Boston is a strange place; here is energy enough to conquer half the continent in ten years; power of thought to seize and tame the Connecticut and the Merrimack; charity enough to send missionaries all over the world; but not justice enough to found a high school for her own daughters, or to forbid her richest citizens from letting bar-rooms as nurseries of poverty and crime, from opening wide gates which lead to the almshouse, the jail, the gallows, and earthly h.e.l.l!
Such are the causes of poverty, organic, political, social. You may see families pa.s.s from the comfortable to the miserable cla.s.s, by intemperance, idleness, wastefulness, even by feebleness of body and of mind; yet while it is common for the rich to descend into the comfortable cla.s.s, solely by lack of the eminent thrift which raised their fathers thence, or because they lack the common stimulus to toil and save, it is not common for the comfortable to fall into the pit of misery in New England, except through wickedness, through idleness, or intemperance.
It is not easy to study poverty in Boston. But take a little inland town, which few persons migrate into, you will find the miserable families have commonly been so, for a hundred years; that many of them are descended from the "servants," or white slaves, brought here by our fathers; that such as fall from the comfortable cla.s.ses, are commonly made miserable by their own fault, sometimes by idleness, which is certainly a sin, for any man who will not work, and persists in living, eats the bread of some other man, either begged or stolen--but chiefly by intemperance. Three fourths of the poverty of this character, is to be attributed to this cause.
Now there is a tendency in poverty to drive the ablest men to work, and so get rid of the poverty, and this I take it is the providential design thereof. Poverty, like an armed man, stalks in the rear of the social march, huge and haggard, and gaunt and grim, to scare the lazy, to goad the idle with his sword, to trample and slay the obstinate sluggard. But he treads also the feeble under his feet, for no fault of theirs, only for the misfortune of being born in the rear of society. But in poverty there is also a tendency to intimidate, to enfeeble, to benumb. The poverty of the strong man compels him to toil; but with the weak, the destruction of the poor is his poverty. An active man is awakened from his sleep by the cold; he arises and seeks more covering; the indolent, or the feeble, shiver on till morning, benumbed and enfeebled by the cold. So weakness begets weakness; poverty, poverty; intemperance, intemperance; crime, crime.
Every thing is against the poor man; he pays the dearest tax, the highest rent for his house, the dearest price for all he eats or wears.
The poor cannot watch their opportunity, and take advantage of the markets, as other men. They have the most numerous temptations to intemperance and crime; they have the poorest safeguards from these evils. If the chief value of wealth, as a rich man tells us, be this--that "it renders its owner independent of others," then on what shall the poor men lean, neglected and despised by others, looked on as loathsome, and held in contempt, shut out even from the sermons and the prayers of respectable men? It is no marvel if they cease to respect themselves.
The poor are the most obnoxious to disease; their children are not only most numerous, but most unhealthy. More than half of the children of that cla.s.s, perish at the age of five. Amongst the poor, infectious diseases rage with frightful violence. The mortality in that cla.s.s is amazing. If things are to continue as now, I thank G.o.d it is so. If Death is their only guardian, he is at least powerful, and does not scorn his work.
In addition to the poor, whom these causes have made and kept in poverty, the needy of other lands flock hither. The n.o.bility of old England, so zealous in pursuing their game, in keeping their entails unbroken, and primogeniture safe, have sent their beggary to New England, to be supported by the crumbs that fall from our table. So, in the same New England city, the extremes of society are brought together.
Here is health, elegance, cultivation, sobriety, decency, refinement--I wish there was more of it; there is poverty, ignorance, drunkenness, violence, crime, in most odious forms--starvation! We have our St.
Giles"s and St. James"s; our n.o.bility, not a whit less n.o.ble than the n.o.blest of other lands, and our beggars, both in a Christian city. Amid the needy population, Misery and Death have found their parish. Who shall dare stop his ears, when they preach their awful denunciation of want and woe?
Good men ask, What shall we do? Foreign poverty has had this good effect; it has shamed or frightened the American beggar into industry and thrift.
Poverty will not be removed till the causes thereof are removed. There are some who look for a great social revolution. So do I; only I do not look for it to come about suddenly, or by mechanical means. We are in a social revolution, and do not know it. While I cannot accept the peculiar doctrines of the a.s.sociationists, I rejoice in their existence.
I sympathize with their hope. They point out the evils of society, and that is something. They propose a method of removing its evils. I do not believe in that method, but mankind will probably make many experiments before we hit upon the right one. For my own part, I confess I do not see any way of removing poverty wholly or entirely, in one or two, or in four or five generations. I think it will linger for some ages to come.
Like the snow, it is to be removed by a general elevation of the temperature of the air, not all at once, and will long hang about the dark and cold places of the world. But I do think it will at last be overcome, so that a man who cannot subsist, will be as rare as a cannibal. "Ye have the poor with you always," said Jesus, and many who remember this, forget that he also said, "and when soever ye will, ye may do them good." I expect to see a mitigation of poverty in this country, and that before long.
It is likely that the legal theory of property in Europe will undergo a great change before many years; that the right to bequeathe enormous estates to individuals will be cut off; that primogeniture will cease, and entailments be broken, and all monopolies of rank and power come to an end, and so a great change take place in the social condition of Europe, and especially of England. That change will bring many of the comfortable into the rich cla.s.s, and eventually many of the miserable into the comfortable cla.s.s. But I do not expect such a radical change here, where we have not such enormous abuses to surmount.
I think something will be done in Europe for the organization of labor, I do not know what; I do not know how; I have not the ability to know; and will not pretend to criticize what I know I cannot create, and do not at present understand. I think there will be a great change in the form of society; that able men will endeavor to remove the causes of crime, not merely to make money out of that crime; that intemperance will be diminished; that idleness in rich or poor will be counted a disgrace; that labor will be more respected; education more widely diffused; and that inst.i.tutions will be founded, which will tend to produce these results. But I do not pretend to devise those inst.i.tutions, and certainly shall not throw obstacles in the way of such as can or will try. It seems likely that something will be first done in Europe, where the need is greatest. There a change must come. By and by, if it does not come peaceably, the continent will not furnish "special constables" enough to put down human nature. If the white republicans cannot make a revolution peacefully, wait a little, and the red republicans will make it in blood. "Peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must," says mankind, first in a whisper, then in a voice of thunder. If powerful men will not write justice with black ink, on white paper, ignorant and violent men will write it on the soil, in letters of blood, and illuminate their rude legislation with burning castles, palaces and towns. While the social change is taking place never so peacefully, men will think the world is going to ruin. But it is an old world, pretty well put together, and, with all these changes, will probably last some time longer. Human society is like one of those enormous boulders, so nicely poised on another rock, that a man may move it with a single hand. You are afraid to come under its sides, lest it fall. When the wind blows, it rocks with formidable noise, and men say it will soon be down upon us. Now and then a rude boy undertakes to throw it over, but all the men who can get their shoulders under, cannot raise the ponderous ma.s.s from its solid and firm-set base.
Still, after all these changes have taken place, there remains the difference between the strong and the weak, the active and the idle, the thrifty and the spendthrift, the temperate and the intemperate, and though the term poverty ceases to be so dreadful, and no longer denotes want of the natural necessaries of the body, there will still remain the relatively rich and the relatively poor.
But now something can be done directly, to remove the causes of poverty, something to mitigate their effects; we need both the palliative charity, and the remedial justice. Tenements for the poor can be provided at a cheap rent, that shall yet pay their owner a reasonable income. This has been proved by actual experiment, and, after all that has been said about it, I am amazed that no more is done. I will not exhort the churches to this in the name of religion--they have other matters to attend to; but if capitalists will not, in a place like Boston, it seems to me the City should see that this cla.s.s of the population is provided with tenements, at a rate not ruinous. It would be good economy to do it, in the pecuniary sense of good economy; certainly to hire money at six per cent., and rent the houses built therewith, at eight per cent., would cost less than to support the poor entirely in almshouses, and punish them in jails.
Something yet more may be done, in the way of furnishing them with work, or of directing them to it; something towards enabling them to purchase food and other articles cheap.
Something might be done to prevent street beggary, and begging from house to house, which is rather a new thing in this town. The indiscriminate charity, which it is difficult to withhold from a needy and importunate beggar, does more harm than good.
Much may be done to promote temperance; much more, I fear, than is likely to be done; that is plainly the duty of society. Intemperance is bad enough with the comfortable and the rich; with the poor it is ruin--sheer, blank and swift ruin. The example of the rich, of the comfortable, goes down there like lightning, to shatter, to blast, and to burn. It is marvellous, that in Christian Boston, men of wealth, and so above the temptation which lurks behind a dollar, men of character otherwise thought to be elevated, can yet continue a traffic which leads to the ruin and slow butchery of such ma.s.ses of men. I know not what can be done by means of the public law. I do know what can be done by private self-denial, by private diligence.
Something also may be done to promote religion amongst the poor, at least something to make it practicable for a poor man to come to church on Sunday, with his fellow-creatures who are not miserable--and to hear the best things that the ablest men in the church have to offer. We are very democratic in our State, not at all so in our church. In this matter the Catholics put us quite to shame. If, as some men still believe, it be a manly calling and a n.o.ble, to preach Christianity, then to preach it to men who stand in the worst and most dangerous positions in society; to take the highest truths of human consciousness, the loftiest philosophy, the n.o.blest piety, and bring them down into the daily life of poor men, rude men, men obscure, unfriended, ready to perish; surely this is the n.o.blest part of that calling, and demands the n.o.blest gifts, the fairest and the largest culture, the loftiest powers.
It is no hard thing to reason with reasoning men, and be intelligible to the intelligent; to talk acceptably and even movingly to scholars and men well read, is no hard thing if you are yourself well read and a scholar. But to be intelligible to the ignorant, to reason with men who reason not, to speak acceptably and movingly with such men, to inspire them with wisdom, with goodness and with piety, that is the task only for some men of rare genius who can stride over the great gulf betwixt the thrones of creative power, and the humble positions of men ignorant, poor and forgot! Yet such men there are, and here is their work.
Something can be done for the children of the poor--to promote their education, to find them employment, to s.n.a.t.c.h these little ones from underneath the feet of that grim Poverty. It is not less than awful, to think while there are more children born in Boston of Catholic parents than of Protestant, that yet more than three fifths thereof die before the sun of their fifth year shines on their luckless heads. I thank G.o.d that thus they die. If there be not wisdom enough in society, nor enough of justice there to save them from their future long-protracted suffering, then I thank G.o.d that Death comes down betimes, and moistens his sickle while his crop is green. I pity not the miserable babes who fall early before that merciful arm of Death. They are at rest. Poverty cannot touch them. Let the mothers who bore them rejoice, but weep only for those that are left--left to ignorance, to misery, to intemperance, to vice that I shall not name; left to the mercies of the jail, and perhaps the gallows at the last. Yet Boston is a Christian city--and it is eighteen hundred years since one great Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost!
I see not what more can be done directly, and I see not why these things should not be done. Still some will suffer: the idle, the lazy, the proud who will not work, the careless who will voluntarily waste their time, their strength, or their goods--they must suffer, they ought to suffer. Want is the only schoolmaster to teach them industry and thrift. Such as are merely unable, who are poor not by their fault--we do wrong to let them suffer; we do wickedly to leave them to perish. The little children who survive--are they to be left to become barbarians in the midst of our civilization?
Want is not an absolutely needful thing, but very needful for the present distress, to teach us industry, economy, thrift and its creative arts. There is nature--the whole material world--waiting to serve. "What would you have thereof?" says G.o.d. "Pay for it and take it, as you will; only pay as you go!" There are hands to work, heads to think; strong hands, hard heads. G.o.d is an economist: He economizes suffering; there is never too much of it in the world for the purpose it is to serve, though it often falls where it should not fall. It is here to teach us industry, thrift, justice. It will be here no more when we have learned its lesson. Want is here on sufferance; misery on sufferance; and mankind can eject them if we will. Poverty, like all evils, is amenable to suppression.
Can we not end this poverty--the misery and crime it brings? No, not to-day. Can we not lessen it? Soon as we will. Think how much ability there is in this town, cool, far-sighted talent. If some of the ablest men directed their thoughts to the reform of this evil, how much might be done in a single generation; and in a century--what could not they do in a hundred years? What better work is there for able men? I would have it written on my tombstone: "This man had but little wit, and less fame, yet he helped remove the causes of poverty, making men better off and better," rather by far than this: "Here lies a great man; he had a great place in the world, and great power, and great fame, and made nothing of it, leaving the world no better for his stay therein, and no man better off."
After all the special efforts to remove poverty, the great work is to be done by the general advance of mankind. We shall outgrow this as cannibalism, butchery of captives, war for plunder, and other kindred miseries have been outgrown. G.o.d has general remedies in abundance, but few specific. Something will be done by diffusing throughout the community principles and habits of economy, industry, temperance; by diffusing ideas of justice, sentiments of brotherly love, sentiments and ideas of religion. I hope every thing from that--the noiseless and steady progress of Christianity; the snow melts, not by sunlight, or that alone, but as the whole air becomes warm. You may in cold weather melt away a little before your own door, but that makes little difference till the general temperature rises. Still while the air is getting warm, you facilitate the process by breaking up the obdurate ma.s.ses of ice and putting them where the sun shines with direct and unimpeded light. So must we do with poverty.
It is only a little that any of us can do--for any thing. Still we can do a little; we can each do by helping towards raising the general tone of society: first, by each man raising himself; by industry, economy, charity, justice, piety; by a n.o.ble life. So doing, we raise the moral temperature of the whole world, and just in proportion thereto. Next, by helping those who come in our way; nay, by going out of our way to help them. In each of these modes, it is our duty to work. To a certain extent each man is his brother"s keeper. Of the powers we possess we are but trustees under Providence, to use them for the benefit of men, and render continually an account of our stewardship to G.o.d. Each man can do a little directly to help convince the world of its wrong, a little in the way of temporizing charity, a little in the way of remedial justice; so doing, he works with G.o.d, and G.o.d works with him.
X.
A SERMON OF THE MORAL CONDITION OF BOSTON.--PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1849.
1 SAMUEL VII. 12.
Hitherto hath the Lord helped us.
A man who has only the spirit of his age can easily be a popular man; if he have it in an eminent degree, he must be a popular man in it: he has its hopes and its fears; his trumpet gives a certain and well-known sound; his counsel is readily appreciated; the majority is on his side.
But he cannot be a wise magistrate, a just judge, a competent critic, or a profitable preacher. A man who has only the spirit of a former age can be none of these four things; and not even a popular man. He remembers when he ought to forecast, and compares when he ought to act; he cannot appreciate the age he lives in, nor have a fellow-feeling with it. He may easily obtain the pity of his age, not its sympathy or its confidence. The man who has the spirit of his own, and also that of some future age, is alone capable of becoming a wise magistrate, a just judge, a competent critic, and a profitable preacher. Such a man looks on pa.s.sing events somewhat as the future historian will do, and sees them in their proportions, not distorted; sees them in their connection with great general laws, and judges of the falling rain not merely by the bonnets it may spoil and the pastime it disturbs, but by the gra.s.s and corn it shall cause to grow. He has hopes and fears of his own, but they are not the hopes and fears of men about him; his trumpet cannot give a welcome or well-known sound, nor his counsel be presently heeded.
Majorities are not on his side, nor can he be a popular man.
To understand our present moral condition, to be able to give good counsel thereon, you must understand the former generation, and have potentially the spirit of the future generation; must appreciate the past, and yet belong to the future. Who is there that can do this? No man will say, "I can." Conscious of the difficulty, and aware of my own deficiencies in all these respects, I will yet endeavor to speak of the moral condition of Boston.
First, I will speak of the actual moral condition of Boston, as indicated by the morals of Trade. In a city like Rome, you must first feel the pulse of the church, in St. Petersburg that of the court, to determine the moral condition of those cities. Now trade is to Boston what the church is to Rome and the imperial court to St. Petersburg: it is the pendulum which regulates all the common and authorized machinery of the place; it is an organization of the public conscience. We care little for any Pius the Ninth, or Nicholas the First; the dollar is our emperor and pope, above all the parties in the State, all sects in the church, lord paramount over both, its spiritual and temporal power not likely to be called in question; revolt from what else we may, we are loyal still to that.
A little while ago, in a sermon of riches, speaking of the character of trade in Boston, I suggested that men were better than their reputation oftener than worse; that there were a hundred honest bargains to one that was dishonest. I have heard severe strictures from friendly tongues, on that statement, which gave me more pain than any criticism I have received before. The criticism was, that I overrated the honesty of men in trade. Now, it is a small thing to be convicted of an error--a just thing and a profitable to have it detected and exposed; but it is a painful thing to find you have overrated the moral character of your townsmen. However, if what I said be not true as history, I hope it will become so as prophecy; I doubt not my critics will help that work.
Love of money is out of proportion to love of better things--to love of justice, of truth, of a manly character developing itself in a manly life. Wealth is often made the end to live for; not the means to live by, and attain a manly character. The young man of good abilities does not commonly propose it to himself to be a n.o.ble man, equipped with all the intellectual and moral qualities which belong to that, and capable of the duties which come thereof. He is satisfied if he can become a rich man. It is the highest ambition of many a youth in this town to become one of the rich men of Boston; to have the social position which wealth always gives, and nothing else in this country can commonly bestow. Accordingly, our young men that are now poor, will sacrifice every thing to this one object; will make wealth the end, and will become rich without becoming n.o.ble. But wealth without n.o.bleness of character is always vulgar. I have seen a clown staring at himself in the gorgeous mirror of a French palace, and thought him no bad emblem of many an ign.o.ble man at home, surrounded by material riches which only reflected back the vulgarity of their owner.
Other young men inherit wealth, but seldom regard it as a means of power for high and n.o.ble ends, only as the means of selfish indulgence; unneeded means to elevate yet more their self-esteem. Now and then you find a man who values wealth only as an instrument to serve mankind withal. I know some such men; their money is a blessing akin to genius, a blessing to mankind, a means of philanthropic power. But such men are rare in all countries, perhaps a little less so in Boston than in most other large trading towns; still, exceeding rare. They are sure to meet with neglect, abuse, and perhaps with scorn; if they are men of eminent ability, superior culture, and most elevated moral aims, set off, too, with a n.o.ble and heroic life, they are sure of meeting with eminent hatred. I fear the man most hated in this town would be found to be some one who had only sought to do mankind some great good, and stepped before his age too far for its sympathy. Truth, Justice, Humanity, are not thought in Boston to have come of good family; their followers are not respectable. I am not speaking to blame men, only to show the fact; we may meddle with things too high for us, but not understand nor appreciate.
Now this disproportionate love of money appears in various ways. You see it in the advantage that is taken of the feeblest, the most ignorant, and the most exposed cla.s.ses in the community. It is notorious that they pay the highest prices, the dearest rents, and are imposed upon in their dealings oftener than any other cla.s.s of men; so the raven and the hooded crow, it is said, seek out the sickliest sheep to pounce upon.
The fact that a man is ignorant, poor, and desperate, furnishes to many men an argument for defrauding the man. It is bad enough to injure any man; but to wrong an ignorant man, a poor and friendless man; to take advantage of his poverty or his ignorance, and to get his services or his money for less than a fair return--that is petty baseness under aggravated circ.u.mstances, and as cowardly as it is mean. You are now and then shocked at rich men telling of the arts by which they got their gold--sometimes of their fraud at home, sometimes abroad, and a good man almost thinks there must be a curse on money meanly got at first, though it falls to him by honest inheritance.
This same disproportionate love of money appears in the fact that men, not driven by necessity, engage in the manufacture, the importation, and the sale of an article which corrupts and ruins men by hundreds; which has done more to increase poverty, misery, and crime than any other one cause whatever; and, as some think, more than all other causes whatever.
I am not speaking of men who aid in any just and proper use of that article, but in its ruinous use. Yet such men, by such a traffic, never lose their standing in society, their reputation in trade, their character in the church. A good many men will think worse of you for being an Abolitionist; men have lost their place in society by that name; even Dr. Channing "hurt his usefulness" and "injured his reputation" by daring to speak against that sin of the nation; but no man loses caste in Boston by making, importing, and selling the cause of ruin to hundreds of families--though he does it with his eyes open, knowing that he ministers to crime and to ruin! I am told that large quant.i.ties of New England rum have already been sent from this city to California; it is notorious that much of it is sent to the nations of Africa--if not from Boston, at least from New England--as an auxiliary in the slave-trade. You know with what feelings of grief and indignation a clergyman of this city saw that characteristic manufacture of his town on the wharves of a Mahometan city. I suppose there are not ten ministers in Boston who would not "get into trouble," as the phrase is, if they were to preach against intemperance, and the causes that produce intemperance, with half so much zeal as they innocently preach "regeneration" and a "form of piety" which will never touch a single corner of the earth. As the minister came down, the Spirit of Trade would meet him on the pulpit stairs to warn him: "Business is business; religion is religion; business is ours, religion yours; but if you make or even allow religion to interfere with our business, then it will be the worse for you--that is all!" You know it is not a great while since we drove out of Boston the one Unitarian minister who was a fearless apostle of temperance.[36] His presence here was a grief to that "form of piety;" a disturbance to trade. Since then the peace of the churches has not been much disturbed by the preaching of temperance. The effect has been salutary; no Unitarian minister has risen up to fill that place!
This same disproportionate love of money appears in the fact, that the merchants of Boston still allow colored seamen to be taken from their ships and shut up in the jails of another State. If they cared as much for the rights of man as for money, as much for the men who sail the ship as for the cargo it carries, I cannot think there would be bra.s.s enough in South Carolina, or all the South, to hold another freeman of Ma.s.sachusetts in bondage, merely for the color of his skin. No doubt, a merchant would lose his reputation in this city by engaging directly in the slave-trade, for it is made piracy by the law of the land.[37] But did any one ever lose his reputation by taking a mortgage on slaves as security for a debt; by becoming, in that way or by inheritance, the owner of slaves, and still keeping them in bondage?
You shall take the whole trading community of Boston, rich and poor, good and bad, study the phenomena of trade as astronomers the phenomena of the heavens, and from the observed facts, by the inductive method of philosophy, construct the ethics of trade, and you will find one great maxim to underlie the whole: Money must be made. Money-making is to the ethics of trade what attraction is to the material world; what truth is to the intellect, and justice in morals. Other things must yield to that; that to nothing. In the effort to comply with this universal law of trade, many a character gives way; many a virtue gets pushed aside; the higher, n.o.bler qualities of a man are held in small esteem.
This characteristic of the trading cla.s.s appears in the thought of the people as well as their actions. You see it in the secular literature of our times; in the laws, even in the sermons; n.o.bler things give way to love of gold. So in an ill-tended garden, in some bed where violets sought to open their fragrant bosoms to the sun, have I seen a cabbage come up and grow apace, with thick and vulgar stalk, with coa.r.s.e and vulgar leaves, with rank unsavory look; it thrust aside the little violet, which, underneath that impenetrable leaf, lacking the morning sunshine and the dew of night, faded and gave up its tender life; but above the grave of the violet there stood the cabbage, green, expanding, triumphant, and all fearless of the frost. Yet the cabbage also had its value and its use.
There are men in Boston, some rich, some poor, old and young, who are free from this reproach; men that have a well-proportioned love of money, and make the pursuit thereof an effort for all the n.o.ble qualities of a man. I know some such men, not very numerous anywhere, men who show that the common business of life is the place to mature great virtues in; that the pursuit of wealth, successful or not, need hinder the growth of no excellence, but may promote all manly life. Such men stand here as violets among the cabbages, making a fragrance and a loveliness all their own; attractive anywhere, but marvellous in such a neighborhood as that.