One other matter let me name--I call it the Crime against Woman. Let us see the evil in its type, its most significant form. Look at that thing of corruption and of shame, almost without shame, whom the judge, with brief words, despatches to the jail. That was a woman once. No! At least, she was once a girl. She had a mother; perhaps, beyond the hills, a mother, in her evening prayer, remembers still this one child more tenderly than all the folded flowers that slept the sleep of infancy beneath her roof; remembers, with a prayer, her child, whom the world curses after it has made corrupt! Perhaps she had no such mother, but was born in the filth of some reeking cellar, and turned into the mire of the streets, in her undefended innocence, to mingle with the coarseness, the intemperance, and the crime of a corrupt metropolis. In either case, her blood is on our hands. The crime which is so terribly avenged on woman--think you that God will hold men innocent of that? But on this sign of our moral state, I will not long delay.
Put all these things together: the character of trade, of the press; take the evidence of poverty, intemperance, and crime--it all reveals a sad state of things. I call your attention to these facts. We are all affected by them more or less; all more or less accountable for them.
Hitherto I have only stated facts, without making comparisons. Let me now compare the present condition of Boston with that in former times. Every man has an ideal, which is better than the actual facts about him. Some men amongst us put that ideal in times past, and maintain it was then an historical fact; they are commonly men who have little knowledge of the past, and less hope for the future; a good deal of reverence for old precedents, little for justice, truth, humanity; little confidence in mankind, and a great deal of fear of new things. Such men love to look back and do homage to the past, but it is only a past of fancy, not of fact, they do homage to. They tell us we have fallen; that the golden age is behind us, and the garden of Eden; ours are degenerate days; the men are inferior, the women less winning, less witty, and less wise, and the children are an untoward generation, a disgrace, not so much to their fathers, but certainly to their grandsires. Sometimes this is the complaint of men who have grown old; sometimes of such as seem to be old without growing so, who seem born to the gift of age, without the grace of youth.