Volume I Part 7 (2/2)

[15] Mr. George N. Briggs.

VI.

A SERMON OF THE PERIs.h.i.+NG CLa.s.sES IN BOSTON.--PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 1846.

MATTHEW XVIII. 14.

It is not the will of our Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.

There are two cla.s.ses of men who are weak and little: one is little by nature, consisting of such as are born with feeble powers, not strongly capable of self-help; the other is little by position, comprising men that are permanently poor and ignorant. When Jesus said, It is not G.o.d's will that one of these little ones should perish, I take it he included both these cla.s.ses--men little by nature, and men little by position.

Furthermore, I take it he said what is true, that it is not G.o.d's will one of these little ones should perish. Now, a man may be said to perish when he is ruined, or even when he fails to attain the degree of manhood he might attain under the average circ.u.mstances of this present age, and these present men. In a society like ours, and that of all nations at this time, as. .h.i.therto, with such a history, a history of blood and violence, cunning and fraud; resting on such a basis--a basis of selfishness; a society wherein there is a preference of the mighty, and a postponement of the righteous, where power is wors.h.i.+pped and justice little honored, though much talked of, it comes to pa.s.s that a great many little ones from both these cla.s.ses actually perish. If Jesus spoke the truth, then they perish contrary to the will of G.o.d, and, of course, by some other will adverse to the will of G.o.d. In a society where the natural laws of the body are constantly violated, where many men are obliged by circ.u.mstances to violate them, it follows unavoidably that many are born little by nature, and they transmit their feebleness to their issue. The other cla.s.s, men little by position, are often so hedged about with difficulties, so neglected, that they cannot change their condition; they bequeath also their littleness to their children.

Thus the number of little ones enlarges with the increase of society.

This cla.s.s becomes perpetual; a cla.s.s of men mainly abandoned by the Christians.

In all forms of social life hitherto devised these cla.s.ses have appeared, and it has been a serious question, What shall be done with them? Seldom has it been the question, What shall be done for them? In olden time the Spartans took children born with a weak or imperfect body, children who would probably be a hinderance to the nation, and threw them into a desert place to be devoured by the wild beasts, and so settled that question. At this day, the Chinese, I am told, expose such children in the streets and beside the rivers, to the humanity of pa.s.sers by; and not only such, but sound, healthy children, none the less, who, though strong by nature, are born into a weak position. Many of them are left to die, especially the boys. But some are saved, those mainly girls. I will not say they are saved by the humanity of wealthier men. They become slaves, devoted by their masters to a most base and infamous purpose. With the exception of criminals, these abandoned daughters of the poor, form, it is said, the only cla.s.s of slaves in that great country.

Neither the Chinese nor the Spartan method is manly or human. It does with the little ones, not for them. It does away with them, and that is all. I will not decide which is the worst of the two modes, the Chinese or the Spartan. We are accustomed to call both these nations heathen, and take it for granted they do not know it is G.o.d's will that not one of these little ones should perish. Be that as it may, we do not call ourselves heathen; we pretend to know the will of G.o.d in this particular. Let us look, therefore, and see how we have disposed of the little ones in Boston, what we are doing for them or with them.

Let me begin with neglected and abandoned children. We all know how large and beautiful a provision is made for the public education of the people. About a fourth part of the city taxes are for the public schools. Yet one not familiar with this place is astonished at the number of idle, vagrant boys and girls in the streets. It appears from the late census of Boston, that there are 4,948 children between four and fifteen who attend no school. I am not speaking of truants, occasional absentees, but of children whose names are not registered at school, permanent absentees. If we allow that 1,948 of these are kept in some sort of restraint by their parents, and have, or have had, some little pains taken with their culture at home; that they are feeble and do not begin to attend school so early as most, or that they are precocious, and complete their studies before fifteen, or for some other good reason are taken from school, and put to some useful business, there still remain 3,000 children who never attend any school, turned loose into your streets! Suppose there is some error in the counting, that the number is overstated one third, still there are left 2,000 young vagrants in the streets of Boston!

What will be the fate of these 2,000 children? Some men are superior to circ.u.mstances; so well born they defy ill breeding. There may be children so excellent and strong they cannot be spoiled. Surely there are some who will learn with no school; boys of vast genius, whom you cannot keep from learning. Others there are of wonderful moral gifts, whom no circ.u.mstances can make vulgar; they will live in the midst of corruption and keep clean through the innate refinement of a wondrous soul. Out of these 2,000 children there may be two of this sort; it were foolish to look for more than one in a thousand. The 1,997 depend mainly on circ.u.mstances to help them; yes, to make their character. Send them to school and they will learn. Give them good precepts, good examples, they will also become good. Give them bad precepts, bad examples, and they become wicked. Send them half clad and uncared for into your streets, and they grow up hungry savages greedy for crime.

What have these abandoned children to help them? Nothing, literally nothing! They are idle, though their bodies crave activity. They are poor, ill-clad, and ill-fed. There is nothing about them to foster self-respect; nothing to call forth their conscience, to awaken and cultivate their sense of religion. They find themselves beggars in the wealth of a city; idlers in the midst of its work. Yes, savages in the midst of civilization. Their consciousness is that of an outcast, one abandoned and forsaken of men. In cities, life is intense amongst all cla.s.ses. So the pa.s.sions and appet.i.tes of such children are strong and violent. Their taste is low; their wants clamorous. Are religion and conscience there to abate the fever of pa.s.sion and regulate desire? The moral cla.s.s and the cultivated shun these poor wretches, or look on with stupid wonder. Our rule is that the whole need the physician, not the sick. They are left almost entirely to herd and consort with the basest of men; they are exposed early and late to the worst influences, and their only comrades are men whom the children of the rich are taught to shun as the pestilence. To be poor is hard enough in the country, where artificial wants are few, and those easily met, where all cla.s.ses are humbly clad, and none fare sumptuously every day. But to be poor in the city, where a hundred artificial desires daily claim satisfaction, and where, too, it is difficult for the poor to satisfy the natural and unavoidable wants of food and raiment; to be hungry, ragged, dirty, amid luxury, wantonness and refinement; to be miserable in the midst of abundance, that is hard beyond all power of speech. Look, I will not say at the squalid dress of these children, as you see them prowling about the markets and wharves, or contending in the dirty lanes and by-places into which the pride of Boston has elbowed so much of her misery; look at their faces! Haggard as they are, meagre and pale and wan, want is not the worst thing written there, but cunning, fraud, violence and obscenity, and worst of all, fear!

Amid all the science and refined culture of the nineteenth century, these children learn little; little that is good, much that is bad. In the intense life around them, they unavoidably become vicious, obscene, deceitful and violent. They will lie, steal, be drunk. How can it be otherwise?

If you could know the life of one of those poor lepers of Boston, you would wonder, and weep. Let me take one of them at random out of the ma.s.s. He was born, unwelcome, amid wretchedness and want. His coming increased both. Miserably he struggles through his infancy, less tended than the lion's whelp. He becomes a boy. He is covered only with rags, and those squalid with long acc.u.mulated filth. He wanders about your streets, too low even to seek employment, now s.n.a.t.c.hing from a gutter half rotten fruit which the owner flings away. He is ignorant; he has never entered a school-house; to him even the alphabet is a mystery. He is young in years, yet old in misery. There is no hope in his face. He herds with others like himself, low, ragged, hungry and idle. If misery loves company, he finds that satisfaction. Follow him to his home at night; he herds in a cellar; in the same sty with father, mother, brothers, sisters, and perhaps yet other families of like degree. What served him for dress by day, is his only bed by night.

Well, this boy steals some trifle, a biscuit, a bit of rope, or a knife 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 sons.h.i.+p 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 Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 oak.u.m. 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 n.o.body 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 G.o.d 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 cla.s.s, and tell where the rich end, and the poor begin. However, men may, in reference to this matter, be divided into three cla.s.ses. 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 cla.s.s. Education of head or hand, a profession or a trade, is wealth in possibility; yes, wealth in prospect, wealth in its process of acc.u.mulation, for wealth itself is only acc.u.mulated labor, as learning is acc.u.mulated thought.

Most of our rich men have come out of this cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses are avoided. It is not G.o.d'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, s.h.i.+rted with mail, covered and s.h.i.+elded 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.

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