Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/131

Rh to bless. Let us leave her there, loving the unlovely, and turn to other sights.

In the streets, there are about nine hundred needy boys, and about two hundred needy girls, the sons and daughters mainly of the intemperate: too idle or too thriftless to work; too low and naked for the public school. They roam about—the nomadic tribes of this town, the gipsies of Boston—doing some chance work for a moment, committing some petty theft. The temptations of a great city are before them. Soon they will be impressed into the regular army of crime, to be stationed in your gaols, perhaps to die on your gallows. Such is the fate of the sons of intemperance; but the daughters! their fate—let me not tell of that.

In your Legislature they have just been discussing a law against dogs, for now and then a man is bitten, and dies of hydrophobia. Perhaps there are ten mad dogs in the State at this moment, and it may be that one man in a year dies from the bite of such. Do the legislators know now many shops there are in this town, in this State, which all the day and all the year sell to intemperate men a poison that maddens with a hydrophobia still worse? If there were a thousand mad dogs in the land, if wealthy men had embarked a large capital in the importation or the production of mad dogs, and if they bit and maddened and slew ten thousand men in a year, do you believe your Legislature would discuss that evil with such fearless