Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/109

Rh begun to make his fortune with his own hard hands; even if the rich man is not, his daughter is for him. I do not think we have cared much to respect the humble efforts of feeble men; not cared much to have men dear, and things cheap. It has not been thought the part of political economy, of sound legislation, or of pure Christianity, to hinder the increase of pauperism, to remove the causes of poverty; yes, the causes of crime—only to take vengeance on it when committed! Boston is a strange place; here is energy enough to conquer half the continent in ten years; power of thought to seize and tame the Connecticut and the Merrimack; charity enough to send missionaries all over the world; but not justice enough to found a high school for her own daughters, or to forbid her richest citizens from letting bar-rooms as nurseries of poverty and crime, from opening wide gates which lead to tho almshouse, the gaol, the gallows, sad earthly hell!

Such are the causes of poverty, organic, political, social. You may see families pass from the comfortable to the miserable class, by intemperance, idleness, wastefulness, even by feebleness of body and of mind; yet, while it is common for the rich to descend into the comfortable class, solely by lack of the eminent thrift which raised their fathers thence, or because they lack the common stimulus to toil and save, it is not common for the comfortable to fall into the pit of misery in New England, except through wickedness, through idleness, or intemperance.

It is not easy to study poverty in Boston. But take a little inland town, which few persons migrate into, you will find the miserable families have commonly been so, for a hundred years; that many of them are descended from the "servants," or white slaves, brought here by our fathers; that such as fall from the comfortable classes are commonly made miserable by their own fault, sometimes by idleness, which is certainly a sin: for any man who will not work, and persists in living, eats the bread of some other man, either begged or stolen—but chiefly by intemperance. Three-fourths of the poverty of this character is to be attributed to this cause.

Now there is a tendency in poverty to drive the ablest