Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/61

Rh hundred drunkards from the prison, too hundred of whom have since done well! If it be the duty of the State to prevent crime, not avenge it, is it not plain what is the way?

However, a reform in this matter will be permanent only through a deeper and wider reform elsewhere. Drunkenness and theft in its various illegal forms, are confined almost wholly to tho poorest class. So long as there is unavoidable misery, like tho present, pauperism and popular ignorance: in long as thirty-seven, are crowded into one house, and that not large; so long as men are wretched and without hope, there will be drunkenness. I know much has been done already; I think drunkenness will never be respectable again, or common amongst, refined and cultivated men; it will be common among the ignorant, the outcast, and the miserable, so long as tho present causes of poverty, ignorance, and misery continue. For that continuance, and the want, the crime, the unimaginable wretchedness and death of heart which comes thereof, it is not these perishing little ones, but the strong that are responsible before God! It will not do for your grand juries to try and hide the matter by indicting "omnibuses and other large carriages;" the voice of God cries, "Where is thy brother?"—and that brother's blood answers from the ground.

What I have suggested only palliates effects; it removes no cause;—of that another time. These little ones are perishing here in the midst of us. Society has never seriously sought to prevent it, perhaps has not been conscious of the fact. It has not so much legislated for them as against them. Its spirit is hostile to them. If the mass of able-headed men were in earnest about this, think you they would allow such unthrifty ways, such a waste of man's productive energies? Never! no, never. They would repel the causes of this evil as now an invading army. The removal of these troubles must be brought about by a great change in the spirit of society. Society is not Christian in form or spirit. So there are many who do not love to hear Christianity preached and applied, but to have some halting theology set upon its crutches. They like, on Sundays, to hear of the sacrifice, not to have mercy and goodness demanded of them. A Christian