Part 23

After all the special efforts to remove poverty, the great work is to be done by the general advance of mankind. We shall outgrow this as cannibalism, butchery of captives, war for plunder, and other kindred miseries have been outgrown. God has general remedies in abundance, but few specific. Something will be done by diffusing throughout the community principles and habits of economy, industry, temperance; by diffusing ideas of justice, sentiments of brotherly love, sentiments and ideas of religion. I hope every thing from that--the noiseless and steady progress of Christianity; the snow melts, not by sunlight, or that alone, but as the whole air becomes warm. You may in cold weather melt away a little before your own door, but that makes little difference till the general temperature rises. Still while the air is getting warm, you facilitate the process by breaking up the obdurate masses of ice and putting them where the sun shines with direct and unimpeded light. So must we do with poverty.

It is only a little that any of us can do--for any thing. Still we can do a little; we can each do by helping towards raising the general tone of society: first, by each man raising himself; by industry, economy, charity, justice, piety; by a noble life. So doing, we raise the moral temperature of the whole world, and just in proportion thereto. Next, by helping those who come in our way; nay, by going out of our way to help them. In each of these modes, it is our duty to work. To a certain extent each man is his brother's keeper. Of the powers we possess we are but trustees under Providence, to use them for the benefit of men, and render continually an account of our stewardship to God. Each man can do a little directly to help convince the world of its wrong, a little in the way of temporizing charity, a little in the way of remedial justice; so doing, he works with God, and God works with him.

X.

A SERMON OF THE MORAL CONDITION OF BOSTON.--PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1849.

1 SAMUEL VII. 12.

Hitherto hath the Lord helped us.

A man who has only the spirit of his age can easily be a popular man; if he have it in an eminent degree, he must be a popular man in it: he has its hopes and its fears; his trumpet gives a certain and well-known sound; his counsel is readily appreciated; the majority is on his side. But he cannot be a wise magistrate, a just judge, a competent critic, or a profitable preacher. A man who has only the spirit of a former age can be none of these four things; and not even a popular man. He remembers when he ought to forecast, and compares when he ought to act; he cannot appreciate the age he lives in, nor have a fellow-feeling with it. He may easily obtain the pity of his age, not its sympathy or its confidence. The man who has the spirit of his own, and also that of some future age, is alone capable of becoming a wise magistrate, a just judge, a competent critic, and a profitable preacher. Such a man looks on passing events somewhat as the future historian will do, and sees them in their proportions, not distorted; sees them in their connection with great general laws, and judges of the falling rain not merely by the bonnets it may spoil and the pastime it disturbs, but by the grass and corn it shall cause to grow. He has hopes and fears of his own, but they are not the hopes and fears of men about him; his trumpet cannot give a welcome or well-known sound, nor his counsel be presently heeded. Majorities are not on his side, nor can he be a popular man.

To understand our present moral condition, to be able to give good counsel thereon, you must understand the former generation, and have potentially the spirit of the future generation; must appreciate the past, and yet belong to the future. Who is there that can do this? No man will say, "I can." Conscious of the difficulty, and aware of my own deficiencies in all these respects, I will yet endeavor to speak of the moral condition of Boston.

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First, I will speak of the actual moral condition of Boston, as indicated by the morals of Trade. In a city like Rome, you must first feel the pulse of the church, in St. Petersburg that of the court, to determine the moral condition of those cities. Now trade is to Boston what the church is to Rome and the imperial court to St. Petersburg: it is the pendulum which regulates all the common and authorized machinery of the place; it is an organization of the public conscience. We care little for any Pius the Ninth, or Nicholas the First; the dollar is our emperor and pope, above all the parties in the State, all sects in the church, lord paramount over both, its spiritual and temporal power not likely to be called in question; revolt from what else we may, we are loyal still to that.

A little while ago, in a sermon of riches, speaking of the character of trade in Boston, I suggested that men were better than their reputation oftener than worse; that there were a hundred honest bargains to one that was dishonest. I have heard severe strictures from friendly tongues, on that statement, which gave me more pain than any criticism I have received before. The criticism was, that I overrated the honesty of men in trade. Now, it is a small thing to be convicted of an error--a just thing and a profitable to have it detected and exposed; but it is a painful thing to find you have overrated the moral character of your townsmen. However, if what I said be not true as history, I hope it will become so as prophecy; I doubt not my critics will help that work.

Love of money is out of proportion to love of better things--to love of justice, of truth, of a manly character developing itself in a manly life. Wealth is often made the end to live for; not the means to live by, and attain a manly character. The young man of good abilities does not commonly propose it to himself to be a noble man, equipped with all the intellectual and moral qualities which belong to that, and capable of the duties which come thereof. He is satisfied if he can become a rich man. It is the highest ambition of many a youth in this town to become one of the rich men of Boston; to have the social position which wealth always gives, and nothing else in this country can commonly bestow. Accordingly, our young men that are now poor, will sacrifice every thing to this one object; will make wealth the end, and will become rich without becoming noble. But wealth without nobleness of character is always vulgar. I have seen a clown staring at himself in the gorgeous mirror of a French palace, and thought him no bad emblem of many an ignoble man at home, surrounded by material riches which only reflected back the vulgarity of their owner.

Other young men inherit wealth, but seldom regard it as a means of power for high and noble ends, only as the means of selfish indulgence; unneeded means to elevate yet more their self-esteem. Now and then you find a man who values wealth only as an instrument to serve mankind withal. I know some such men; their money is a blessing akin to genius, a blessing to mankind, a means of philanthropic power. But such men are rare in all countries, perhaps a little less so in Boston than in most other large trading towns; still, exceeding rare. They are sure to meet with neglect, abuse, and perhaps with scorn; if they are men of eminent ability, superior culture, and most elevated moral aims, set off, too, with a noble and heroic life, they are sure of meeting with eminent hatred. I fear the man most hated in this town would be found to be some one who had only sought to do mankind some great good, and stepped before his age too far for its sympathy. Truth, Justice, Humanity, are not thought in Boston to have come of good family; their followers are not respectable. I am not speaking to blame men, only to show the fact; we may meddle with things too high for us, but not understand nor appreciate.

Now this disproportionate love of money appears in various ways. You see it in the advantage that is taken of the feeblest, the most ignorant, and the most exposed classes in the community. It is notorious that they pay the highest prices, the dearest rents, and are imposed upon in their dealings oftener than any other class of men; so the raven and the hooded crow, it is said, seek out the sickliest sheep to pounce upon. The fact that a man is ignorant, poor, and desperate, furnishes to many men an argument for defrauding the man. It is bad enough to injure any man; but to wrong an ignorant man, a poor and friendless man; to take advantage of his poverty or his ignorance, and to get his services or his money for less than a fair return--that is petty baseness under aggravated circumstances, and as cowardly as it is mean. You are now and then shocked at rich men telling of the arts by which they got their gold--sometimes of their fraud at home, sometimes abroad, and a good man almost thinks there must be a curse on money meanly got at first, though it falls to him by honest inheritance.

This same disproportionate love of money appears in the fact that men, not driven by necessity, engage in the manufacture, the importation, and the sale of an article which corrupts and ruins men by hundreds; which has done more to increase poverty, misery, and crime than any other one cause whatever; and, as some think, more than all other causes whatever. I am not speaking of men who aid in any just and proper use of that article, but in its ruinous use. Yet such men, by such a traffic, never lose their standing in society, their reputation in trade, their character in the church. A good many men will think worse of you for being an Abolitionist; men have lost their place in society by that name; even Dr. Channing "hurt his usefulness" and "injured his reputation" by daring to speak against that sin of the nation; but no man loses caste in Boston by making, importing, and selling the cause of ruin to hundreds of families--though he does it with his eyes open, knowing that he ministers to crime and to ruin! I am told that large quantities of New England rum have already been sent from this city to California; it is notorious that much of it is sent to the nations of Africa--if not from Boston, at least from New England--as an auxiliary in the slave-trade. You know with what feelings of grief and indignation a clergyman of this city saw that characteristic manufacture of his town on the wharves of a Mahometan city. I suppose there are not ten ministers in Boston who would not "get into trouble," as the phrase is, if they were to preach against intemperance, and the causes that produce intemperance, with half so much zeal as they innocently preach "regeneration" and a "form of piety" which will never touch a single corner of the earth. As the minister came down, the Spirit of Trade would meet him on the pulpit stairs to warn him: "Business is business; religion is religion; business is ours, religion yours; but if you make or even allow religion to interfere with our business, then it will be the worse for you--that is all!" You know it is not a great while since we drove out of Boston the one Unitarian minister who was a fearless apostle of temperance.[36] His presence here was a grief to that "form of piety;" a disturbance to trade. Since then the peace of the churches has not been much disturbed by the preaching of temperance. The effect has been salutary; no Unitarian minister has risen up to fill that place!

This same disproportionate love of money appears in the fact, that the merchants of Boston still allow colored seamen to be taken from their ships and shut up in the jails of another State. If they cared as much for the rights of man as for money, as much for the men who sail the ship as for the cargo it carries, I cannot think there would be brass enough in South Carolina, or all the South, to hold another freeman of Massachusetts in bondage, merely for the color of his skin. No doubt, a merchant would lose his reputation in this city by engaging directly in the slave-trade, for it is made piracy by the law of the land.[37] But did any one ever lose his reputation by taking a mortgage on slaves as security for a debt; by becoming, in that way or by inheritance, the owner of slaves, and still keeping them in bondage?

You shall take the whole trading community of Boston, rich and poor, good and bad, study the phenomena of trade as astronomers the phenomena of the heavens, and from the observed facts, by the inductive method of philosophy, construct the ethics of trade, and you will find one great maxim to underlie the whole: Money must be made. Money-making is to the ethics of trade what attraction is to the material world; what truth is to the intellect, and justice in morals. Other things must yield to that; that to nothing. In the effort to comply with this universal law of trade, many a character gives way; many a virtue gets pushed aside; the higher, nobler qualities of a man are held in small esteem.

This characteristic of the trading class appears in the thought of the people as well as their actions. You see it in the secular literature of our times; in the laws, even in the sermons; nobler things give way to love of gold. So in an ill-tended garden, in some bed where violets sought to open their fragrant bosoms to the sun, have I seen a cabbage come up and grow apace, with thick and vulgar stalk, with coarse and vulgar leaves, with rank unsavory look; it thrust aside the little violet, which, underneath that impenetrable leaf, lacking the morning sunshine and the dew of night, faded and gave up its tender life; but above the grave of the violet there stood the cabbage, green, expanding, triumphant, and all fearless of the frost. Yet the cabbage also had its value and its use.

There are men in Boston, some rich, some poor, old and young, who are free from this reproach; men that have a well-proportioned love of money, and make the pursuit thereof an effort for all the noble qualities of a man. I know some such men, not very numerous anywhere, men who show that the common business of life is the place to mature great virtues in; that the pursuit of wealth, successful or not, need hinder the growth of no excellence, but may promote all manly life. Such men stand here as violets among the cabbages, making a fragrance and a loveliness all their own; attractive anywhere, but marvellous in such a neighborhood as that.

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Look next on the morals of Boston, as indicated by the Newspapers, the daily and the weekly press. Take the whole newspaper literature of Boston, cheap and costly, good and bad, study it all as a whole, and by the inductive method construct the ethics of the press, and here you find no signs of a higher morality in general than you found in trade. It is the same centre about which all things gravitate here as there. But in the newspapers the want of great principles is more obvious, and more severely felt than in trade--the want of justice, of truth, of humanity, of sympathy with man. In trade you meet with signs of great power; the highway of commerce bears marks of giant feet. Our newspapers seem chiefly in the hands of little men, whose cunning is in a large ratio to their wisdom or their justice. You find here little ability, little sound learning, little wise political economy; of lofty morals almost nothing at all. Here, also, the dollar is both Pope and King; right and truth are vassals, not much esteemed, nor over-often called to pay service to their Lord, who has other soldiers with more pliant neck and knee.

A newspaper is an instrument of great importance; all men read it; many read nothing else; some it serves as reason and conscience too: in lack of better, why not? It speaks to thousands every day on matters of great moment--on matters of morals, of politics, of finance. It relates daily the occurrences of our land, and of all the world. All men are affected by it; hindered or helped. To many a man his morning paper represents more reality than his morning prayer. There are many in a community like this who do not know what to say--I do not mean what to think, thoughtful men know what to think--about any thing till somebody tells them; yet they must talk, for "the mouth goes always." To such a man a newspaper is invaluable; as the idolater in the Judges had "a Levite to his priest," so he has a newspaper to his reason or his conscience, and can talk to the day's end. An able and humane newspaper would get this class of persons into good habits of speech, and do them a service, inasmuch as good habits of speech are better than bad.

One portion of this literature is degrading; it seems purposely so, as if written by base men, for base readers, to serve base ends. I know not which is most depraved thereby, the taste or the conscience. Obscene advertisements are there, meant for the licentious eye; there are loathsome details of vice, of crime, of depravity, related with the design to attract, yet so disgusting that any but a corrupt man must revolt from them; there are accounts of the appearance of culprits in the lower courts, of their crime, of their punishment; these are related with an impudent flippancy, and a desire to make sport of human wretchedness and perhaps depravity, which amaze a man of only the average humanity. We read of Judge Jeffreys and the bloody assizes in England, one hundred and sixty years ago, but never think there are in the midst of us men who, like that monster, can make sport of human misery; but for a cent you can find proof that the race of such is not extinct. If a penny-a-liner were to go into a military hospital, and make merry at the sights he saw there, at the groans he heard, and the keen smart his eye witnessed, could he publish his fiendish joy at that spectacle--you would not say he was a man. If one mock at the crimes of men, perhaps at their sins, at the infamous punishments they suffer--what can you say of him?

It is a significant fact that the commercial newspapers, which of course in such a town are the controlling newspapers, in reporting the European news, relate first the state of the markets abroad, the price of cotton, of consols, and of corn; then the health of the English queen, and the movements of the nations. This is loyal and consistent; at Rome, the journal used to announce first some tidings of the Pope, then of the lesser dignitaries of the church, then of the discovery of new antiques, and other matters of great pith and moment; at St. Petersburg, it was first of the Emperor that the journal spoke; at Boston, it is legitimate that the health of the dollar should be reported first of all.

The political newspapers are a melancholy proof of the low morality of this town. You know what they will say of any party movement; that measures and men are judged on purely party grounds. The country is commonly put before mankind, and the party before the country. Which of them in political matters pursues a course that is fair and just; how many of them have ever advanced a great idea, or been constantly true to a great principle of natural justice; how many resolutely oppose a great wrong; how many can be trusted to expose the most notorious blunders of their party; how many of them aim to promote the higher interests of mankind? What servility is there in some of these journals, a cringing to the public opinion of the party; a desire that "our efforts may be appreciated!" In our politics every thing which relates to money is pretty carefully looked after, though not always well looked after; but what relates to the moral part of politics is commonly passed over with much less heed. Men would compliment a senator who understood finance in all its mysteries, and sneer at one who had studied as faithfully the mysteries of war, or of slavery. The Mexican War tested the morality of Boston, as it appears both in the newspapers and in trade, and showed its true value.

There are some few exceptions to this statement; here and there is a journal which does set forth the great ideas of this age, and is animated by the spirit of humanity. But such exceptions only remind one of the general rule.

In the sectarian journals the same general morality appears, but in a worse form. What would have been political hatred in the secular prints, becomes theological odium in the sectarian journals; not a mere hatred in the name of party, but hatred in the name of God and Christ. Here is less fairness, less openness, and less ability than there, but more malice; the form, too, is less manly. What is there a strut or a swagger, is here only a snivel. They are the last places in which you need look for the spirit of true morality. Which of the sectarian journals of Boston advocates any of the great reforms of the day? nay, which is not an obstacle in the path of all manly reform? But let us not dwell upon this, only look and pass by.

I am not about to censure the conductors of these journals, commercial, political, or theological. I am no judge of any man's conscience. No doubt they write as they can or must. This literature is as honest and as able as "the circumstances will admit of." I look on it as an index of our moral condition, for a newspaper literature always represents the general morals of its readers. Grocers and butchers purchase only such articles as their customers will buy; the editors of newspapers reveal the moral character of their subscribers as well as their correspondents. The transient literature of any age is always a good index of the moral taste of the age. These two witnesses attest the moral condition of the better part of the city; but there are men a good deal lower than the general morals of trade and the press. Other witnesses testify to their moral character.

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Let me now speak of your moral condition as indicated by the Poverty in this city. I have so recently spoken on the subject of poverty in Boston, and printed the sermon, that I will not now mention the misery it brings. I will only speak of the moral condition which it indicates, and the moral effect it has upon us.

In this age, poverty tends to barbarize men; it shuts them out from the educational influences of our times. The sons of the miserable class cannot obtain the intellectual, moral, and religious education which is the birthright of the comfortable and the rich. There is a great gulf between them and the culture of our times. How hard it must be to climb up from a cellar in Cove Place to wisdom, to honesty, to piety. I know how comfortable pharisaic self-righteousness can say, "I thank thee I am not wicked like one of these," and God knows which is the best before His eyes, the scorner, or the man he loathes and leaves to dirt and destruction. I know this poverty belongs to the state of transition we are now in, and can only be ended by our passing through this into a better. I see the medicinal effect of poverty, that with cantharidian sting it drives some men to work, to frugality and thrift; that the Irish has driven the American beggar out of the streets, and will shame him out of the almshouse ere long. But there are men who have not force enough to obey this stimulus; they only cringe and smart under its sting. Such men are made barbarians by poverty, barbarians in body, in mind and conscience, in heart and soul. There is a great amount of this barbarism in Boston; it lowers the moral character of the place, as icebergs in your harbor next June would chill the air all day.