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 jails and penitentiaries the
small villains, the petty criminals, the infantile offenders, the
ten-dollar desperadoes, and fill their places with some of these
monsters of abomination, who drive their roan span through our fine
streets until honest men have to fly to escape being run over; and
if they would turn out from their incarceration the poor girls of
the town, and put in some of the magnificent ladies who cover up the
sidewalk with their unpaid-for fineries, and with scornful look, in
the church-aisle, pass the daughters of poverty, who with their
faded dress and plain hat _dare_ to come to worship God in the same
sanctuary.
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