Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/81

Rh of attaining the average morality of the race at thin day; not be many born foes of society as are born blind or deaf.

The criminals from circumstances become what they are by tho action of causes which may be ascertained, guarded against, mitigated, and at last overcome and removed. These men are born of poor parents, and find it difficult to satisfy the natural wants of food, clothing, and shelter. They get little culture, intellectual or moral. The school-house is open, but the parent does not send the children, he wants their services,—to beg for him, perhaps to steal, it may be to do little services which lie within their power. Besides, the child must be ill-clad, and so a mark is set on him. The boy of tho perishing classes, with but common endowments, cannot learn at school as one of the thrifty or abounding class. Then ho receives no stimulus at home; there everything discourages his attempts. He cannot share the pleasure and sport of his youthful fellows. His dress, his uncleanly habits, the result of misery, forbid all that. So the children of the perishing herd together, ignorant, ill-fed, and miserably clad. You do not find the sons of this class in your colleges, in your high schools, where all is free for the people; few even in the grammar-schools; few in the churches. Though born into the nineteenth century after Christ, they grow up almost in the barbarism of the nineteenth century before Him. Children that are blind and deaf, though born with a superior organization, if left to themselves, become only savages, little more than animals. What are we to expect of children, born indeed with eyes and ears, but yet shut out from the culture of the age they live in ? In the corruption of a city, in the midst of its intenser life, what wonder that they associate with crime, that the moral instinct, baffled and cheated of its due, becomes so powerless in the boy or girl; what wonder that reason never gets developed there, nor conscience, nor that blessed religious sense learns ever to assert its power? Think of tho temptations that beset the boy; those yet more revolting which address the other sex. Opportunities for crime continually offer. Want impels, desire leagues with opportunity, and the result we know. Add to all this the curse that creates so much disease, poverty, wretchedness, and so perpetually begets