Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/133

Rh tailing the means of intemperance. These we most thickly-strewn in the haunts of poverty. On a single Sunday the police found there hundred and thirteen shops in the full experiment of unblushing and successful crime. These rum-shops are tho factories of crime; the raw material is furnished by poverty; it passes into the hands of the rum-seller, and is soon ready for delivery at the mouth of the gaol or the foot of the gallows. It is notorious that intemperance is the proximate cause of three-fourths of the crime in Boston; yet it is very respectable to own houses and rent them for the purpose of making men intemperate; nobody loses his standing by that. I am not surprised to hear of women armed with knives, and boys with six-barrelled revolvers in their pockets; not surprised at the increase of capital trials.

One other matter let me name—I call it the crime against woman. Let us see the evil in its type, its most significant form. Look at that thing of corruption and of shame—almost without shame—whom the judge, with brief words, despatches to the gaol. That was a woman once. No! At least, she was once a girl. She had a mother; perhaps beyond the hills, a mother, in her evening prayer, remembers still this one child more tenderly than all the folded flowers that slept the sleep of infancy beneath her roof; remembers, with a prayer, her child, whom the world curses after it has made corrupt ! Perhaps she had no such mother, but was born in the filth of some reeking cellar, and turned into the mire of the streets, in her undefended innocence, to mingle with the coarseness, the intemperance, and the crime of a corrupt metropolis. In either case, her blood is on our hands. The crime which is so terribly avenged on woman—think you that God will hold men innocent of that ? But on this sign of our moral state I will not long delay.

Put all these things together: the character of trade, of the press; take the evidence of poverty, intemperance, and crime—it all reveals a sad state of things. I call your attention to these facts. We are all affected by them more or less—all more or less accountable for them. Hitherto I have only stated facts, without making com-