Part 21

Do we not see that by our present course we are teaching men violence, fraud, deceit, and murder? What is the educational effect of our present political conduct, of our invasions, our battles, our victories; of the speeches of "our great men?" You all know that this teaches the poor, the low, and the weak that murder and robbery are good things when done on a large scale; that they give wealth, fame, power, and honors. The ignorant man, ill-born and ill-bred, asks: "Why not when done on a small scale; why not good for me?" If it is right in the President of the United States to rob and murder, why not for the President of the United States Bank? Do famous men say, "Our country however bounded," and vote to plunder a sister State? then why shall not the poor man, hungry and cold, say, "My purse however bounded," and seize on all he can get? Give one a seat in Congress if you will, and the other a noose of hemp, there is a God before whom seats in Congress and hempen halters are of equal value, but who does justice to great and little!

* * * * *

To reform the dangerous classes of society, to advance those who loiter behind our civilization, we need a special work designed directly for the good of the criminals and such as stand on that perilous ground which slopes towards crime. Some good men undertook this work long ago. They found much to do; a good deal to encourage them. Some of them are well known to you, are laboring here in the midst of us. They need counsel, encouragement, and aid. We must not look coldly on their enterprise nor on them. They can tell far better than I what specific plans are best for their specific work. Already have they accomplished much in this noble enterprise. The society for aiding discharged convicts is a prophecy of yet better things. Soon I trust it will extend its kind offices to all the prisons, and its work be made the affair of the State. The plan now before your Legislature for a "State Manual Labor School," designed to reform vicious children, is also full of promise. The wise and anonymous charity which so beautifully and in silence has dropped its gold into the chest for these poor outcasts, is itself its hundred-fold reward. Institutions like that which we contemplate have been found successful in England, Germany, and France. They actually reform the juvenile delinquent and bring up useful men, not hardened criminals.[35] We are beginning to attend to this special work of removing the causes of crime, and restoring at least the young offenders.

However, the greater portion of this work is not special and for the criminal, but general and for society. To change the treatment of criminals, we must change every thing else. The dangerous class is the unavoidable result of our present civilization; of our present ideas of man and social life. To reform and elevate the class of criminals, we must reform and elevate all other classes. To do that, we must educate and refine men. We must learn to treat all men as brothers. This is a great work and one of slow achievement. It cannot be brought about by legislation, nor any mechanical contrivance and reorganization alone. There is no remedy for this evil and its kindred but keeping the laws of God; in one word, none but Christianity, goodness, and piety felt in the heart, applied in all the works of life, individually, socially, and politically. While educated and abounding men acknowledge no rule of conduct but self-interest, what can you expect of the ignorant and the perishing? While great men say without rebuke that we do not look at "the natural justice of a war," do you expect men in the lowest places of society, ignorant and brutish, pinched by want, to look at the natural justice of theft, of murder? It were a vain expectation. We must improve all classes to improve one; perhaps the highest first. Different men acting in the most various directions, without concert, often jealous one of another, and all partial in their aims, are helping forward this universal result. While we are contending against slavery, war, intemperance, or party rage, while we are building up hospitals, colleges, schools, while we are contending for freedom of conscience, or teaching abstractly the love of man and love of God, we are all working for the welfare of this neglected class. The gallows of the barbarian and the Gospel of Christianity cannot exist together. The times are full of promise. Mankind slowly fulfils what a man of genius prophesies; God grants what a good man asks, and when it comes, it is better than what he prayed for.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] The allusion is to the following passages of Scripture, which were read as the lesson for the day: Numb. xiv.; 2 Kings, ii. 23-25; and Luke, xv.

[32] See other statistics in "Sermon of the Perishing Classes," pp. 205, 206.

[33] Mr. Horace Mann.

[34] The period of confinement in our States' Prisons differs a good deal in the various States, as will appear from the following Table.

Whole No. in prison. Average sentence. In Conn. 189, March 31, 1841, 7 yrs. 3 mos. Va. 181, Sept 30, 1839, 6 " 10 " Mass. 322, Sept. 30, 1840, 5 " 9 " La. 68, Sept 30, 1839, 5 " 1 " N. J. 152, Sept. 30, 1840, 4 " 7 " Ky. 162, Sept. 30, 1839, 4 " 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 Warwickshire, 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 passing 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 classes 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 accumulates money, and secondly, through the money itself. Then there is a body of men who are comfortable. This class comprises the mass of the people in all the callings of life. Out of this class 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 class 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 mass 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 classes are not sharp and distinctly drawn. There are no sharp divisions in nature; but for our convenience, we distinguish classes by their centre where they are most unlike, and not by their circumference 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 class 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 God. I never see a poor man carried to jail for some petty crime, or even for a great one, without thinking that probably, in God'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 God; 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 Massachusetts for fifty years past, or tried for some capital offence, and show what class of society they were from, how they were bred, what influences were about them in childhood, how they passed 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 classic 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 latitude, and it soon comes. Nay, as they get to learn the wants of cultivated men, there will be a poorer class 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 ships 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 hell of want and crime, this the worldly heaven of luxury and power! Put on the one side the stately nobility 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, God 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 God'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 God; 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 God 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 God.

* * * * *

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.

Suppose a race of men has little vigor of body or of mind, and yet the same natural wants as a vigorous race; put them in favorable circumstances, in a good climate, on a rich soil, they will be poor on account of the feebleness of their mind and body; put them in a stern climate, on a sterile soil, and they will perish. Such is the case with the Mexicans. Soil and climate are favorable, yet the people are poor. Suppose a nation had only one third part of the Laplander's ability, and yet needed the result of all his power, and was put in the Laplander's position, they would not live through the first winter. Had they been Mexicans who came to Plymouth in 1620, not one of them, it is probable, would have seen the next summer. Take away half the sense or bodily strength of the Bushmans of South Africa, and though they might have sense enough to dig nuts out of the ground, yet the lions and hyenas would eventually eat up the whole nation. So the poverty of a nation may come from want of power of body or of mind.

Then if a nation increases in numbers more rapidly than in wealth, there is a corresponding increase of want. Let the number of births in England for the next ten years be double the number for the last ten, without a corresponding creation of new wealth, and the English are brought to the condition of the Irish. Let the number of births in Ireland in like manner multiply, and one half the population must perish for want of food. So the poverty of a nation may depend on the disproportionate increase of its numbers.

Then an able race, under favorable outward circumstances, without an over-rapid increase of numbers, if its powers are not much developed, will be poor in comparison with a similar race under similar circumstances, but highly developed. Thus England, under Egbert in the ninth century, was poor compared with England under Victoria in the nineteenth century. The single town of Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, or even Sheffield, is probably worth many times the wealth of all England in the ninth century. So the poverty of a nation may depend on its want of development.

Old England and New England are rich, partly through the circumstances of climate and soil, partly and chiefly through the great vigor of the race, with only a normal increase of numbers, and partly through a more complete development of the nations. Such are the chief natural and organic causes of poverty on a large scale in a nation.

II. The causes may be political. By political, I mean such as are brought about by the laws, either the fundamental laws, the constitution, or the minor laws, statutes. Sometimes the laws tend to make the whole nation poor. Such are the laws which force the industry of the people out of the natural channel, restricting commerce, agriculture, manufactures, industry in general. Sometimes this is done by promoting war, by keeping up armies and navies, by putting the destructive work of fighting, or the merely conservative work of ruling, before the creative works of productive industry. France was an example of that a hundred years ago. Spain yet continues such, as she has been for two centuries.

Sometimes this is done by hindering the general development of the nation, by retarding education, by forbidding all freedom of thought. The States of the Church are an example of this when compared with Tuscany; all Italy and Austria, when compared with England; Spain, when compared with Germany, France, and Holland.

Sometimes this is brought about by keeping up an unnatural institution--as slavery, for example. South Carolina is an instance of this, when compared with Massachusetts. South Carolina has many advantages over us, yet South Carolina is poor while Massachusetts is rich.

Sometimes this political action primarily affects only the distribution of wealth, and so makes one class rich and another poor. Such is the case with laws which give all the real estate to the oldest son, laws which allow property to be entailed for a long time or forever, laws which cut men off from the land. These laws at first seem only to make one class rich and the others poor, and merely to affect the distribution of wealth in a nation, but they are unnatural and retard the industry of the people, and diminish their productive power, and make the whole nation less rich. Legislation may favor wealth and not men--property which is accumulated labor, rather than labor which is the power that accumulates property. Such legislation always endangers wealth in the end, lessening its quantity and making its tenure uncertain.

Two things may be said of European legislation in general, and especially of English legislation. First, That it has aimed to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few and keep it there. Hence it favors primogeniture, entails monopolies of posts of profit and of honor. Second, It has always looked out for the proprietor and his property, and cared little for the man without property; hence it always wanted the price of things high, the wages of men low, and in addition to natural and organic obstacles it continually put social impediments in the poor man's way. In England no son of a laborer could rise to eminence in the law or in medicine, scarcely in the church; no, not even in the army or navy.

These two statements will bear examination. The genius of England has demanded these two things. The genius of America demands neither, but rejects both; demands the distribution of property, puts the rights of man first, the rights of things last. Such are the political causes, and such their effects.

III. Then there are social causes which make a nation poor. Such are the prevalence of an opinion that industry is not respectable; that it is honorable to consume, disgraceful to create; that much must be spent, though little earned. The Spanish nation is poor in part through the prevalence of this opinion.