers; but under this rude tuition I am told that the
Irish improve and actually become better. The children who receive the
instruction of our public schools, imperfect as they are, will be better
than their fathers; and their grandchildren will have lost all trace of
their barbarian descent.
I have often spoken of our penal law as wrong in its principle, taking
it for granted that the ignorant and miserable men who commit crime do
it always from wickedness, and not from the pressure of circumstances
which have brutalized the man; wrong in its aim, which is to take
vengeance on the offender, and not to do him a good in return for the
evil he has done; wrong in its method, which is to inflict a punishment
that is wholly arbitrary, and then to send the punished man, overwhelmed
with new disgrace, back to society, often made worse than before,--not
to keep him till we can correct, cure, and send him back a reformed man.
I would retract nothing of what I have often said of that; but not long
ago all this was worse; the particular statutes were often terribly
unjust; the forms of trial afforded the accused but little chance of
justice; the punishments were barbarous and terrible. The plebeian
tyranny of the Lord Brethren in New England was not much lighter than
the patrician despotism of the Lord Bishops in the old world, and was
more insulting. Let me mention a few facts, to refresh the memories of
those who think we are going to ruin, and can only save ourselves by
holding to the customs of our fathers, and of the "good old times." In
1631, a man was fined forty pounds, whipped on the naked back, both his
ears cut off, and then banished this colony, for uttering hard speeches
against the government and the church at Salem. In the first century of
the existence of this town, the magistrates could banish a woman because
she did not like the preaching, nor all the ministers, and told the
people why; they could whip women naked in the streets, because they
spoke reproachfully of the magistrates; they could fine men twenty
pounds, and then banish them, for comforting a man in jail before his
trial; they could pull down, with legal formality, the house of a man
they did not like; they could whip women at a cart's tail from Salem to
Rhode Island, for fidelity to their conscience; they could beat,
imprison, and banish men out of the land, simply for baptizing one
another in a stream of water, instead of sprinkling them from a dish;
they could crop the ears, and scourge the backs, and bore the tongues of
men, for being Quakers; yes, they could shut them in jails, could banish
them out of the colony, could sell them as slaves, could hang them on a
gallows, solely for worshipping God after their own conscience; they
could convulse the whole land, and hang some thirty or forty men for
witchcraft, and do all this in the name of God, and then sing psalms,
with most nasal twang, and pray by the hour, and preach--I will not say
how long, nor what, nor how! It is not yet one hundred years since two
slaves were judicially burnt alive, on Boston Neck, for poisoning their
master.