Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/101

Rh of luxury and power! Put on the one side tho stately nobility of England, well bom, well bred, armed with tho power of manners, the power of money, the power of culture, and the power of place, and on the other side put the beggary of England, the two million paupers who are kept wholly on public or private charity; the three million labourers who formerly fed on potatoes, God knows what they feed on now, and all tho other hungry sons of want who are kept in awe only by the growling lion who guards tho British throne; and you see at once the result of modern civilization in the ablest, the foremost, the freest, the most practical, and the richest nation in the old world.

Even here in Now England, a country not two hundred and fifty years old, a litte patch of cleared land on the edge of the continent, we hear of poverty which is frightful to think of. It is a serious question, what shall be done for the poor? There are few that can tell what shall be done with them, or what is to become of them. Want is always here in Boston. Misery is here. Starvation is not unknown. What is now serious will one day be alarming. Even now it is awful to think of the misery that lurks in this Christian town. New England in fifty years has increased vastly in wealth, but poverty increases too. There has been a great advance in the productiveness of human labour; with our tools a man can do as much rude work in one day as he could in three days a hundred years ago. I mean work with the axe, the Slough, the spade; of nicer work, yet more; of the most delicate work, see what machines do for him, The end is not yet; soon we shall have engines that will whittle granite, as a gang of saws cleaves logs into broad smooth boards. Yet with all this advance in the productiveness of human toil, still there is poverty. A day's work now will bring a man greater proportionate pay than ever before in New England. I mean to say that the ordinary wages for an ordinary day's work will support a man comfortably and respectably longer than they ever would before. On the whole, the price of things has come down and the price of work has gone up. Yet still there are the poor; there is want, there is misery, there is starvation. The community gives more than ever before; a