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peace for all your troubles. Morning of liberation for all your incarcerations. Morning of resurrection for your soul buried in sin. Good morning! Morning for the resuscitated household that has been waiting for your return. Morning for the cradle and the crib already disgraced with being that of a drunkard's child. Morning for the daughter that has trudged off to hard work because you did not take care of home. Morning for the wife who at forty or fifty years has the wrinkled face, and the stooped shoulder, and the white hair. Morning for one. Morning for all. Good morning! In God's name, good morning.

In our last dreadful war the Federals and the Confederates were encamped on opposite sides of the Rappahannock, and one morning the brass band of the Northern troops played the national air, and all the Northern troops cheered and cheered. Then on the opposite side of the Rappahannock the brass band of the Confederates played "My Maryland" and "Dixie," and then all the Southern troops cheered and cheered. But after awhile one of the bands struck up "Home, Sweet Home," and the band on the opposite side of the river took up the strain, and when the tune was done the Confederates and the Federals all together united, as the tears rolled down their cheeks, in one great huzza! huzza! Well, my friends, heaven comes very near to-day. It is only a stream that divides us--the narrow stream of deathand the voices there and the voices here seem to commingle, and we join trumpets, and hosannahs, and hallelujahs, and the chorus of the united song of earth and heaven is, "Home, Sweet Home." Home of bright domestic circle on earth. Home of forgiveness in the great heart of God. Home of eternal rest in heaven. Home! Home! Home!

CHAPTER V.

UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN.

The destruction of the poor is their poverty.-Proverbs x: 15.

On an island nine miles long by two and a half wide stands the largest city on this continent-a city mightiest for virtue and for vice. Before I get through with this series of Sabbath morning discourses, I shall show you the midnoon of its magnificent progress and philanthropy, as well as the midnight of its crime and sin. Twice in every twenty-four hours our City Hall and old Trinity clocks strike twelve-once while business and art are in full blast, and once while iniquity is doing its uttermost. Both stories must be told. It is pleasanter to put on a plaster than to thrust in a probe; but it is absurd to propose remedies for disease until we have taken a diagnosis of that disease. The patient may squirm and cringe, and fight back, and resist; but the surgeon must go on. Before I get through with these Sabbath morning sermons, I shall make you all smile at the beautiful things I will say about the grandeur and beneficence of this cluster of cities; but my work now is excavation and exposure. I have as much amusement as any man of my profession can afford to indulge in at any one time, in seeing some of the clerical "reformers " of this day mount their war-charger, dig in their spurs, and with glittering lance dash down upon the iniquities of cities that have been three or four thousand years dead. These men will corner an old sinner of twenty or thirty centuries ago, and scalp him, and hang him, and

cut him to pieces, and then say: "Oh! what great things have been done." With amazing prowess, they throw sulphur at Sodom, and fire at Gomorrah, and worms at Herod, and pitch Jezebel over the wall, but wipe off their gold spectacles, and put on their best kid gloves, and unroll their morocco-covered sermon, and look bashful when they begin to speak about the sins of our day, as though it were a shame even to mention them. The hypocrites! They are afraid of the libertines and the men who drink too much, in their churches, and those who grind the face of the poor. Better, I say, clear out all our audiences from pulpit to storm-door, until no one is left but the sexton, and he staying merely to lock up, than to have the pulpit afraid of the pew. The time has come when the living Judases and Herods and Jezebels are to be arraigned. There is one thing I like about a big church: a dozen people may get mad about the truth and go off, and you don't know they are gone until about the next year. The cities standing on the ground are the cities to be reformed, and not the Herculaneums buried under volcanic ashes, or the cities of the plain fifty feet under the Dead Sea.

I unroll the scroll of new revelations. With city missionary, and the police of New York and Brooklyn, I have seen some things that I have not yet stated in this series of discourses on the night side of city life. The night of which I speak now is darker than any other. No glittering chandelier, no blazing mirror adorns it. It is the long, deep exhaustive night of city pauperism. "We won't want a carriage to-night," said the detectives. "A carriage would hinder us in our work; a carriage going through the streets where we are going would only bring out the people to see what was the matter." So on foot we went up the dark lanes of poverty Everything

revolting to eye, and ear, and nostril. Population unwashed, uncombed. Rooms unventilated. Three midnights overlapping each other-midnight of the natural world, midnight of crime, midnight of pauperism. Stairs oozing with filth. The inmates, nine-tenths of the journey to their final doom, traveled. They started in some unhappy home of the city or of the country. They plunged into the shambles of death within ten minutes' walk of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, and then came on gradually down until they have arrived at the Fourth Ward. When they move out of the Fourth Ward they will move into Bellevue Hospital; when they move out of Bellevue Hospital they will move to Blackwell's Island; when they move from Blackwell's Island they will move to the Potter's Field; when they move from the Potter's Field they will move into hell! Bellevue Hospital and Blackwell's Island take care of 18,000 patients in one year. As we passed on, the rain pattering on the street and dripping around the doorways made the night more dismal. I said, "Now let the police go ahead," and they flashed their light, and there were fourteen persons trying to sleep, or sleeping, in one room. Some on a bundle of straw; more with nothing under them and nothing over them. "Oh!" you say, "this is exceptional." It is not. Thousands lodge in that way. One hundred and seventy thousand families living in tenement houses, in more or less inconvenience, more or less squalor. Half a million people in New York cityfive hundred thousand people living in tenement-houses; multitudes of these people dying by inches. Of the twenty-four thousand that die yearly in New York fourteen thousand die in tenement-houses. No lungs that God ever made could for a long while stand the atmosphere we breathed for a little while. In the Fourth

Ward, 17,000 people within the space of thirty acres. You say, "Why not clear them out? Why not, as at Liverpool, where 20,000 of these people were cleared ont of the city, and the city saved from a moral pestilence, and the people themselves from being victimized?” There will be no reformation for these cities until the tenement-house system is entirely broken up. The city authorities will have to buy farms, and will have to put these people on those farms, and compel them to work. By the strong arm of the law, by the police lantern conjoined with Christian charity, these places must be exposed and must be uprooted. Those places in London which have become historical for crowded populations-St. Giles, Whitechapel, Holborn, the Strand-have their match at last in the Sixth Ward, Eleventh Ward, Fourteenth Ward, Seventeenth Ward of New York. No purification for our cities until each family shall have something of the privacy and seclusion of a home circle. As long as they herd like beasts, they will be beasts.

Hark! What is that heavy thud on the wet pavement? Why, that is a drunkard who has fallen, his head striking against the street-striking very hard. The police try to lift him up. Ring the bell for the city ambulance. No. Only an outcast, only a tatterdemalion-a heap of sores and rags. But look again. Perhaps he has some marks of manhood on his face; perhaps he may have been made in the image of God; perhaps he has a soul which will live after the dripping heavens of this dismal night have been rolled together as a scroll; perhaps he may have been died for, by a king; perhaps he may yet be & conqueror charioted in the splendors of heavenly welcome. But we must pass on. We cross the street, and, the rain beating in his face, lies a man entirely unconscious. I wonder where he came from. I wonder if

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