But I need not go back so far. Who that is fifty years of age, does not remember the aspect of Boston on public days; on the evening of such days? Compare the "Election day," or the Fourth of July, as they were kept thirty or forty years ago, with such days in our time. Some of you remember the celebration of Peace, in 1783; many of you can recollect the similar celebration in 1815. On each of those days the inhabitants from the country towns came here to rejoice with the citizens of this town. Compare the riot, the confusion, the drunkenness then, with the order, decorum, and sobriety of the celebration at the introduction of water last autumn, and you see what has been done in sixty or seventy years for temperance.
A great deal of the crime in Boston is of foreign origin: of the one thousand and sixty-six children vagrant in your streets, only one hundred and three had American parents; of the nine hundred and thirty-three persons in the House of Correction here, six hundred and sixteen were natives of other countries; I know not how many were the children of Irishmen, who had not enjoyed the advantages of our institutions. I cannot tell how many rum-shops are kept by foreigners.[42] Now in Ireland no pains have been taken with the education of the people by the Government; very little by the Catholic church; indeed, the British government for a long time rendered it impossible for the church to do any thing in this way. For more than seventy years, in that Catholic country, none but a Protestant could keep a school or even be a tutor in a private family. A Catholic schoolmaster was to be transported, and, if he returned, adjudged guilty of high treason, barbarously put to death, drawn and quartered. A Protestant schoolmaster is as repulsive to a Catholic, as a Mahometan schoolmaster or an Atheist would be to you. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Irish are ignorant, and, as a consequence thereof, are idle, thriftless, poor, intemperate, and barbarian; not to be wondered at if they conduct like wild beasts when they are set loose in a land where we think the individual must be left free to the greatest extent. Of course they will violate our laws, those wild bisons leaping over the fences which easily restrain the civilized domestic cattle; will commit the great crimes of violence, even capital offences, which certainly have increased rapidly of late. This increase of foreigners is prodigious: more than half the children in your public schools are children of foreigners; there are more Catholic than Protestant children born in Boston.
With the general and unquestionable advance of morality, some offences are regarded as crimes which were not noticed a few years ago. Drunkenness is an example of this. An Irishman in his native country thinks little of beating another or being beaten; he brings his habits of violence with him, and does not at once learn to conform to our laws. Then, too, a good deal of crime which was once concealed is now brought to light by the press, by the superior activity of the police; and yet, after all that is said, it seems quite clear that what is legally called crime and committed by Americans, has diminished a good deal in fifty years. Such crime, I think, never bore so small a proportion to the population, wealth, and activity of Boston, as now. Even if we take all the offences committed by these strangers who have come amongst us, it does not compare so very unfavorably as some allege with the "good old times." I know men often look on the fathers of this colony as saints; but in 1635, at a time when the whole State contained less than one tenth of the present population of Boston, and they were scattered from Weymouth Fore-River to the Merrimack, the first grand jury ever impanelled at Boston "found" a hundred bills of indictment at their first coming together.
If you consider the circumstances of the class who commit the greater part of the crimes which get punished, you will not wonder at the amount. The criminal court is their school of morals; the constable and judge are their teachers; but under this rude tuition I am told that the Irish improve and actually become better. The children who receive the instruction of our public schools, imperfect as they are, will be better than their fathers; and their grandchildren will have lost all trace of their barbarian descent.
I have often spoken of our penal law as wrong in its principle, taking it for granted that the ignorant and miserable men who commit crime do it always from wickedness, and not from the pressure of circumstances which have brutalized the man; wrong in its aim, which is to take vengeance on the offender, and not to do him a good in return for the evil he has done; wrong in its method, which is to inflict a punishment that is wholly arbitrary, and then to send the punished man, overwhelmed with new disgrace, back to society, often made worse than before,—not to keep him till we can correct, cure, and send him back a reformed man. I would retract nothing of what I have often said of that; but not long ago all this was worse; the particular statutes were often terribly unjust; the forms of trial afforded the accused but little chance of justice; the punishments were barbarous and terrible. The plebeian tyranny of the Lord Brethren in New England was not much lighter than the patrician despotism of the Lord Bishops in the old world, and was more insulting. Let me mention a few facts, to refresh the memories of those who think we are going to ruin, and can only save ourselves by holding to the customs of our fathers, and of the "good old times." In 1631, a man was fined forty pounds, whipped on the naked back, both his ears cut off, and then banished this colony, for uttering hard speeches against the government and the church at Salem. In the first century of the existence of this town, the magistrates could banish a woman because she did not like the preaching, nor all the ministers, and told the people why; they could whip women naked in the streets, because they spoke reproachfully of the magistrates; they could fine men twenty pounds, and then banish them, for comforting a man in jail before his trial; they could pull down, with legal formality, the house of a man they did not like; they could whip women at a cart's tail from Salem to Rhode Island, for fidelity to their conscience; they could beat, imprison, and banish men out of the land, simply for baptizing one another in a stream of water, instead of sprinkling them from a dish; they could crop the ears, and scourge the backs, and bore the tongues of men, for being Quakers; yes, they could shut them in jails, could banish them out of the colony, could sell them as slaves, could hang them on a gallows, solely for worshipping God after their own conscience; they could convulse the whole land, and hang some thirty or forty men for witchcraft, and do all this in the name of God, and then sing psalms, with most nasal twang, and pray by the hour, and preach—I will not say how long, nor what, nor how! It is not yet one hundred years since two slaves were judicially burnt alive, on Boston Neck, for poisoning their master.
But why talk of days so old? Some of you remember when the pillory and the whipping-post were a part of the public furniture of the law, and occupied a prominent place in the busiest street in town. Some of you have seen men and women scourged, naked, and bleeding, in State street; have seen men judicially branded in the forehead with a hot iron, their ears clipped off by the sheriff, and held up to teach humanity to the gaping crowd of idle boys and vulgar men. A magistrate was once brought into odium in Boston, for humanely giving back to his victim a part of the ear he had officially shorn off, that the mutilated member might be restored and made whole. How long is it since men sent their servants to the "Workhouse," to be beaten "for disobedience," at the discretion of the master? It is not long since the gallows was a public spectacle here in the midst of us, and a hanging made a holiday for the rabble of this city and the neighboring towns; even women came to see the death-struggle of a fellow-creature, and formed the larger part of the mob; many of you remember the procession of the condemned man sitting on his coffin, a procession from the jail to the gallows, from one end of the city to the other. I remember a public execution some fourteen or fifteen years ago, and some of the students of theology at Cambridge, of undoubted soundness in the Unitarian faith, came here to see men kill a fellow-man!
Who can think of these things, and not see that a great progress has been made in no long time. But if these things be not proof enough, then consider what has been done here in this century for the reformation of juvenile offenders; for the discharged convict; for the blind, the deaf, and the dumb; for the insane, and now even for the idiot. Think of the numerous Societies for the widows and orphans; for the seamen; the Temperance Societies; the Peace Societies; the Prison Discipline Society; the mighty movement against slavery, which, beginning with a few heroic men who took the roaring lion of public opinion by the beard, fearless of his roar, has gone on now, till neither the hardest nor the softest courage in the State dares openly defend the unholy institution. A philanthropic female physician delivers gratuitous lectures on physiology to the poor of this city, to enable them to take better care of their houses and their bodies; an unpretending man, for years past, responsible to none but God, has devoted all his time and his toil to the most despised class of men, and has saved hundreds from the jail, from crime and ruin at the last. Here are many men and women not known to the public, but known to the poor, who are daily ministering to the wants of the body and the mind. Consider all these things, and who can doubt that a great moral progress has been made? It is not many years since we had white slaves, and a Scotch boy was invoiced at fourteen pounds lawful money, in the inventory of an estate in Boston. In 1630, Governor Dudley complains that some of the founders of New England, in consequence of a famine, were obliged to set free one hundred and eighty servants, "to our extreme loss," for they had cost sixteen or twenty pounds apiece. Seventy years since, negro slavery prevailed in Massachusetts, and men did not blush at the institution. Think of the treatment which the leaders of the anti-slavery reform met with but a few years ago, and you see what a progress has been made![43]
I have extenuated nothing of our condition; I have said the morals of trade are low morals, and the morals of the press are low; that poverty is a terrible evil to deal with, and we do not deal with it manfully; that intemperance is a mournful curse, all the more melancholy when rich men purposely encourage it; that here is an amount of crime which makes us shudder to think of; that the voice of human blood cries out of the ground against us. I disguise nothing of all this; let us confess the fact, and, ugly as it is, look it fairly in the face. Still, our moral condition is better than ever before. I know there are men who seem born with their eyes behind, their hopes all running into memory; some who wish they had been born long ago: they might as well; sure it is no fault of theirs that they were not. I hear what they have to tell us. Still, on the whole, the aspect of things is most decidedly encouraging; for if so much has been done when men understood the matter less than we, both cause and cure, how much more can be done for the future?