Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/115

Rh die before the sun of their fifth year shines on their luckless hoods, I thank God that thus they die. If there be not wisdom enough in society, nor enough of justice there to save them from their future long-protracted suffering, then I thank God that Death comes down betimes, and moistens his sickle while his crop is green. I pity not the miserable babes who fall early before that merciful arm of Death. They are at rest. Poverty cannot touch them. Let the mothers who bore thorn rejoice, but weep only for those that are left—loft to ignorance, to misery, to intemperance, to vice that I shall not name; left to the mercies of the gaol, end perhaps the gallows at the last. Yet Boston is a Christian city—and it is eighteen hundred years since one great Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost!

I see not what more can be done directly, and I see rot why these things should not be done. Still some will suffer; the idle, the lazy, the proud who will not work, the careless who will voluntarily waste their time; their strength, or their goods—they must suffer, they caught to suffer. Want is the only schoolmaster to teach them industry and thrift. Such as are merely unable, who are poor not by their fault—we do wrong to let them suffer; we do wickedly to leave them to perish. The little children who survive—are they to be left to become barbarians in the midst of our civilisation?

Want is not an absolutely needful thing, but very needful for the present distress, to teach us industry, economy, material world—waiting to serve. "What would you have thereof?" says God. "Pay for it and take it, as you will; only pay as you go!" There are hands to work, heads to think; strong hands, hard heads. God is an economist; He economizes suffering; there is never too much of it in the world for the purpose it is to serve, though it often falls where it should not fall. It is here to teach us industry, thrift, justice; It will be here no more when we have learned its lesson. Want is here on sufferance; misery on sufferance; and mankind can eject them if we will. Poverty, like all evils, is amenable to suppression.

Can we not end this poverty—the misery and crime it thrift, and its creative arts.