sick, and manage great commercial enterprises.

When our cities are so raised, we shall have a different style of
municipal government. The great question, in regard to the execution
of the law, now is: "What is popular?" Our city governments
slumber--great carcasses of insufficiency, sending up their stench
into the nostrils of high heaven, while there are thousands of
gambling-houses, and drinking-saloons, and more places of damnable
lust than the decency of the country has time to count. Do you tell me
that the authorities do not know it? They do know it. All the police
know it. The sheriff and his deputies know it. The aldermen know it.
The mayors know it. Everybody who keeps his eyes and ears open knows
it. In the name of God I impeach the municipal authorities of many of
our cities, that they neglect to execute the law. You cannot charge
it upon any one party. Within the past few years both parties, and
all kinds of parties, have been in power; but the work has never been
done. You have but to pass the City Hall, or look in upon the rooms of
some of our city officials, to see to what sort of men our cities have
been abandoned. Look at the swearing, bloated, sensual wretches who
stand on the outside of the New York City Hall, picking their teeth,
waiting for some crumbs of emolument to fall at their feet; and then
tell me how far it is from New York to Sodom. Who are those wretched
women sent up in the city van to the police-court, apprehended for
drunkenness? They will be locked up in jail; but what will be done
with the groggeries that made them drunk? Who are these men in the
city-prison? That man stole a pair of shoes; that boy, one dollar from
the counter; that girl snatched a purse--all villanies of less than
twenty or thirty dollars' damage to the community; but for
that gambler, who last night took that young man's thousand
dollars--nothing! For that man who broke in upon the purity of a
Christian household, and by a perfidy and adroitness that beat the
strategy of hell, flung that girl into the chasm of earthly
despair, from which her lost soul goes shrieking to the bottomless
pit--nothing! For those who "fleeced" a young man, and induced him to
filch from his employers vast sums of money, until, in his agony, he
came to an officer of the church, and frantically asked what he should
do--nothing!

Verily, small crimes ought to be punished; but it were more just if
our authorities would turn out from our j