Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/86

82 again? What, if the father sent out his son with had boys, and when he erred and fell, said, "You did mischief with bad boys once; I know they enticed you. I know you worn feeble, and could not resist their seductions, But I shall punish you. Do as well as you please, I will not forgive you. If you err again, I will punish you afresh. It you do sever so well, you shall be infamous for ever!" What if a public teacher never took back to college a boy who once had broke the academic law—but made him infamous for over? What if the physicians had kept a patient the requisite time in the hospital, and discharged him as wholly cured, hut hid men beware of him and shun him for ever? That is just what we are doing with this class of criminals; not intentionally, not consciously—but doing none the less!

Let us look a moment more carefully, though I have already touched on this subject, at tho proximate causes of crime in this class of men. The first cause is obvious—poverty. Most of tho criminals are from the lowest ranks of society. If you distribute men into three classes,—the abounding, the thriving, the perishing,—you wilt find the inmates of your prisons come almost; wholly from the latter class. The perishing fill the sink of society, and the dangerous the sink of tho perishing—for in that "lowest deep there is a lower depth." Of three thousand one hundred and eighty-eight persons confined in the House of Correction in this city, one thousand six hundred and fifty-seven were foreigners; of the five hundred and fifty sent from this city in five years to the State's Prison, one hundred and eighty-five were foreigners. Of five hundred and forty-seven females in the prison on Blackwell's Island at one time—five hundred and nineteen were committed for "vagrancy;" women with no capital but their person, with no friend, no shelter. Examine minutely, you shall find that more than nine-tenths of all criminals come from the perishing class cf men. There all cultivation,—intellectual, moral, religious,—is at the lowest ebb. They are a class of barbarians; yes, of savages, living in the midst of civilization, but not of it. The fact, that most criminals come from this class, shows that the causes of the crime lie out of them more than in them; that they are victims of society, not foes. The effect of property in elevating