344. Foes of Society

Foes of Society

Mic_6:9 : ’93The Lord’92s voice crieth unto the city.’94

Whether God or Satan shall have complete possession of our American cities, is the question of the hour. Never so many churches, never so many reformatory institutions, never so many good men and women, never such bright prospects as now; but do not think that righteousness will triumph without any rebuff, or without terrific and long-continued struggle. Take, for instance, the one fact that in the busy season many of the streets of our great cities are depraved picture-galleries by reason of the unclad figures represented in the show windows and on the board fences, a kind of immorality which is becoming the curse of our great towns. Many of our theaters and opera houses and places of amusement are by their mode of street advertisement in the busy season committing an outrage against which city authorities ought long ago to have lifted an interdict. Twenty-five years ago such things would have been impossible. The managers who ordered them, and the bill-posters who carried them, and the merchants who displayed them in their show windows, would have been hauled up before the police court to answer. You would not allow such lack of apparel in your parlor, or in the presence of your household. No. Why, then, allow it in the presence of all our great cities?

I denounce the immorality in the modes of street advertisements in the busy seasons in our great cities as an appalling education in the wrong direction. I ask that all respectable merchants refuse such advertisements from their show windows, and that the mayors of our cities in the busy season go down and look at the degrading spectacle, north, south, east and west, and in all the cities on this continent. It is an appalling outrage against which no voice seems to be lifted. If the pictures of actors and actresses in the show windows and on the board fences in the busy season of the year are genuine specimens of what is going on in the ’93reformed’94 American theater, that institution is rapidly ’93reforming’94 toward Sodom.

In southern Europe the immoral pictures of Herculaneum and Pompeii are put in private galleries under lock and key as specimens of a depraved age and to be seen only by the severe antiquarian; but Brooklyn and New York and Philadelphia and Boston and New Orleans and all our great cities at certain times of the year put their immoral advertisements in the show windows and on the board fences, so that men, women, and children, on their way to church, on their way to school, on their way to social reunion, and on their way to business, can look at them. In the name of God and of decent citizens, I demand a reform in this respect. Away with this evil. It is the business of all city authorities throughout this land to stop it. While never since the world stood have the forces of righteousness been more triumphant than they are now, never since the world stood have the forces of evil been so unblushing and blatant.

We are on the way toward complete and universal victory. The desert is to be a garden, and all wrongs are to be righted, and you and I will see the day, if not on earth, then looking down from the battlements of heaven. But as intelligent workers’97and I am glad to know that a vast multitude of these people are Christian workers, going forth in asylums and in penitentiaries and in almshouses and on the street, and everywhere preaching Jesus Christ, and my ambition is that this whole congregation be one great band of Christian workers’97I say, it is most important that we all be intelligent in regard to the obstacles in the way and the evils to be extirpated.

In the first place, I remark, among the antagonists of society are all public criminals. It is not strange that in large cities there should be a large class of criminals’97American criminals and foreign criminals Never so many good and industrious and honorable men and women coming from foreign lands to live in this land, as now. Stand at the immigrant depots and see them come with their Bibles, a vast multitude of them an addition to the moral resources as well as the financial resources of this country. Not an immigration of pauperism and sin, but of righteousness and industry. I have seen them at the Castle Garden and at Ellis Island waiting for transportation on the rail-trains reading their Bibles to their families. In former years the majority of the criminals who took ship from Europe came into the port of New York. Wise legislation, with the object of excluding the criminal and the pauper, has fortunately averted this evil, which was formerly a formidable one. In 1869, of the forty-nine thousand people in the prisons of this country thirty-two thousand were of foreign birth. Many were the desperadoes of society. They oozed into the slums of the city awaiting their time to riot and steal and debauch, joining the great gang of American thieves and cut-throats. There are four thousand people in this neighborhood of cities whose entire business it is to commit crime. It is as much their business to do that as it is your business to manage merchandise or jurisprudence or medicine. They take the few weeks or months they are in jail as wasted time, just as you look upon that as wasted time when you are crippled with influenza or rheumatism. It is their business to pick pockets and shop-lift and blow up safes and ply the panel game, and they are as proud of the achievement among their fellows as you are proud when by skilful argument you upset the plea of an opposing counsel, or when you cure a gunshot fracture which another surgeon gave up; just as much as you merchants are proud of the fact among your comrades when you have foresight enough to purchase just before goods go up twenty per cent. It is their business to commit crime. They rally to it all their energies of body, mind, and soul, and I do not suppose that once a year the thought of the immorality comes across them. In addition to these professional criminals there are others more or less industrious in crime. Ten thousand arrests in this neighborhood of cities in one year for theft. Ten thousand arrests in one year in this neighborhood of cities for assault and battery. Fifty thousand arrests in one year for intoxication. Rum, the cause of a great many of these evils. Rum, the cause of most of the thefts, giving men indistinct ideas of property, so they get their hands on things that do not belong to them. Rum, the author of most of the assaults and batteries, inspiring men with a sudden bravery which they must demonstrate, though it be on the face of the next gentleman. Seven million dollars of property stolen in this neighborhood of cities in one year.

Can you, as good and honest citizens, let all these things pass, saying: ’93They do not interest me?’94 They must interest you. They touch your pocket. You are today paying the board of the criminals, from the boy that steals a spool of cotton from a counter up to the man who helps enact a Black Friday. Yea, it ought to touch your heart. You might as well think of standing in a room of confined air, fifty people breathing, and you not be influenced by the vitiated atmosphere, as to think of standing in cities where there are thousands of criminals without being contaminated. What is the burning of your store compared with the destruction of your morals or the morals of your friends? What is the theft of silver and gold compared with the theft of the good morals of your little children?

Society comes out glad to arrest criminals, and we shout: ’93Stop thief; stop thief!’94 and we rush down and we surround the panting ruffian, and we hasten him off to the police station; with a gusto we put on the handcuffs and hopples; but what are we doing for the time when the handcuffs and hopples will come off? The vast majority are turned out of prison worse than they went in; society practically saying to these criminals: ’93You go in there and rot,’94 instead of practically saying: ’93You have offended against the law of the land, and you must suffer; but we are not against you. We want to reform you; we want to redeem you; here are Bibles and tracts and Christian influences. Jesus Christ died for you. Look and live.’94 No such influence as that. The introduction of industries into our penitentiaries was a great improvement as well as an evil against which honest manufacturers suffering by the competition were driver to protest; but something more than hammer and shoe-last are necessary to reform the criminal classes, something more than sermons necessary to reform them. The vast majority of them have an idea that society has a grudge against them, and so they have a grudge against society, and they are plotting worse crimes this very moment. They burned one house. They will burn three. They will drive deeper the knife of assassination. They will say: ’93You are against me and I am against you.’94 I think the prisons of this country are the best places I know of to manufacture vagabonds and footpads and cut-throats. The first Raymond Street Jail in Brooklyn was the disgrace of Christendom. I looked through the wicket one day, and I saw a group of men there, and as I stood with my handkerchief to my lip and nostril, I said to them; ’93How do you stand it here?’94 ’93Oh,’94 said one, ’93God knows, we have to stand it.’94 The second Raymond Street Jail is far from being a model prison. Vast sums of money expended, but no care for cleanliness or ablution. Officers of the law do as well as they can. But what a prison that is for an age like this when all the improvements in ventilation and cleanliness are abroad. So much money for an insult to the city. I tell you that stifled air and darkness and maltreatment never yet changed a villain into an honest man. ’93Oh,’94 says some one, ’93they are incorrigible, and you cannot do them any good.’94 I believe there are hundreds in the prison bunks today, throughout the United States, who would leap at the idea of reform if there were any chance for them.

I speak with more emphasis because these cases are constantly coming before me’97men in the thraldom of bad habits trying to get out; men who have been incarcerated and who would like to be restored to their lost places in society. The secretary of one of our benevolent societies said to a lad, fifteen years of age, who had been three years of those fifteen in prison: ’93What did they do to make you better?’94 ’93Well,’94 said the lad, ’93when I came up the first time before the judge, he said, ’91You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’92 Then I committed another crime and was brought up, and the judge said, ’91You rascal.’92 Then I committed another crime, and was brought up the third time, and the judge said, ’91You ought to be hanged.’92’93 A great many of them in the prisons once, twice, thrice, four times. Of one thousand five hundred prisoners in Sing Sing, four hundred had been there before. In the House of Correction, in which there had been five thousand inmates, three thousand had been there before. The prisons and the houses of correction do not reform and they do not correct. While I have no sympathy with that executive clemency which would let crime go free, and I have no sympathy with those people who sit in courthouse galleries weeping because some hard-hearted wretch has been brought to justice, I tell you plainly we need more potential influence in behalf of the reformation of criminals. We want a John Howard or a Sir William Blackstone or an Elizabeth Fry to do for the prisons of America what those people I have mentioned did for the prisons of Europe. I thank God for an Isaac T. Hopper, a Dr. Wines, and a Mr. Harris, and for other people who have given their time for the purification of our prisons and the reformation of the criminal classes; but I fear it will be a long while yet before our cities will come under the benediction of him who said, ’93I was in prison and ye visited me.’94

Among the antagonists of society I also place untrustworthy officials. The Bible says: ’93Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning.’94 In all our cities there are bad men who get into positions of authority and influence. That always depresses the moral sentiment. Why was it that crime so triumphed in New York between 1866 and 1871? It was because many of the judges of the police courts were as villainous as the criminals brought before them for trial. Those were the days of high carnival for election frauds and assassination and forgery. We had the Whisky Ring and the Tammany Ring and the Erie Ring and other rings. One man received one hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars a year for serving the dear public. It was estimated that within a few years fifty-eight million dollars had been swamped by fraud in that city. A criminal in those times had only to wink to the judge, or have his lawyer wink for him, and the decision was for the defendant. They had a way of ’93fixing things up,’94 which fixed the interests of society down. It is no compliment to our great cities that there are men and women unwhipped of justice, notorious criminals in all our great cities. There are the ’93fences,’94 those who stand between the thief and the honest man, letting the thief go, and at high price restoring the property to the owner. There are funeral thieves who go in and sit down and weep with the bereft and pick their pockets. There are thieves who are in Wall Street called ’93skinners,’94 because they are adroit and they have sleight-of-hand with stocks and bonds. They are the confidence men who tell you they have a dead child in their house they want to bury, and they have no house and they never had any family. Or they get you to let them have money to go to Europe where they have fallen heir to a large property, and they will send the money right back by the first mail. The harbor thieves, the pickpockets, the shoplifters. Notorious men and women pointed out to you on the streets of our great cities. For fifteen years doing nothing but despoiling society. Ought these things to be allowed. When one criminal escapes it opens the door for a dozen criminalities. Society practically says in regard to such persons in its leniency and in its lack of justice, ’93Crime is safe, crime pays.’94

Let the law swoop, let the criminals understand the detectives are on their track, that the police-club is brandished, that the door of the prison is opening, that the judge is ready to call on the case. When years ago, one of our former Presidents pardoned a dealer in impure literature, he hindered mightily the crusade against bad books; while when ten or twelve years ago Governor Dix refused to pardon Foster, the assassin, although the pressure for pardon was very great, he vindicated the cause of God and the integrity of the State of New York.

Among these antagonists of society are the idle. Of course, I do not speak of those who are getting old and of those who are sick and of those who cannot get work, but I mean those who can work and will not work. A French nobleman was asked why he toiled after he was so wealthy, and he replied: ’93I keep working that I may not hang myself.’94 The healthiest man on earth, the most prosperous man on earth, cannot afford to be continuously idle. Character like water becomes putrid if it stands too long. There are a great many people abroad who will not work, notwithstanding there is so much work to do. Work to do for God and for the betterment of the world’92s condition. They will not work. Some of them say they cannot get work. Any healthy man can get work. It may not be just the work he wants, but there is work for all, some kind of work. At times when there was a dearth in these things I have sometimes tried to set men to work and offered to pay them largely. They would not work. I have set them to sawing wood in my cellar. I told them I would pay them well, I would pay them right away; and I went back to my work, and I heard the saw going for about three minutes, and then I went down, and lo! the wood, but no saw. They did not want to work. Society owes them a living, they say. Now, I would for such men reinstate the old-fashioned whipping-post. They are not afraid of penitentiaries and Sing Sings. They have no objections to almshouses. They like thin soup when they cannot get mock-turtle. I would put honest work on one side and a raw-hide on the other, and let them take their choice. I like Paul’92s scanty bill of fare for Thessalonian loafers: ’93He that will not work, neither shall he eat.’94 By what law of God or man is it right or fair that you and I shall toil until the brain gets numb and the hands are blistered, to help support in the United States what I take to be about two million loafers? Out of the lazy classes come the criminals.

Among the antagonists of society are the oppressed poor. Poverty is chastening to a certain extent, but after that it makes a man desperate. There are thousands of criminals in this country made such by maltreatment. They have been pursued and beaten and abused and wronged until they are like a wild beast that has run until it can run no longer, and turns around and stands foaming and bleeding to fight the hounds. Alas for this underground suffering in these great cities! You say, ’93I don’92t see it.’94 You ought to see it. It is wallowing, it is steaming, it is foaming, it is putrefying under all these cities. You go down the stairs decayed with filth until you see at the foot of it the poor, suffering ones three-fourths dead, or they slink into a darker corner under the glaring lantern of the police. Some of them lying down in scenes beyond description. The sewers of the city empty themselves upon them. They lie down to sleep amid the swimming filth. Ah! these are the sores that breed perpetual corruption. These are the volcanoes that threaten us with Caraccas earthquake. These volcanoes of suffering underneath that roar and heave and rock and blaspheme and die. There they are all huddled together, men, women, children, black, white. Mary Magdalen without her repentance, and Lazarus without his God. ’93Oh,’94 you say, ’93I never saw it.’94 You never will see it until those struggling wretches come up in the light of the judgment throne, and while all hearts are being revealed, God will ask you what you did. to help them.

Then there is another class almost as helpless, the honest poor. Their eyes sunken, cheek-bones standing out, hands damp with slow consumptions, flesh puffed up with dropsies, breath like that of the charnel house. They hear overhead the rolling of the wheels of fashion and the gay laughter of men and maidens, and wonder why God did so much for others and did so little for them. Feeling something of the infidelity and the atheism of the German girl who, when told in her wretchedness that God was good, answered ’93No, no good God; look at me, no good God.’94 Two hundred and ninety thousand honest poor in a single neighborhood of cities’97in one year dependent upon private charity, city charity, State charity, Christian charity. Awful story of suffering. If their voice could come up it would make a groan that would shake the earth and move the world and heaven to the rescue. But for the most part they suffer in silence. It is unexpressed suffering.

There is the large host of sewing women in these cities. You say, ’93The sewing-machine has alleviated all their miseries.’94 Ah, no! Some of them toiling on night after night, and night after night until the blood spurts from nostril and lip. Their woe well voiced by a woman in these cities who sat one day, her invalid husband on one side, and her invalid child on the other’97and said to a city missionary: ’93I am clear discouraged; we have it so hard, and then there are other things.’94 ’93Well,’94 said the missionary, ’93What do you mean by other things?’94 ’93Oh,’94 she said, ’93my sins; you see there is no good comes here, and we work from Monday morning till Saturday night, and Sunday comes and we can’92t go out, and I walk this floor, and I dread to meet God at last; and then to see this poor little wee thing getting weaker and weaker, and to feel we are getting no nearer God but floating away from him. Oh, sir, I do wish 1 was ready to die.’94

I should not wonder if they had a great deal better time in the next world than you and I will have, because they have had it so hard here. It will be just like Christ to say: ’93Come here and take one of these high seats in heaven. Ye suffered with me on earth; now be glorified with me in heaven.’94 O thou weeping One of Bethany, O thou dying One of the Cross, have mercy upon the suffering!

I preach this sermon because I want you to know who are the antagonists of society, because I want you to be more discriminating in your contributions, because I want to make you the warm friends of all city evangelization and all Howard Missions, and all Christian influences, and because I thought perhaps some of you today might go home and open the wardrobe and see some garment there you could spare for the poor. And who knows but that those garments you give away may be all changed, and that hat may become to you a jeweled coronet, and that apparel you gave away may by some supernatural influence be whitened and woven into Christ’92s robe, so that at last he shall pass his hand over it and say, ’93I was naked and ye clothed me.’94 Yea, I preach this sermon because I want you in the contrast to realize how gently God has dealt with you, and because I want you, when you sit at your table today and look into the round faces of your children, and there is plenty of food on the table, to see how good God has been to you; how good he is now. And then this afternoon, after the dining hour has passed, you might go to your private room and lock the door and then kneel down and say: ’93O God, there are so many sick and crippled children, I thank thee that mine are well’97some of them on earth, some of them in heaven. Lord, I surrender to thee. Sprinkled as I once was with waters of baptism as my mother held me at the altar, today I consecrate my soul to thee in the holier baptism of repenting tears.’94

For sinners, Lord, thou cam’92st to bleed,

And I’92m a sinner vile indeed;

Lord, I believe thy grace is free,

Oh, magnify that grace in me.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage