Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/127

Rh city; but there are men a good deal lower than the general morals of trade and the press. Other witnesses testify to their moral character.

Let mo now speak of your moral condition as indicated by the poverty in this city. I have so recently spoken on the subject of poverty in Boston, and printed the sermon, that I will not now mention the misery it brings. I will only speak of the moral condition which it indicates, and the moral effect it has upon us.

In this age, poverty tends to barbarize men; it shuts them out from the educational influences of our times. The sons of the miserable class cannot obtain the intellectual, moral, and religious education which is tho birth-right of the comfortable and the rich. There is a great gulf between them and the culture of our times. How hard it must be to climb up from a cellar in Cove Place to wisdom, to honesty, to piety. I know how comfortable pharisaic self-righteousness can say, "I thank thee I am not wicked like one of these and God knows which is the best before His eyes, the scorner, or the man he loathes and leaves to dirt and destruction. I know this poverty belongs to the state of transition we are now in, and can only be ended by our passing through this into a better. I see the medicinal effect of poverty, that with cantharidian sting it drives some men to work, to frugality and thrift; that the Irish has driven tho American beggar out of the streets, and will shame him out of the alms-house ere long. But there are men who have not force enough to obey this stimulus ; they only cringe and smart under its sting. Such men are made barbarians by Poverty,—barbarians in body, in mind and conscience, in heart and soul. There was great amount of this barbarism in Boston; it lowers the moral character of the place, as icebergs in your harbour next June would chill the air all feet day.

The fact that poverty is here, that little is done by public authority, or by the ablest men in the land, to remove the evil tree and dig up its evil root; that amid all the wealth of Boston and all its charity, there are not even comfortable tenements for the poor to be had at any but a ruinous rent— that is a sad foot, and bears a said