Volume I Part 8 (1/2)

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 cla.s.s 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 quant.i.ties. 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 quant.i.ties, 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 G.o.d's design, but was it man's intention? The condition of the poor has. .h.i.therto been bettered, not so much by the design of the strong, as by G.o.d making their wrath and cupidity serve the weak.

Under such circ.u.mstances, 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 circ.u.mstances; 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 G.o.d 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 mult.i.tude. 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 l.u.s.t 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d! 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 G.o.d 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 wors.h.i.+p in our churches, till he sold his garment and bought a pew! Many of our houses of public wors.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.s of men are peris.h.i.+ng; yes, peris.h.i.+ng in the nineteenth century; peris.h.i.+ng in Boston, wealthy, charitable Boston; peris.h.i.+ng soul and body, contrary to G.o.d's will; and peris.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d, from mere emptiness of soul, and for amus.e.m.e.nt'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 circ.u.mstances. Go to any State Prison in the land, and you shall find that seven-eighths of the convicts came from this cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s; they have no more ”inherited sin” than any other cla.s.s in the land; all the difference, then, between the morals and manners of rich and poor, is the result of education and circ.u.mstances.

The fate of the daughters of the poor is yet worse. Many of them are doomed to destruction by the l.u.s.t 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 G.o.d, 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 cla.s.ses, the victims of society, and the foes of society, the men that organize its sins, and then tell us n.o.body is to blame. May G.o.d 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 G.o.d? 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 cla.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e, 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, was.h.i.+ng 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 Was.h.i.+ngtonians 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 const.i.tutional; 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.

Then, too, some of our influential temperance men aid us no longer.

Beecher is not here; Channing and Ware have gone to their reward. That other man,[19] benevolent and indefatigable, where is he? He trod the worm of the still under his feet, but the worm of the pulpit stung him, and he too is gone; that champion of temperance, that old man eloquent, driven out of Boston. Why should I not tell an open secret?--driven out by rum and the Unitarian clergy of Boston.

Whatsoever the causes may be, I think you see proofs enough of the fact, that drunkenness has increased within the last few years. You see it in the men drunken in the streets, in the numerous shops built to gratify the intemperate man. Some of these are elegant and costly, only for the rich; others so mean and dirty, that one must be low indeed to wallow therein. But the same thing is there in both, rum, poison-drink. Many of these latter are kept by poor men, and the spider's web of the law now and then catches one of them, though latterly but seldom here.

Sometimes they are kept, and, perhaps, generally owned, by rich men who drive through the net. I know how hard it is to see through a dollar, though misery stand behind it, if the dollar be your own, and the misery belong to your brother. I feel pity for the man who helps ruin his race, who scatters firebrands and death throughout society, scathing the heads of rich and poor, and old and young. I would speak charitably of such an one as of a fellow-sinner. How he can excuse it to his own conscience is his affair, not mine. I speak only of the fact. For a poor man there may be some excuse; he has no other calling whereby to gain his bread; he would not see his own children beg, nor starve, nor steal! To see his neighbor go to ruin and drag thither his children and wife, was not so hard. But it is not the shops of the poor men that do most harm! Had there been none but these, they had long ago been shut, and intemperance done with. It is not poor men that manufacture this poison; nor they who import it, or sell by the wholesale. If there were no rich men in this trade there would soon be no poor ones! But how does the rich man reconcile it to his conscience? I cannot answer that.

It is difficult to find out the number of drink-shops in the city. The a.s.sessors say there are eight hundred and fifty; another authority makes the number twelve hundred. Let us suppose there are but one thousand. I think that much below the real number, for the a.s.sistant a.s.sessors found three hundred in a single ward! These shops are open morning and night. More is sold on Sunday, it is said, than any other day in the week! While you are here to wors.h.i.+p your Father, some of your brothers are making themselves as beasts; yes, lower. You shall probably see them at the doors of these shops as you go home; drunk in the streets this day! To my mind, the retailers are committing a great offence. I am no man's judge, and cannot condemn even them. There is one that judgeth. I cannot stand in the place of any man's conscience. I know well enough what is sin; G.o.d, only, who is a sinner. Yet I cannot think the poor man that retails, half so bad as the rich man who distils, imports, or sells by wholesale the infamous drug. He knew better, and cannot plead poverty as the excuse of his crime.

Let me mention some of the statistics of this trade before I speak of its effects. If there are one thousand drink-shops, and each sells liquor to the amount of only six dollars a day, which is the price of only one hundred drams, or two hundred at the lowest shops, then we have the sum of $2,190,000 paid for liquor to be drunk on the spot every year. This sum is considerably more than double the amount paid for the whole public education of the people in the entire State of Ma.s.sachusetts! In Boston alone, last year, there were distilled, 2,873,623 gallons of spirit. In five years, from 1840 to 1845, Boston exported 2,156,990, and imported 2,887,993 gallons. They burnt up a man the other day, at the distillery in Merrimack street. You read the story in the daily papers, and remember how the by-standers looked on with horror to see the wounded man attempting with his hands to fend off the flames from his naked head! Great Heaven! It was not the first man that distillery has burned up! No, not by thousands. You see men about your streets, all afire; some half-burnt down; some with all the soul burned out, only the cinders left of the man, the sh.e.l.l and wall, and that tumbling and tottering, ready to fall. Who of you has not lost a relative, at least a friend, in that withering flame, that terrible _Auto da fe_, that h.e.l.l-fire on earth?

Let us look away from that. I wish we could look on something to efface that ghastly sight. But see the results of this trade. Do you wonder at the poverty just now spoken of; at the vagrant children? In the Poor House at Albany, at one time, there were 633 persons, and of them 615 were intemperate! Ask your city authorities how many of the poor are brought to their Almshouse directly or remotely by intemperance! Do you wonder at the crime which fills your jails, and swells the tax of county and city? Three fourths of the petty crime in the State comes from this source directly or remotely. Your jails were never so full before! When the parents are there, what is left for the children? In Prussia, the Government which imprisons the father takes care of the children, and sends them to school. Here they are forced into crime.

As I gave some statistics of the cause, let me also give some of the effects. Two years ago your Grand Jury reports that one of the city police, on Sunday morning, between the hours of twelve and two, in walking from Cornhill square to Cambridge street, pa.s.sed more than one hundred persons more or less drunk! In 1844 there were committed to your House of Correction, for drunkenness, 453 persons; in 1845, 595; in 1846, up to the 24th of August, that is, in seven months and twenty-four days, 446. Besides there have been already in this year, 396 complained of at the Police Court and fined, but not sent to the House of Correction. Thus, in seven months and twenty-four days, 842 persons have been legally punished for public drunkenness. In the last two months and a half 445 persons were thus punished. In the first twenty-four days of this month, ninety-four! In the last year there were 4,643 persons committed to your watch-houses, more than the twenty-fifth of the whole population. The thousand drink-shops levy a direct tax of more than $2,000,000. That is only the first outlay. The whole ultimate cost in idleness, sickness, crime, death and broken hearts--I leave you to calculate that! The men who live in the lower courts, familiar with the sinks of iniquity, speak of this crime as ”most awful!” Yet in this month and the last, there were but nine persons indicted for the illegal sale of the poison which so wastes the people's life! The head of your Police and the foreman of your last Grand Jury are prominent in that trade.

Does the Government know of these things; know of their cause? One would hope not. The last Grand Jury in their public report, after speaking manfully of some actual evils, instead of pointing at drunkenness and bar-rooms, direct your attention ”to the increased number of omnibuses and other large carriages in the streets.”