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.
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!
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.
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.