Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/20

14 soul of Christian society is deeply moved may not, after all, be pure chimeras, but only chimerical anticipations of a result as yet indefinitely distant. Be this as it may, Christianity, if it does not absolutely exact, does certainly love as fair a distribution as may be of this world’s goods among those who are equal members of the Christian brotherhood. She abhors at least the hideous extremes of wealth and destitution. She abhors the sight of sumptuous palaces tenanted by Christians, with other Christians starving at their gates. The soul in truth is not so independent of the body that Christian aspirations and Christian excellence can easily exist where the whole being of great masses of the people is absorbed in the grim struggle with hunger. A very large proportion of crime is the offspring of want, and can be practically removed only by giving bread to the people. And how great an obstacle to Christianity are the feelings produced in the hearts of multitudes by the daily pressure of an unjust lot! How many evil tempers against which Christian ministers preach are inevitably aggravated by institutions which the preachers think it their political duty to support! In the United States the distribution of worldly goods is probably more equal, and the means of a decent livelihood are more assured to all than in any other country. Poverty, saving among the newly arrived emigrants, is rare; want of bread almost unknown, except as the consequence of vice. There are no workhouses full of penal paupers, nor multitudes of labourers outside the workhouses living with penal pauperism always in view. The inmates of the public almshouses, even in the great cities, are few in number, and, for the most part, as I was told, not Americans by birth; nor has American society been scared by the terrible cancer of