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.
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.
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.
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.