ten thousand souls; he might pass
within all these bands of "civilization," and in some alley, or "Five
Points," sit down and weep for the calamity of his brethren. He would
behold there War and Captivity enough to fill an entire volume of
Lamentations. Captivity! were men ever bound by a darker chain, or
trampled by a harder heel, than those victims of destitution and of
their own passions? War! did the Jew behold any hosts more terrible
pressing into Jerusalem, than you and I might see if we looked about us?
The entrenched filth that all day long sends its steaming rot through
lane and dwelling, through bone and marrow, and saps away the life. Cold
that encamps itself in the empty fire-place, and blows through the
broken door, and paralyzes the naked limbs. Hunger that takes the strong
man by the throat, and kills the infant in its mother's arms. And still
another traitorous legion that, equipped with the fascinations of the
bottle and the shamelessness of harlotry, appeals to the passions of the
brutal and proffers comfort to the hearts of the sad. War and Captivity
in the midst of peace and refinement--is it not, my friends? And, with
all this, may we not expect that fierce instinct of selfishness which
overwhelms every other impulse, and breaks out in crime? Ah! and do we
not discover a counterpart to that saddest feature of all in such
circumstances--a desecration even of the parental instinct? Fathers,
beating their sons into the career of guilt; and mothers--worse than
those who made horrid food of their own children--offering their
daughters to the Moloch of lust in the shape of some "gentlemanly"
devil with a portable hell in his own breast!

And it seems to me that if one with a prophet vision and a prophet
heart, widened to the compass of humanity, should thus go into these
waste places, nothing would affect him more; nothing would strike a
deeper and tenderer chord in his bosom; than the condition of these
little ones amidst the siege and terror. And, comprehending all their
need--their moral as well as their physical destitution--he might
exclaim, as describing the most pitiable spectacle of all--"The young
children ask bread, and no man breaketh it unto them."

And I think that every one of you who has reflected at all upon this
subject, must feel that, of all the conditions of Humanity in the darker
regions of the City, there is none more sorrowful, more momentous, and
at the same time more hopeful, tha