to bless. Let us leave her there, loving the unlovely, and turn to other sights.
In the streets, there are about nine hundred needy boys, and about two hundred needy girls, the sons and daughters mainly of the intemperate: too idle or too thriftless to work; too low and naked for the public school. They roam about—the nomadic tribes of this town, the gipsies of Boston—doing some chance work for a moment, committing some petty theft. The temptations of a great city are before them.[1] Soon they will be impressed into the regular army of crime, to be stationed in your gaols, perhaps to die on your gallows. Such is the fate of the sons of intemperance; but the daughters! their fate—let me not tell of that.
In your Legislature they have just been discussing a law against dogs, for now and then a man is bitten, and dies of hydrophobia. Perhaps there are ten mad dogs in the State at this moment, and it may be that one man in a year dies from the bite of such. Do the legislators know now many shops there are in this town, in this State, which all the day and all the year sell to intemperate men a poison that maddens with a hydrophobia still worse? If there were a thousand mad dogs in the land, if wealthy men had embarked a large capital in the importation or the production of mad dogs, and if they bit and maddened and slew ten thousand men in a year, do you believe your Legislature would discuss that evil with such fearless
- ↑ The conduct of public magistrates, who are paid for serving the people, is not what it should be in respect to temperance. The city authorities allow the laws touching the sale of the great instrument of demoralization to be violated continually. There is no serious effort made to enforce these laws. Nor is this all; the shameless conduct of conspicuous men at the supper given in this city after the funeral of John Quincy Adams, and the debauchery on that occasion, are well known, find will long be remembered.
At the next festival (in September, 1851), it is notorious that the city authorities, at the expense of the citizens, provided a large quantity of intoxicating drink for the entertainment of our guests during the excursion in the harbour. It is also a matter of great notoriety, that many were drunk on that occasion. I need hardly add, that on board one of the crowded steamboats, three cheers were given for the " Fugitive Slave Law," by men who it is hoped will at length become sober enough to "forget" it. When the magistrates of Boston do such deeds, and are not even officially friends of temperance, what shall we expect of the poor and the ignorant and the miserable?" Cain, where is thy brother?" may be asked here and now as well as in the Bible story.
