Volume I Part 13 (1/2)
D. C. 79, Nov. 30, 1840, 3 ” 8 ”
Md. 104, 3 ”
Phila. 129, Sept. 30, 1840, 2 ” 5 ”
The difference between the average term of punishment in Connecticut and Philadelphia is 300 per cent! If the same result is effected by each, there has then been a great amount of gratuitous suffering in one case.
[35] I refer to the prisons at Stretton-upon-Dunmore in Warwicks.h.i.+re, that at Horn near Hamburg, and the one at Mettray near Tours in France.
The French penal code allows the guardian or relatives of an offender under age to take him from prison on giving bonds for his good behavior.
While these pages were first pa.s.sing through the press, I learned the happy effect which followed the execution of the license laws in this city. In 1846, from the 10th of March to the 24th of April, there were sent to the House of Correction for intemperance one hundred eighty-nine persons. During the same period of the year 1847, only eighty-four have been thus punished! But alas, in 1851 the evil has returned, and the demon of drunkenness mows down the wretched in Boston with unrestricted scythe.
IX.
A SERMON OF POVERTY.--PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 14, 1849.
PROVERBS X. 15.
The destruction of the poor is their poverty.
Last Sunday something was said of riches. To-day I ask your attention to a sermon of poverty. By poverty, I mean the state in which a man does not have enough to satisfy the natural wants of food, raiment, shelter, warmth and the like. From the earliest times that we know of, there have been two cla.s.ses of men, the rich who had more than enough, the poor who had less. In one of the earliest books which treats of the condition of men, we find that Abraham, a rich man, owns the bodies of three hundred men that are poor. In four thousand years, the difference between rich and poor in our part of America is a good deal lessened, not done away with. In New England property is more uniformly distributed than in most countries, perhaps more equally than in any land as highly civilized. But even here the old distinction remains in a painful form and extended to a pitiful degree.
At one extreme of society is a body called the rich, men who have abundance, not a very numerous body, but powerful, first through the energy which acc.u.mulates money, and secondly, through the money itself.
Then there is a body of men who are comfortable. This cla.s.s comprises the ma.s.s of the people in all the callings of life. Out of this cla.s.s the rich men come, and into it their children or grandchildren commonly return. Few of the rich men of Boston were sons of rich men; still fewer grandsons; few of them perhaps will be fathers of men equally rich; still fewer grandfathers of such. Then there is the cla.s.s that is miserable. Some of them are supported by public charity, some by private, some of them by their toil alone--but altogether they form a ma.s.s of men who only stay in the world, and do not live in the best sense of that word.
Such are the great divisions of society in respect to property. However, the lines between these three cla.s.ses are not sharp and distinctly drawn. There are no sharp divisions in nature; but for our convenience, we distinguish cla.s.ses by their centre where they are most unlike, and not by their circ.u.mference where they intermix and resemble each other.
The line between the miserable and comfortable, between the comfortable and rich, is not distinctly drawn. The centre of each cla.s.s is obvious enough while the limits thereof are a dissolving view.
The poor are miserable. Their food is the least that will sustain nature, not agreeable, not healthy; their clothing scanty and mean, their dwellings inconvenient and uncomfortable, with roof and walls that let in the cold and the rain--dwellings that are painful and unhealthy; in their personal habits they are commonly unclean. Then they are ignorant; they have no time to attend school in childhood, no time to read or to think in manhood, even if they have learned to do either before that. If they have the time, few men can think to any profit while the body is uncomfortable. The cold man thinks only of the cold; the wretched of his misery. Besides this they are frequently vicious. I do not mean to say they are wicked in the sight of G.o.d. I never see a poor man carried to jail for some petty crime, or even for a great one, without thinking that probably, in G.o.d's eye, the man is far better than I am, and from the State's prison or scaffold, will ascend into heaven and take rank a great ways before me. I do not mean to say they are wicked before G.o.d; but it is they who commit the minor crimes, against decency, sobriety, against property and person, and most of the major crimes, against human life. I mean that they commit the crimes that get punished by law. They crowd your courts, they tenant your jails; they occupy your gallows. If some man would write a book describing the life of all the men hanged in Ma.s.sachusetts for fifty years past, or tried for some capital offence, and show what cla.s.s of society they were from, how they were bred, what influences were about them in childhood, how they pa.s.sed their Sundays, and also describe the configuration of their bodies, it would help us to a valuable chapter in the philosophy of crime, and furnish mighty argument against the injustice of our mode of dealing with offenders.
Poverty is the dark side of modern society. I say modern society, though poverty is not modern, for ancient society had poverty worse than ours and a side still darker yet. Cannibalism, butchery of captives after battle, frequent or continual wars for the sake of plunder, and the slavery of the weak--these were the dark side of society in four great periods of human history, the savage, the barbarous, the cla.s.sic and the feudal. Poverty is the best of these five bad things, each of which, however, has grimly done its service in its day.
There is no poverty among the Gaboon negroes. Put them in our lat.i.tude, and it soon comes. Nay, as they get to learn the wants of cultivated men, there will be a poorer cla.s.s even in the torrid zone. Poverty prevails in every civilized nation on earth; yes, in every savage nation in austere climes. Let us look at some examples. England is the richest country in Europe. I mean she has more wealth in proportion to her population than any other in a similar climate. Look at her possessions in every corner of the globe; at her armies which Europe cannot conquer; at her s.h.i.+ps which weave the great commercial web that spreads all round about the world; at home what factories, what farms, what houses, what towns, what a vast and wealthy metropolis; what an aristocracy--so rich, so cultivated, so able, so daring, and so unconquered.
But in that very English nation the most frightful poverty exists. Look at the two sister islands: this the queen, and that the beggar of all nations; the rose and the shamrock; the one throned in royal beauty, the other bowed to the dust, torn and trampled under foot. In that capital of the world's wealth, in that centre of power far greater than the power of all the Caesars, there is the most squalid poverty. Look at St.
Giles and St. James--that the earthly h.e.l.l of want and crime, this the worldly heaven of luxury and power! Put on the one side the stately n.o.bility of England, well born, well bred, armed with the power of manners, the power of money, the power of culture and the power of place, and on the other side put the beggary of England, the two million paupers who are kept wholly on public or private charity; the three million laborers who formerly fed on potatoes, G.o.d knows what they feed on now, and all the other hungry sons of want who are kept in awe only by the growling lion who guards the British throne; and you see at once the result of modern civilization in the ablest, the foremost, the freest, the most practical and the richest nation in the old world.
Even here in New England, a country not two hundred and fifty years old, a little patch of cleared land on the edge of the continent, we hear of poverty which is frightful to think of. It is a serious question what shall be done for the poor; there are few that can tell what shall be done with them, or what is to become of them. Want is always here in Boston. Misery is here. Starvation is not unknown. What is now serious will one day be alarming. Even now it is awful to think of the misery that lurks in this Christian town. New England in fifty years has increased vastly in wealth, but poverty increases too. There has been a great advance in the productiveness of human labor; with our tools a man can do as much rude work in one day as he could in three days a hundred years ago. I mean work with the axe, the plough, the spade; of nicer work, yet more; of the most delicate work, see what machines do for him.
The end is not yet; soon we shall have engines that will whittle granite, as a gang of saws cleaves logs into broad smooth boards. Yet with all this advance in the productiveness of human toil, still there is poverty. A day's work now will bring a man greater proportionate pay than ever before in New England. I mean to say that the ordinary wages for an ordinary day's work will support a man comfortably and respectably longer than they ever would before. On the whole, the price of things has come down and the price of work has gone up. Yet still there are the poor; there is want, there is misery, there is starvation.
The community gives more than ever before; a better public provision is made for the poor, private benevolence is more active and works far more wisely--yet still there is poverty, want, misery unremoved, unmitigated, and, many think, immitigable!
Now I am not going to deny that poverty, like other forms of suffering, plays a part in the economy of the human race. If G.o.d's children will not work, or will throw away their bread, I do not complain that He sends them to bed without their supper--to a hard bed and a narrow and a cold. ”Earn your breakfast before you eat it,” is not merely the counsel of Poor Richard, but of Almighty G.o.d; it is a just counsel, and not hard. But is poverty an essential, substantial, integral element in human civilization, or is it an accidental element thereof, and transiently present; is it amenable to suppression? For my own part, I believe that all evil is transient, a thing that belongs to the process of development, not to the nature of man, or the higher forms of social life towards which he is advancing. If G.o.d be absolutely good, then only good things are everlasting. This general opinion which comes from my religion as well as my philosophy, affects my special opinion of the history and design of poverty. I look on it as on cannibalism, the butchery of captives, the continual war for the sake of plunder, or on slavery; yes, as I look on the diseases incident to childhood, things that mankind live through and outgrow; which, painful as they are, do not make up the greatest part of the entire life of mankind. If it shall be said that I cannot know this, that I have not a clear intellectual perception of the providential design thereof, or the means of its removal, still I believe it, and if I have not the knowledge which comes of philosophy, I have still faith, the result of instinctive trust in G.o.d.
Let us look a little at the causes of poverty. Some things we see best on a large scale. So let us look at poverty thus, and then come down to the smaller forms thereof.
I. There may be a natural and organic cause. The people of Lapland, Iceland and Greenland are a poor people compared with the Scotch, the Danes, or the French. There is a natural and organic cause for their poverty in the soil and climate of those countries, which cannot be changed. They must emigrate before they can become rich or comfortable in our sense of the word. Hence their poverty is to be attributed to their geographical position. Put the New Englanders there, even they would be a poor people. Thus the poverty of a nation may depend on the geographical position of the nation.