Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/87

Rh and moralizing a class of men in seldom appreciated. Historically the animal man comes before the spiritual Animal wants are imperious; they must be supplied. The lower you go in tho social scale, the more is man subordinated to his animal appetites and demonized by them. Nature aims to preserve tho individual and ropeat the species—so all passions relative to these two designs are pre-eminently powerful. If a man is born into tho intense life of an American city, and grows up, having no contact with tho loftier culture which naturally belongs to that intense life, why tho man becomes mainly an animal, all the more violent for the atmosphere he Wreathes in. What shall restrain him P He has not tho normal check of reason, conscience, religion, — these sleep in the man ; nor tho artificial and conventional check of honour, of manners. The public opinion which he bows to favours obscenity, drunkenness, and violence. He is doubly a savige. His wants cannot be legally satisfied. He breaks the law, the law which covers property, then goes on to higher crimes. The next cause is the result of the first—education is neglected, intellectual, moral, and religious. Now and then a boy in whom the soul of genius is covered with the beggar's rags, struggles through the terrible environment of modern poverty to die, the hero of misery, in the attempt at education! His expiring light only makes visible the darkness out of which it shone. Boys born into this condition find at home nothing to aid them, nothing to encourage a love of excellence, or a taste for even the rudiments of learning. What is unavoidably the lot of such? The land has been the schoolmaster of the human race, but the perishing class scarce sees its face. Poverty brings privations, misery, and that a deranged state of the system; then unnatural appetites goad and burn the man. The destruction of the poor is their poverty. They see wealth about them, but have none; so none of what it brings; neither the cleanliness, nor health, nor self-respect, nor cultivation of mind, and heart, and soul. I am told that no Quaker has ever been confined in any gaol in New England for any real crime. Are the Quakers better born than other men? Nay, but they are looked after in childhood. Who ever saw a Quaker in an almshouse? Not a fiftieth part of the people of New York are negroes,