Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/128

124 testimony to our moral state! Sometimes the spectacle of misery does good, quickening the moral sense and touching the electric tie which binds all human hearts into one great family; but when it does not lead to this result, then it debases the looker on. To know of wont, of misery, of all the complicated and far-extended ill they bring; to hear of this, and to see it in the streets; to have the money to alleviate, and yet not to alleviate; the wisdom to devise a cure therefore, and yet make no effort towards it—that is to be yourself debased and barbarized. I have often thought, in seeing the poverty of London, that the daily spectacle of such misery did more in a year to debauch the British heart than all the slaughter at Waterloo. I know that misery has called out heroic virtue in some men and women, and made philanthropists of such as otherwise had been only getters and keepers of gain. We have noble examples of that in the midst of us; but how many men has poverty trod down into the mire; how many has this sight of misery hardened into cold worldliness, the man frozen into mere respectability, its thin smile on his lips, its ungodly contempt in his heart!

Out of this barbarism of poverty there come three other forms of evil which indicate the moral condition of Boston; of that portion named just now as below the morals of trade and the press. These also I will call up to testify.

One is intemperance. This is a crime against the body; it is felony against your own frame. It makes a schism amongst your own members. The amount of it is fearfully great in this town. Some of our most wealthy citizens, who rent their buildings for the unlawful sale of rum to be applied to an intemperate abuse, are directly concerned in promoting this intemperance; others, rich but less wealthy, have sucked their abundance out of the bones of the poor, and are actual manufacturers of the drunkard and the criminal. Here are numerous distilleries owned, and some of them conducted, I am told, by men of wealth. The fire thereof is not quenched at all by day, and there is no night there; the worm dieth not. There out of the sweetest plant which God has made to grow under a tropic sun, men distil a poison the most