Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/88

84 yet more than a sixth part of all the criminals in her four State's prisons are men of colour. These facts show plainly the causes of crime.

It hi almost impossible to exaggerate the temptation a of the perishing class in our great cities. In Boston at this moment there arc more than four hundred boys employed about the various bowling-alleys of tho city, exposed to the intemperance, tho coarseness, the general corruption of the men who mainly frequent those nlaccs. What will be their fate? Shall I speak of their sisters; of tho education they are receiving; the end that awaits them? Poverty brings misery with its family of vices.

A third cause of crime comes with tho rest—intemperance, the destroying angel that lays waste the household of the poor. In our country, misery in a healthy man is almost proof of vice ; but tho vice may belong to one alone, and the misery it brings be shared by the whole family. A large proportion of the perishing class are intemperate, and a great majority of all our criminals.

Now, our present method is wholly inadequate to reform men exposed to such circumstances. You may punish the man, but it does no good. You can seldom frighten men out of a fever. Can you frighten them from crime, when they know little of the internal distinction between right and wrong; when all the circumstances about them impel to crime? Can you frighten a starving girl into chastity? You cannot keep men from lewdness, theft, and violence, when they have no self-respect, no culture, no development of mind, heart, and soul. The gaol will not take the place of the church, of the school-house, of home. It will not remove the causes which are making new criminals. It does not reform the old ones. Shall we shut men in a gaol, and when there treat them with all manner of violence, crush out the little self-respect yet left, give them a degrading dress, and send them into the world cursed with an infamous name, and all that because they were born in the low places of society, and caught the stain thereof? The gaol does not alter the circumstances which occasioned the crime, and till these causes are removed a fresh crop will spring out of the festering soil. Some men teach dogs and horses things unnatural to these animals they use violence and blows as their instrument