Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/130

Rh monument and song tho demon appears not. He is there, gaunt, bony, and destructive; but so elegantly clad, with manners so unoffending, you do not murk his nice, nor four bin stops. Hut go down to that miserable lane, where men mothered by misery and sired by crime, where the sons of poverty and the daughters of "wretchedness, are huddled thick together, and you see thin demon of intemperance in all his ugliness. Let me sneak soberly; exaggeration is a figure of speech would always banish from my rhetoric, hero, above all, where the fact is more appalling than any fiction I could devise. In the low parts of Boston, where want abounds, where misery abounds, intemperance abounds yet more, to multiply want, to aggravate misery, to make savage what poverty has only made barbarian; to stimulate passion into crime. Here it is not music and the song which crown the bowl; it is crowned by obscenity, by oaths, by curses, by violence, sometimes by murder. These twine the ivy round the poor man's bowl; no, it is the Upas that they twine. Think of the sufferings of the drunkard himself, of his poverty, his hunger, and his nakedness, his cold; think of his battered body; of his mind and conscience, how they are gone. But is that all? Far from it. These curses shall become blows upon his wife; that savage violence shall be expended on his child.

In his senses this man was a barbarian; there are centuries of civilization betwixt him and cultivated men. But the man of wealth, adorned with respectability, and armed with science, harbours a demon in the street, a profitable demon to tho rich man who rents his houses for such a use. The demon enters our barbarian, who straightway becomes a savage. In his fury he tears his wife and child. The law, heedless of the greater culprits, the demon and the demon-breeder, seizes our savage man and shuts him in the gaol. Now he is out of the tempter's reach; let us leave him; let us go to his home. His wife and children still are there, freed from their old tormentor. Enter: look upon the squalor, the filth, the want, the misery, still left behind. Respectability halts at the door with folded arms, and can no further go. But charity, the leve of man which never fails, enters even there; enters to lift up the fallen, to cheer the despairing, to comfort and