Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/147

Rh ago and of tho man. In tho hands of a practical man, this thought might load to good results. A beginning has already been made in the right direction, by establishing the State Reform School for Boys. It will be easy to improve on this experiment, and conduct prisons for men on tho same scheme of correction and cure, not merely of long as poverty, misery, intemperance, and ignorance continue, no civil police, no moral police, can keep such causes crime? Your morality, your religion? Is it? Take away your property, your home, your friends, the respect of respectable men; take away what you have received from education, intellectual, moral, and religious; and how much better would tho best of us be than the men who will to-morrow be huddled off to gaol, for crimes committed in a dram-shop to-day? The circumstances which have kept you temperate, industrious, respectable, would have made nine-tenths of the men in gaol as good men as you are.

It is not pleasant to think that there are no amusements which lie level to the poor in this country. In Paris, Naples, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, there are cheap pleasures for poor men, which yet are not low pleasures. Here there are amusements for the comfortable and the rich, not too numerous, rather too rare, perhaps, but none for the poor, save only the vice of drunkenness; that is hideously cheap; the inward temptation powerful; the outward occasion always at hand. Last summer, some benevolent men treated tho poor children of the city to a day of sunshine, fresh air, and frolic in the fields. Once a year the children, gathered together by another benevolent man, have a floral procession in the streets ; some of them have charitably been taught to dance. These things are beautiful to think of; signs of our progress from "the good old times," and omens of a brighter day, when Christianity shall bear more abundantly flowers, and fruit even yet more fair.

The morals of the current literature, of the daily press—you can change when you will. If there is not in us a demand for low morals there will be no supply. The morals of trade, and of politics, the handmaid thereof, we can make better soon as we wish.