Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/50

46 tell you what becomes of the sons. Will a white lily grow in a common sewer; can you bleach linen in a tan-pit? Yes, as soon as you can rear a virtuous population, under such circumstances. Go to any State Prison in tho land, and you shall find that seven-eighths of the convicts came from this class, brought there by crimes over which they had no control; crimes which would have made you and me thieves and pirates. The characters of such men are made for them, far more than by them. There is no more vice, perhaps, born into that class: they have no more "inherited sin" than any other class in the land; all the difference, then, between the morals and manners of rich and poor, is the result of education and circumstances.

The fate of the daughters of the poor is yet worse. Many of them are doomed to destruction by the lust of men, their natural guardians and protectors. Think of an able, "respectable" man, comfortable, educated, and "Christian," helping debase a woman, degrade her in his eyes, her eyes, the eyes of tho world I Why, it is bad enough to enslave a man, but thus to enslave a woman—I have no words to speak of that. The crime and sin, foul, polluting and debasing all it touches, has come here to curse man and woman, the married and the single, and tho babe unborne! It seems to me as if I saw the genius of this city stand before God, lifting his hands in agony to heaven, crying for mercy on woman, insulted and trodden down, for vengeance on man, who treads her thus infamously into the dust. The vengeance comes, not the mercy. Misery in woman is the strongest inducement to crime. Where self-respect is not fostered; where severe toil hardly holds her soul and body together amid the temptations of a city, and its heated me, it is no marvel to me that this sin should slay its victims, finding woman an easy prey.

Let me follow the children of the poor a step further—I mean to tho gaol. Few men seem aware of the frightful extent of crime amongst us, and the extent of the remedy, more awful yet. In less than one year, namely, from the 9th of June, 1845, to the 2nd of June, 1846, there were committed to your House of Correction, in this city, 1228 persons, a little more than one out of every fifty-six in the whole population that is more than ten years old. Of these 377 were women; 851 men. Five were sentenced for an