Part 24

The fact that such poverty is here, that so little is done by public authority, or by the ablest men in the land, to remove the evil tree and dig up its evil root; that amid all the wealth of Boston and all its charity, there are not even comfortable tenements for the poor to be had at any but a ruinous rent--that is a sad fact, and bears a sad testimony to our moral state! Sometimes the spectacle of misery does good, quickening the moral sense and touching the electric tie which binds all human hearts into one great family; but when it does not lead to this result, then it debases the looker-on. To know of want, of misery, of all the complicated and far-extended ill they bring; to hear of this, and to see it in the streets; to have the money to alleviate, and yet not to alleviate; the wisdom to devise a cure therefor, and yet make no effort towards it--that is to be yourself debased and barbarized. I have often thought, in seeing the poverty of London, that the daily spectacle of such misery did more in a year to debauch the British heart than all the slaughter at Waterloo. I know that misery has called out heroic virtue in some men and women, and made philanthropists of such as otherwise had been only getters and keepers of gain. We have noble examples of that in the midst of us; but how many men has poverty trod down into the mire; how many has this sight of misery hardened into cold worldliness, the man frozen into mere respectability, its thin smile on his lips, its ungodly contempt in his heart!

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Out of this barbarism of poverty there come three other forms of evil which indicate the moral condition of Boston; of that portion named just now as below the morals of trade and the press. These also I will call up to testify.

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One is Intemperance. This is a crime against the body; it is felony against your own frame. It makes a schism amongst your own members. The amount of it is fearfully great in this town. Some of our most wealthy citizens, who rent their buildings for the unlawful sale of rum to be applied to an intemperate abuse, are directly concerned in promoting this intemperance; others, rich but less wealthy, have sucked their abundance out of the bones of the poor, and are actual manufacturers of the drunkard and the criminal. Here are numerous distilleries owned, and some of them conducted, I am told, by men of wealth. The fire thereof is not quenched at all by day, and there is no night there; the worm dieth not. There out of the sweetest plant which God has made to grow under a tropic sun, men distil a poison the most baneful to mankind which the world has ever known. The poison of the Borgias was celebrated once; cold-hearted courtiers shivered at its name. It never killed many; those with merciful swiftness. The poison of rum is yet worse; it yearly murders thousands; kills them by inches, body and soul. Here are respectable and wealthy men, men who this day sit down in a Christian church and thank God for his goodness, with contrite hearts praise him for that Son of Man who gave his life for mankind, and would gladly give it to mankind; yet these men have ships on the sea to bring the poor man's poison here, or bear it hence to other men as poor; have distilleries on the land to make still yet more for the ruin of their fellow Christians; have warehouses full of this plague, which "outvenoms all the worms of Nile;" have shops which they rent for the illegal and murderous sale of this terrible scourge. Do they not know the ruin which they work; are they the only men in the land who have not heard of the effects of intemperance? I judge them not, great God! I only judge myself. I wish I could say, "They know not what they do;" but at this day who does not know the effect of intemperance in Boston?

I speak not of the sale of ardent spirits to be used in the arts, to be used for medicine, but of the needless use thereof; of their use to damage the body and injure the soul of man. The chief of your police informs me there are twelve hundred places in Boston, where this article is sold to be drunk on the spot; illegally sold. The Charitable Association of Mechanics, in this city, have taken the accumulated savings of more than fifty years, and therewith built a costly establishment, where intoxicating drink is needlessly but abundantly sold! Low as the moral standard of Boston is, low as are the morals of the press and trade, I had hoped better things of these men, who live in the midst of hard-working laborers, and see the miseries of intemperance all about them. But the dollar was too powerful for their temperance.

Here are splendid houses, where the rich man or the thrifty needlessly drinks. Let me leave them; the evil Demon of Intemperance appears not there; he is there, but under well-made garments, amongst educated men, who are respected and still respect themselves. Amid merriment and song the Demon appears not. He is there, gaunt, bony, and destructive, but so elegantly clad, with manners so unoffending, you do not mark his face, nor fear his steps. But go down to that miserable lane, where men mothered by Misery and sired by Crime, where the sons of Poverty and the daughters of Wretchedness, are huddled thick together, and you see this Demon of Intemperance in all his ugliness. Let me speak soberly: exaggeration is a figure of speech I would always banish from my rhetoric, here, above all, where the fact is more appalling than any fiction I could devise. In the low parts of Boston, where want abounds, where misery abounds, intemperance abounds yet more, to multiply want, to aggravate misery, to make savage what poverty has only made barbarian; to stimulate passion into crime. Here it is not music and the song which crown the bowl; it is crowned by obscenity, by oaths, by curses, by violence, sometimes by murder. These twine the ivy round the poor man's bowl; no, it is the Upas that they twine. Think of the sufferings of the drunkard himself, of his poverty, his hunger and his nakedness, his cold; think of his battered body; of his mind and conscience, how they are gone. But is that all? Far from it. These curses shall become blows upon his wife; that savage violence shall be expended on his child. In his senses this man was a barbarian; there are centuries of civilization betwixt him and cultivated men. But the man of wealth, adorned with respectability and armed with science, harbors a Demon in the street, a profitable Demon to the rich man who rents his houses for such a use. The Demon enters our barbarian, who straightway becomes a savage. In his fury he tears his wife and child. The law, heedless of the greater culprits, the Demon, and the demon-breeder, seizes our savage man and shuts him in the jail. Now he is out of the tempter's reach; let us leave him; let us go to his home. His wife and children still are there, freed from their old tormentor. Enter: look upon the squalor, the filth, the want, the misery still left behind. Respectability halts at the door with folded arms, and can no further go. But charity, the love of man which never fails, enters even there; enters to lift up the fallen, to cheer the despairing, to comfort and to bless. Let us leave her there, loving the unlovely, and turn to other sights.

In the streets, there are about nine hundred needy boys, and about two hundred needy girls, the sons and daughters mainly of the intemperate; too idle or too thriftless to work; too low and naked for the public school. They roam about--the nomadic tribes of this town, the gipsies of Boston--doing some chance work for a moment, committing some petty theft. The temptations of a great city are before them.[38] Soon they will be impressed into the regular army of crime, to be stationed in your jails, perhaps to die on your gallows. Such is the fate of the sons of intemperance; but the daughters! their fate--let me not tell of that.

In your Legislature they have just been discussing a law against dogs, for now and then a man is bitten and dies of hydrophobia. Perhaps there are ten mad dogs in the State at this moment, and it may be that one man in a year dies from the bite of such. Do the legislators know how many shops there are in this town, in this State, which all the day and all the year sell to intemperate men a poison that maddens with a hydrophobia still worse? If there were a thousand mad dogs in the land, if wealthy men had embarked a large capital in the importation or the production of mad dogs, and if they bit and maddened and slew ten thousand men in a year, do you believe your Legislature would discuss that evil with such fearless speech? Then you are very young, and know little of the tyranny of public opinion, and the power of money to silence speech, while justice still comes in, with feet of wool, but iron hands.[39]

There is yet another witness to the moral condition of Boston. I mean Crime. Where there is such poverty and intemperance, crime may be expected to follow. I will not now dwell upon this theme, only let me say, that in 1848, three thousand four hundred and thirty-five grown persons, and six hundred and seventy-one minors were lawfully sentenced to your jail and House of Correction; in all, four thousand one hundred and six; three thousand four hundred and forty-four persons were arrested by the night police, and eleven thousand one hundred and seventy-eight were taken into custody by the watch; at one time there were one hundred and forty-four in the common jail. I have already mentioned that more than a thousand boys and girls, between six and sixteen, wander as vagrants about your streets; two hundred and thirty-eight of these are children of widows, fifty-four have neither parent living. It is a fact known to your police, that about one thousand two hundred shops are unlawfully open for retailing the means of intemperance. These are most thickly strown in the haunts of poverty. On a single Sunday the police found three hundred and thirteen shops in the full experiment of unblushing and successful crime. These rum-shops are the factories of crime; the raw material is furnished by poverty; it passes into the hands of the rum-seller, and is soon ready for delivery at the mouth of the jail, or the foot of the gallows. It is notorious that intemperance is the proximate cause of three fourths of the crime in Boston; yet it is very respectable to own houses and rent them for the purpose of making men intemperate; nobody loses his standing by that. I am not surprised to hear of women armed with knives, and boys with six-barrelled revolvers in their pockets; not surprised at the increase of capital trials.

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One other matter let me name--I call it the Crime against Woman. Let us see the evil in its type, its most significant form. Look at that thing of corruption and of shame, almost without shame, whom the judge, with brief words, despatches to the jail. That was a woman once. No! At least, she was once a girl. She had a mother; perhaps, beyond the hills, a mother, in her evening prayer, remembers still this one child more tenderly than all the folded flowers that slept the sleep of infancy beneath her roof; remembers, with a prayer, her child, whom the world curses after it has made corrupt! Perhaps she had no such mother, but was born in the filth of some reeking cellar, and turned into the mire of the streets, in her undefended innocence, to mingle with the coarseness, the intemperance, and the crime of a corrupt metropolis. In either case, her blood is on our hands. The crime which is so terribly avenged on woman--think you that God will hold men innocent of that? But on this sign of our moral state, I will not long delay.

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Put all these things together: the character of trade, of the press; take the evidence of poverty, intemperance, and crime--it all reveals a sad state of things. I call your attention to these facts. We are all affected by them more or less; all more or less accountable for them.

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Hitherto I have only stated facts, without making comparisons. Let me now compare the present condition of Boston with that in former times. Every man has an ideal, which is better than the actual facts about him. Some men amongst us put that ideal in times past, and maintain it was then an historical fact; they are commonly men who have little knowledge of the past, and less hope for the future; a good deal of reverence for old precedents, little for justice, truth, humanity; little confidence in mankind, and a great deal of fear of new things. Such men love to look back and do homage to the past, but it is only a past of fancy, not of fact, they do homage to. They tell us we have fallen; that the golden age is behind us, and the garden of Eden; ours are degenerate days; the men are inferior, the women less winning, less witty, and less wise, and the children are an untoward generation, a disgrace, not so much to their fathers, but certainly to their grandsires. Sometimes this is the complaint of men who have grown old; sometimes of such as seem to be old without growing so, who seem born to the gift of age, without the grace of youth.

Other men have a similar ideal, commonly a higher one, but they place it in the future, not as an historical reality, which has been, and is therefore to be worshipped, but one which is to be made real by dint of thought, of work. I have known old persons who stoutly maintained that the pears and the plums and the peaches, are not half so luscious as they were many years ago; so they bewailed the existing race of fruits, complaining of "the general decay" of sweetness, and brought over to their way of speech some aged juveniles. Meanwhile, men born young, set themselves to productive work, and, instead of bewailing an old fancy, realized a new ideal in new fruits, bigger, fairer, and better than the old. It is to men of this latter stamp, that we must look for criticism and for counsel. The others can afford us a warning, if not by their speech, at least by their example.

It is very plain, that the people of New England are advancing in wealth, in intelligence, and in morality; but in this general march, there are little apparent pauses, slight waverings from side to side; some virtues seem to straggle from the troop; some to lag behind, for it is not always the same virtue that leads the van. It is with the flock of virtues, as with wild fowl--the leaders alternate. It is probable that the morals of New England in general, and of Boston in special, did decline somewhat from 1775 to 1790; there were peculiar but well-known causes, which no longer exist, to work that result. In the previous fifteen years, it seems probable that there had been a rapid increase of morality, through the agency of causes equally peculiar and transient. To estimate the moral growth or decline of this town, we must not take either period as a standard. But take the history of Boston, from 1650 to 1700, from 1700 to 1750, thence to 1800, and you will see a gradual, but a decided progress in morality in each of these periods. It is not easy to prove this in a short sermon; I can only indicate the points of comparison, and state the general fact. From 1800 to 1849, this progress is well marked, indisputable, and very great. Let us look at this a little in detail, pursuing the same order of thought as before.

It is generally conceded that the moral character of trade has improved a good deal within fifty or sixty years. It was formerly a common saying, that "If a Yankee merchant were to sell salt water at high-tide, he would yet cheat in the measure." The saying was founded on the conduct of American traders abroad, in the West Indies and elsewhere. Now things have changed for the better. I have been told by competent authority, that two of the most eminent merchants of Boston, fifty or sixty years ago, who conducted each a large business, and left very large fortunes, were notoriously guilty of such dishonesty in trade, as would now drive any man from the Exchange. The facility with which notes are collected by the banks, compared to the former method of collection, is itself a proof of an increase of practical honesty; the law for settling the affairs of a bankrupt tells the same thing. Now this change has not come from any special effort, made to produce this particular effect, and, accordingly, it indicates the general moral progress of the community.

The general character of the press, since the end of the last century, has decidedly improved, as any one may convince himself of, by comparing the newspapers of that period, with the present; yet a publicity is now-a-days given to certain things which were formerly kept more closely from the public eye and ear. This circumstance sometimes produces an apparent increase of wrong-doing, while it is only an increased publicity thereof. Political servility, and political rancor, are certainly bad enough, and base enough, at this day, but not long ago both were baser and worse; to show this, I need only appeal to the memories of men before me, who can recollect the beginning of the present century. Political controversies are conducted with less bitterness than before; honesty is more esteemed; private worth is more respected. It is not many years since the Federal party, composed of men who certainly were an honor to their age, supported Aaron Burr, for the office of President of the United States; a man whose character, both public and private, was notoriously marked with the deepest infamy. Political parties are not very puritanical in their virtue at this day; but I think no party would now for a moment accept such a man as Mr. Burr, for such a post.[40] There is another pleasant sign of this improvement in political parties: last autumn the victorious party, in two wards of this city, made a beautiful demonstration of joy, at their success in the Presidential election, and on Thanksgiving day, and on Christmas, gave a substantial dinner to each poor person in their section of the town. It was a trifle, but one pleasant to remember.

Even the theological journals have improved within a few years. I know it has been said that some of them are not only behind their times, which is true, "but behind all times." It is not so. Compared with the sectarian writings--tracts, pamphlets, and hard-bound volumes of an earlier day--they are human, enlightened, and even liberal.

In respect to poverty, there has been a great change for the better. However, it may be said in general, that a good deal of the poverty, intemperance, and crime, is of foreign origin; we are to deal with it, to be blamed if we allow it to continue; not at all to be blamed for its origin. I know it is often said, "The poor are getting poorer, and soon will become the mere vassals of the rich;" that "The past is full of discouragement; the future full of fear." I cannot think so. I feel neither the discouragement nor the fear. It should be remembered that many of the Fathers of New England owned the bodies of their laborers and domestics! The condition of the working man has improved, relatively to the wealth of the land, ever since. The wages of any kind of labor, at this day, bear a higher proportion to the things needed for comfort and convenience, than ever before for two hundred years.

If you go back one hundred years, I think you will find that, in proportion to the population and wealth of this town or this State, there was considerably more suffering from native poverty then than now. I have not, however, before me the means of absolute proof of this statement; but this is plain, that now public charity is more extended, more complete, works in a wiser mode, and with far more beneficial effect; and that pains are now taken to uproot the causes of poverty--pains which our fathers never thought of. In proof of this increase of charity, and even of the existence of justice, I need only refer to the numerous benevolent societies of modern origin, and to the establishment of the ministry at large, in this city--the latter the work of Unitarian philanthropy. Some other churches have done a little in this good work. But none have done much. I am told the Catholic clergy of this city do little to remove the great mass of poverty, intemperance, and crime among their followers. I know there are some few honorable exceptions, and how easy it is for Protestant hostility to exaggerate matters; still, I fear the reproach is but too well founded, that the Catholic clergy are not vigilant shepherds, who guard their sacred flock against the terrible wolves which prowl about the fold. I wish to find myself mistaken here.

Some of you remember the "Old Almshouse" in Park-street; the condition and character of its inmates; the effect of the treatment they there received. I do not say that our present attention to the subject of poverty is any thing to boast of--certainly we have done little in comparison with what common sense demands; very little in comparison with what Christianity enjoins; still it is something; in comparison with "the good old times," it is much that we are doing.

There has been a great change for the better in the matter of intemperance in drinking. Within thirty years, the progress towards sobriety is surprising, and so well marked and obvious that to name it is enough. Probably there is not a "respectable" man in Boston who would not be ashamed to have been seen drunk yesterday; even to have been drunk in ever so private a manner; not one who would willingly get a friend or a guest in that condition to-day! Go back a few years, and it brought no public reproach, and, I fear, no private shame. A few years further back, it was not a rare thing, on great occasions, for the fathers of the town to reel and stagger from their intemperance--the magistrates of the land voluntarily furnishing the warning which a romantic historian says the Spartans forced upon their slaves.

It is easy to praise the Fathers of New England; easier to praise them for virtues they did not possess, than to discriminate, and fairly judge those remarkable men. I admire and venerate their characters, but they were rather hard drinkers; certainly a love of cold water was not one of their loves. Let me mention a fact or two: it is recorded in the Probate office, that in 1678, at the funeral of Mrs. Mary Norton, widow of the celebrated John Norton, one of the ministers of the first church in Boston, fifty-one gallons and a half of the best Malaga wine were consumed by the "mourners;" in 1685, at the funeral of the Rev. Thomas Cobbett, minister at Ipswich, there were consumed one barrel of wine and two barrels of cider--"and as it was cold," there was "some spice and ginger for the cider." You may easily judge of the drunkenness and riot on occasions less solemn than the funeral of an old and beloved minister. Towns provided intoxicating drink at the funeral of their paupers; in Salem, in 1728, at the funeral of a pauper, a gallon of wine and another of cider are charged as "incidental;" the next year, six gallons of rum on a similar occasion; in Lynn, in 1711, the town furnished "half a barrel of cider for the Widow Dispaw's funeral." Affairs had come to such a pass, that in 1742, the General Court forbade the use of wine and rum at funerals. In 1673, Increase Mather published his "Wo unto Drunkards." Governor Winthrop complains, in 1630, that "The young folk gave themselves to drink hot waters very immoderately."[41]