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REV. CORTLAND MYERS. 
 
MIDNIGHT IN A 
 
 GREAT CITY 
 
 CORTLAND MYERS 
 
 Pastor of t lie Brooklyn Temple 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MERRILL AND BAKER 
 
 Publishers 
 
Copyright, 1896, 
 
 BY 
 
 CORTLAND MYERS. 
 
 THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS, 
 RAHWAY, N. J. 
 
I place the fruit of the brain in the right hand of her whose 
 left hand holds the love of the heart. 
 
 " Take them, Love, the book and me together ; 
 Where the heart lies let the brain be also." 
 
 —The Author. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Many days and many nights of many weeks 
 were given by the author to the investigation of 
 city darkness. Friends and missionaries and 
 officials gave their needed and appreciated aid, 
 The story was first told to thousands of listeners 
 in the Brooklyn Temple. Other thousands 
 crowded about the doors, unable to enter. Their 
 cry and its accompanying sound from many parts 
 of this land were heard and are answered by this 
 book. No literary excellence is claimed, only 
 a personal knowledge of the facts and a Calvary 
 purpose to save the city. That these pages be 
 not used for fuel, but their facts fire the souls of 
 men, is the desire of 
 
 The Author. 
 
 Brooklyn, N. Y., Sept. i, i8g6. 
 
 iii 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. 
 
 The Dark Tenements, 
 
 I 
 
 II. 
 
 The Murder of the Innocents, . 
 
 14 
 
 III. 
 
 The Clouds above Rich Homes, 
 
 J * 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Center of Iniquity, 
 
 53 
 
 V. 
 
 The Hospital Wards, 
 
 . 76 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Shadows from the Footlights, 
 
 94 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Fogs of Ignorance, 
 
 . 119 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Blackness of Impurity, . 
 
 137 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Smoke of Factories, . 
 
 • 151 
 
 X. 
 
 The Gloom of the Prison Cell, . 
 
 173 
 
 XI. 
 
 The Piece of Lava from the Volcano, 
 
 • 197 
 
 XII. 
 
 The American "Joss," .... 
 
 217 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The Morning Breaketh, 
 
 • 239 
 
 vii 
 
MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE DARK TENEMENTS. 
 
 The King of Day mounts his golden throne in 
 the world's sky and swings his scepter of light 
 and warmth above the dwellings of all men; but 
 with all his mighty power, the selfishness of 
 humanity is mightier in its rebellion, and forbids 
 his dominion over a part of the world. His 
 scepter can touch the lily of the field, and com- 
 mand the garments from his own royal wardrobe 
 to be placed upon its form of beauty and robe it 
 with more glory than that of Solomon in all the 
 splendor of his royalty. With one of his thou- 
 sand hands he paints the bloom upon the cheek 
 
2 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 of the luscious fruit and pours the wine into the 
 heart of the purple cluster; the emerald 
 axminster is spread out upon the floor of earth's 
 palace by his servant. It was his hand that 
 dashed the mixture of color against the western 
 sky and made the indescribable glory of a sum- 
 mer evening. It was the artist from his studio 
 who sped down the skies with pallet in hand 
 and arched the eastern heavens with the splendor 
 of the rainbow, reflecting the beauty of the upper 
 world. The silver robes of the Queen of Night 
 are bought with his gold, and the starry worlds 
 borrow at his treasury. Life and beauty for this 
 planet are the sacrifice of his life. It is insanity 
 and crime to shut out from his wonderful power 
 the most precious life, and thus to banish joy, 
 health, comfort, and heaven from the habitation 
 of that part of the human family which, by virtue 
 of poverty, lives in the tenements of the great 
 cities. 
 
 In many of these homes the sun never shines; 
 in most of them it rarely ever enters. Flowers 
 wither and die in a cellar; human flowers must 
 pass that same sad way. The violet in the fence 
 corner wears a purple robe, and is more royal 
 in the sight of our present civilization than that 
 
THE DARK TENEMENTS. 
 
 3 
 
 which was made in the image and likeness of 
 God. 
 
 " When wilt thou save the people, 
 
 O God of mercy, when ? 
 The people, Lord, the people, 
 
 Not thrones and crowns, but men. 
 Flowers of thy heart, O God, are they ; 
 Let them not pass like weeds away, 
 Their heritage a sunless day, 
 
 God save the people ! " 
 
 That prayer must reach the throne before the 
 march of civilization and the triumph of the 
 Kingdom of God. 
 
 The superstructure totters because of the 
 crumbling foundation stones in the rotten tene- 
 ments at the bottom of society. 
 
 Ordinary tenement houses contain five stories 
 and a basement; four families usually occupy 
 one floor. The halls are extremely narrow, and 
 nearly all of them are dark even in the brightest 
 day. The visitor is obliged to move with hands 
 extended and feel his way, while in constant 
 dread of a collision with wood or humanity. In 
 some of the hallways there is no method of 
 securing air or light except where a faint glim- 
 mer comes from a narrow skylight or a transom. 
 
4 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 In the older houses the sink is found in the hall, 
 and all the families must draw and pour water in 
 the same place, where the filth and menace to 
 health are beyond description. In these older 
 tenements there are attic rooms; cold in winter 
 and sweltering in summer — rented usually to 
 old and friendless people at the enormous rent 
 of five dollars per month for a single little room. 
 In all these tenements the families usually occupy 
 two or three small rooms, paying from eight to 
 twelve dollars per month; and dispossessment 
 hangs, like a thunder cloud lurid with lightning, 
 above their heads. If they are without food, the 
 rent must be paid. If they are without clothes, 
 the rent must first be provided. The most at- 
 tractive thing to be said about heaven, for them, 
 is that there will be no rent collected there. 
 
 The sight which they dread most, and which 
 composes one of the saddest pictures on earth, 
 is that of their few articles of furniture on the 
 street in front of the tenement. From one tene- 
 ment in this city twenty-eight families were 
 evicted in one winter's day; some of their poor 
 furniture was thrown from the fifth-story win- 
 dow. I saw a picture which made my heart 
 ache. A mother sat in the center of the w r orn 
 
THE DARK TENEMENTS. 
 
 5 
 
 household articles, a baby on her bosom and 
 three other children at her knee; and the winds 
 of a cold world sported with their rags and 
 mocked their shivering. 
 
 There are about 40,000 tenements in New 
 York city alone, housing nearly 200,000 children 
 under five years of age. As many as 100 of 
 these children have been found in a single small 
 tenement. The most crowded place on this en- 
 tire planet is in New York city. The average 
 population per square mile in this district is more 
 than 250,000, while the most thickly populated 
 district of Old London has only 175,000. 
 
 There are 100,000 people living in rear tene- 
 ments. You pass through a hole in the wall 
 and along a narrow, dark alley until you emerge 
 into a small court of but a few feet square, and 
 there find yourself completely surrounded by 
 five, six, or seven stories of tumble-down build- 
 ings, just swarming with humanity and foul 
 with dirt, disease, and death. Here the mor- 
 tality is astounding — at least one-third greater 
 than even in the lowest part of London. A 
 great physician has recently said, if we could see 
 the air breathed in these places by their occu- 
 pants, it would show itself to be more fetid than 
 
6 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 the mud of the gutters. Oh, what a pitiful 
 mockery to call such places home! The devil 
 planned them and his agents built them, and 
 God's sunlight never shines in them. In the 
 winter they do not furnish a barrier to the cold, 
 and in the summer heat they are positively un- 
 bearable. The tired people find their beds on 
 stone walks and roofs, in alleys and foul courts 
 and empty wagons. The sun never shines in 
 three-quarters of the bedrooms in New York 
 city. Many of these rookeries are ratholes and 
 homes for vermin. Cockroaches may delight in 
 them, but no one made in God's image can long 
 endure them. The death rate is just in propor- 
 tion to this kind of tenements; and from these 
 doorways is constantly swinging the soiled 
 white crape to tell of another death at the hands 
 of the murderer Selfishness. 
 
 I have climbed five stories like a steam craft 
 in a fog, feeling my way through the dark hall of 
 a back-yard tenement, and entered a space 
 eight feet by twelve, with a dark closet in the 
 rear and a little light and no sun in the front, and 
 found a father and mother with six children. 
 This was their home. What a lie given to the 
 sweet name, and what a disgrace to our civiliza- 
 
THE DARK TENEMENTS. 
 
 7 
 
 tion! No carpet, r"~ paper, scarcely any plas- 
 tering, a few pieces of old and broken furniture, 
 one small bed for eight, poverty written every- 
 where, and starvation stamped upon every coun- 
 tenance. This sad scene was not made by 
 themselves, but by sickness and misfortune. 
 Could human eye witness it without a tear? 
 Could human heart think upon it without a pro- 
 test? Could Christian civilization continue to 
 endure it? The spring of their tears may be un- 
 noticed, but it may cause a stream which will 
 make a disastrous flood when the levees of 
 another Mississippi break. 
 
 I came down from that garret to the cellar, 
 and partially under ground, where a ray of 
 sunlight never found its way, in a space of only 
 a few feet square, as damp as the river's bank in 
 a foggy night, I stood to comfort a blind man 
 and his wife, both Christian people, without a 
 friend on earth. They had come, by misfortune, 
 from one of the largest homes in New York 
 State down to one of the foulest cellars in the 
 world. In that alley they had lived fifteen 
 years, and been forced from the best room, by 
 their increasing poverty, down to the cellar. 
 She was sick and he was blind, but in their 
 
8 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 struggle they were paying their five dollars a 
 month rent and starving when they could not 
 earn more. 
 
 In the center of all unworthiness there are 
 thousands of the world's worthy poor suffering 
 and dying. Through these tenements stalks 
 poverty doing its deadly work, and crime carry- 
 ing ruin to hundreds, and disease giving death 
 to thousands. The penalty of injustice must 
 reach the entire city by countless channels. It 
 moves into the very homes of the rich. If the 
 washerwoman carries clothes into the back-yard 
 tenement, she wraps disease into her bundle 
 when it returns. The connection between one 
 part of society and the other has never been 
 severed and never can be. In it is greatest 
 peril, and as the tenement-house population and 
 tenement-house evil increase, the peril grows in 
 precisely the same ratio. 
 
 A certain duke who recently married an 
 American heiress has made the announcement 
 that the immense cost of the extensive improve- 
 ments that have been made on his castle has been 
 paid out of his own pocket. I make the an- 
 nouncement that, unless the hands of the rich go 
 down into their pockets for the improvement of 
 
THE DARK TENEMENTS. 
 
 9 
 
 the dwellings of the poor, the castles of the rich 
 must crumble. In a New York paper recently I 
 read the account of one of the richest American 
 girls spending her millions; some of it for dogs, 
 some of it for horses, some of it for carriages, 
 some of it for four or five different palaces, and 
 nearly all of it was thrown upon the altar of the 
 heathen god Self. In that same paper I read 
 the account of 175 cases of eviction on the 
 coldest winter day with the thermometer at 
 zero — and this in one single court of the 
 city. Mothers with starving and crying chil- 
 dren were pleading for mercy, not knowing 
 where to lay their heads, while one of their 
 sisters did not know how to lay her head in 
 so many palaces at once. Above the courts of 
 earth and above the tenements and above the 
 palace stands the judgment throne of God. 
 
 Dives and Lazarus are together again. Laza- 
 rus lies in the cheerless tenements, full of sores 
 and hungry. What is the only salvation for 
 Dives? 
 
 In a rear tenement I talked with an old lady, 
 intelligent and Christian. Her husband was 
 crippled and able to work only a part of the time. 
 They paid their rent and lived on tea, with 
 
io MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 crackers or bread. For many years that had 
 been their food, and sometimes they could not 
 get even that. She had just been given a piece 
 of cake, but was unable to eat it, because she was 
 unaccustomed to it and her digestion would not 
 bear it. I thought of Yanderbilt, who is highly 
 pleased when he can take a bit of graham cracker 
 and a sip of malted milk without suffering the 
 agonies of dyspepsia. The old lady had found 
 her highest happiness that day because they had 
 expected to be thrown into the street, but they 
 had gathered together the last farthing of the 
 month's rent and it was in the landlord's hand; 
 the hand that takes oftentimes from fifteen to 
 thirty per cent, interest on his tenement-house 
 investment. A church corporation and a pri- 
 vate individual alike find here the best place to 
 draw with greedy clutch the proceeds from their 
 money, and that money is oftentimes crimson 
 with human blood. 
 
 I recognize the responsibility which rests upon 
 many of the tenants themselves, for their sad 
 circumstances. My eyes are not blind to the ex- 
 istence of the largest number of saloons in these 
 very districts. I have heard the blasphemy and 
 impurity from the lips of drunken men and 
 
THE DARK TENEMENTS. 
 
 1 1 
 
 women sounding through alley and court, hall 
 and room of the tenement house, but with all 
 this knowledge I have other knowledge which 
 makes my heart sad and to overflow with 
 purest sympathy. In the back-yard tenement, 
 in a garret room, with a bed that occupied nearly 
 half the space, with one narrow window which 
 the sun never touched, with not a thread of car- 
 pet, without wall paper, with scarcely any plas- 
 ter, with a small broken stove, with one or two 
 crippled chairs, with only an old mattress on the 
 bed, with no sheets or covering except a tattered 
 overcoat, here lay a Christian man, dying of con- 
 sumption. For two years he had waited for 
 death. In that same room, night and day, lived 
 his wife and three children. She earned and 
 paid the rent by scrubbing saloons at night. 
 They were worthy of some of earth's best, but 
 they received the very poorest. It was not the 
 pay of the earth — it came through the com- 
 merce of hell. 
 
 One of the greatest difficulties in the way of 
 destroying this tenement-house disgrace and evil 
 is ignorance. Let the light of day shine in upon 
 this and every other evil that prefers darkness to 
 daylight. The agents and owners must have 
 
12 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 human eyes fastened upon them before their 
 selfishness can be checked. Boards of health 
 have done something, but they must do vastly 
 more. The officials must be backed up by pub- 
 lic sentiment, and be made to stamp out these 
 diseased and crime-breeding places. The Gos- 
 pel of the Son of God must have more power 
 over the wealth of the city. The money of New 
 York is made downtown, but is enjoyed and 
 squandered by the aristocrats uptown. 
 
 There must be more study given to this prob- 
 lem by philanthropists and social scientists. We 
 must come to understand the folly of attempting 
 to save men and women who live in darkness 
 and dampness and foulness and are herded to- 
 gether like animals. The physical man bears a 
 vital relation to the moral man. We must have 
 the courage to keep the churches and the schools 
 in the needy sections. They must not continue 
 to move out and the saloons to move in. The 
 law must demand better buildings, and the greed 
 of the landlords be checked. Men must be made 
 to see their relation to their fellow-man, and 
 also the possibility of good returns from good 
 houses. All good men and women should co- 
 operate for the destruction of this abomination 
 
THE DARK TENEMENTS. 
 
 and the alleviation of the suffering of this large 
 part of humanity. Social regeneration depends 
 in a great measure upon the banishment of this 
 darkness and the entrance of the light of Chris- 
 tian civilization. 
 
 The Earl of Shaftesbury, 
 
 " That friend of all the friendless 'neath the sun, 
 Whose hand had wiped away a thousand tears ; 
 Whose eloquent lips and clear, strong brain had done 
 God's holy service through his fourscore years," 
 
 when near his end, with tears of love upon his 
 cheeks, and with the spirit of the Christ in his 
 heart, said, " When I feel how old I am, and 
 know that I must soon die, I hope it is not 
 wrong, but I feel I cannot bear to go and leave 
 the world with all the misery in it." If the 
 spirit of the noble earl, that friend of the poor, — 
 which was the spirit of Christ, that other friend 
 of the poor, — should rule in every heart, how 
 quickly the miserable tenements would be swept 
 from the face of the earth ! 
 
 Oh, how the Saviour of men must rejoice in 
 his work of making the mansions in heaven 
 when he sees these homes of earth! 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE MURDER OF THE INNOCENTS. 
 
 The home is the most important factor in 
 human society, and the cradle is the most impor- 
 tant factor in the home. Its rocking sets in 
 motion the entire social world. It stands at the 
 center of power, even in the Kingdom of God. 
 " The hand that rocks the cradle moves the 
 world," simply because of the recognition of the 
 throne in the manger. Our knowledge has not 
 yet taught us the value of the algebraic quantity 
 of childhood in the unsolved problems of human 
 society neither our scientific nor philosophic 
 education has yet taught the necessity of going 
 back to the source, if we would purify the 
 stream. We must recognize the royalty there is 
 in the cradle if we would have citizen kings and 
 reveal the value of a republican form of govern- 
 ment. Suffer the children, if you would ever 
 establish the Kingdom of God upon earth. Suf- 
 14 
 
THE MURDER OF THE INNOCENTS. 15 
 
 fer the children, if you would ever glory in a 
 republic. Suffer the children, if you would ever 
 have a better city and a better nation and a bet- 
 ter world. Suffer them to come out of their 
 wretched tenement homes. Suffer them to 
 break their shackles and be free. Suffer them to 
 breathe pure air and carry pure blood. Suffer 
 the little innocents to escape the foul murderer's 
 hand. The " murder of the innocents " is 
 effected by the poison of heredity and environ- 
 ment and toil and neglect. There are literally 
 thousands and hundreds of thousands of chil- 
 dren butchered in the slaughtering pens of the 
 modern social world. It is enough to make all 
 hell resound with laughter, when we stand in 
 the very center of such a tremendous evil, and in 
 our inhumanity say, " We are civilized." The 
 lower world must echo with infernal applause 
 when, in our stupidity and carelessness and 
 ignorance and barbarism, we say, " We are 
 Christian." 
 
 " And while we range with science, glorying in the time, 
 City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city 
 slime." 
 
 I have seen enough to bring tears from a heart 
 of stone, in the alleys and in the back-yard 
 
1 6 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 courts; in the narrow, contracted, filthy, wretched 
 tenement hovels where the god of gold was wor- 
 shiped and the dearest life was poured out on 
 the altars of heathen sacrifices, and the God of 
 Heaven was absolutely forgotten. The un- 
 worthiness of many of the fathers and mothers 
 in these tenement homes may give rise to just 
 condemnation, but this does not affect the 
 innocent children. O God, have mercy on 
 them! Whatever be said about their parents, 
 Heaven pity the hundreds and thousands of 
 innocents murdered in our great cities! The 
 law of heredity is the saddest law stamped upon 
 this universe. But the larger part of that sad- 
 ness is impressed indelibly upon the neglected 
 and outcast children of the crowded city. If 
 there was coursing through their veins other 
 blood than that which is coursing through them 
 at this hour, their world might be vastly differ- 
 ent and their eternity a heaven. 
 
 I have stood in the dingy, dirty tenement 
 house with a single room as a home, with one 
 narrow window looking out upon a back-yard 
 court; this the home of eight or ten people — 
 father, mother, and children; and I have looked 
 over into the cradle, about the only piece of fur- 
 
THE MURDER OF THE INNOCENTS. 17 
 
 niture in the room, and have seen a six-months'- 
 old baby weighing only two pounds, and as I 
 looked into its pinched and drawn little face and 
 form, and saw its bird-claw fingers, so small that 
 I could not detect the nails, I said to its mother, 
 " Is it ill? " " No, not that I know of." Then 
 I said to myself, " No, not ill, but starving; liter- 
 ally starving and neglected, besides being born 
 into a world of suffering and disease." I looked 
 across the room and saw the mother, crippled 
 and hobbling on two crutches, haggard and 
 worn, and literally her life being poured out on 
 that same altar of sacrifice. I said to myself, 
 " No wonder, born of such ancestry and living 
 in such surroundings, that the little pinched 
 form has only six months to live upon earth, and 
 shall then be hurled out of existence almost like 
 an atom of dust." 
 
 I have been in a narrow, contracted, back- 
 yard tenement, in a room fifteen by twelve feet, 
 where lived father and mother and several chil- 
 dren. I have there seen three or four children 
 as bright-faced as I ever saw in my life, even 
 though they had dirty faces. As I saw the curly- 
 headed boys and girls together, I looked over 
 to the other corner of the room, and there the 
 
1 8 MIDXIGIIT IX A GREAT CITY. 
 
 father was slowly passing out of this world, lying 
 in wretchedness and misery. The mother's 
 blood was saturated with the results of a life of 
 sin, and I said, as I turned toward heaven, " O 
 God, if the world does not pity, do not forget 
 these dear children!" 
 
 In that kind of a home, with that kind of 
 blood coursing through their veins, what must 
 be the result? For weeks and months never 
 out of that low and narrow prison, and breath- 
 ing that tainted atmosphere and carrying that 
 foulest blood, what must be the result? If the 
 blood which is coursing through the veins of 
 tens of thousands of the little ones of these cities 
 could be seen, what would be its condition? It 
 would be as infectious as that stream which the 
 sewers carry. Born in innocence, yet born to 
 disease and death. What a heritage! 
 
 A Philadelphia surgeon recently had a curious 
 experience. A lady brought her child to his 
 office and asked him if he could get an orange 
 seed out of the child's throat. He found that 
 the seed had lodged in the windpipe and could 
 not be reached. He thought that it would come 
 out naturally, and, as it would cause no incon- 
 venience, would do no harm to remain a day or 
 
THE MURDER OF THE INNOCENTS. 19 
 
 two. Some time afterward he was called to see 
 the child, who was found to be suffocating. 
 Tracheotomy alone could save the child's life. 
 An incision was made in the windpipe, and the 
 orange seed was found imbedded in a mass of 
 white pulp. When the seed was examined, it 
 was found that the heat of the child's body had 
 caused it to burst and sprout, and an orange tree 
 was growing in the child's throat. So the seed 
 of a drunkard's habit is planted in the throat of 
 the child, and the deadly upas tree sprouts and 
 grows until the victim is strangled to death. 
 The Juke family in seventy-five years had twelve 
 hundred descendants, the large majority of 
 whom were idiots, imbeciles, maniacs, drunk- 
 ards, paupers, prostitutes, and criminals. Fifty- 
 eight out of every hundred of the Juke women 
 were vicious. In seventy-five years the actual 
 cost of this family to the government was 
 $1,250,000. Such is the power of heredity. 
 
 " Life's mystery is this : what parents do 
 Is mirrored in their children ; changeless laws 
 Proclaim that neither intercession, prayer, 
 Nor yet repentance, can atone for deeds 
 By parents done, transgression of the flesh. 
 'Tis sins like these will cheat mankind of half 
 His heritage ; take from his nerves the steel, 
 His bones the marrow, rob his brain of strength." 
 
so MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 I have looked over into the cradle at the 
 little face of a beautiful child, and I turned back 
 with the sighing' of a sad heart and said, " born 
 intoxicated," because I saw the demon drink 
 clutching maternity by the throat and killing it, 
 while the helpless babe was moaning and groan- 
 ing out its short life. 
 
 A murderer who was hanged recently in this 
 country, the day before his execution said, " I 
 am dreadfully sorry for my position and my 
 crime, but am I to tJame? When I was less 
 than four years old my mother poured whisky 
 down my throat, just to see how I would act. 
 Am I to blame? " 
 
 Suppose, my reader, you had been born in 
 New York city, in a back-yard tenement, seven 
 stories from the ground in a single room, where 
 the sun never shines; without any bedding, with 
 only a broken table and stove and stool in the 
 room. Born into such a world as that, where 
 would you be? Heaven only knows. The 
 pathway from that garret hovel leads directly to 
 the jail and the dens of vice. Where would you 
 be? A certain missionary in New York tells us 
 he discovered four families living in a single 
 large room, one in each corner, and they got 
 
THE MURDER OF THE INNOCENTS. 21 
 
 along very well until one family took in a boarder 
 and made trouble. Suppose children were born 
 into such a home as that, what must inevitably 
 be the result? Kicked and snubbed and pushed 
 down and starved, they would be forced out to a 
 life of sin and crime. That little form came into 
 the world with all its tenderness and beauty. 
 How vast the contrast now, with its hands 
 pinched and body withered and starving; the 
 eyes either bulging from their sockets, or falling 
 back into them; a life eaten up with filth and 
 fever. To be born into such a world is almost 
 always death, or disease, or crime. 
 
 In New York city out of a single tenement 
 house of 470 tenants, in four years there were 
 125 arrests. There are 75,000 or 100,000 chil- 
 dren in New York city alone, worse than 
 homeless, and godless and friendless. Out of 
 that 100,000 children come seventy-five per cent, 
 of the criminals of New York city. They are 
 educated in crime, educated in vice, and literally 
 compelled to lead a vicious life. There were in 
 New York city alone in a score of years 25,000 
 little babes abandoned on the streets — nearly 
 1300 a year deserted on the streets — wrapped in 
 rags or newspapers. The great Foundling Hos- 
 
2 2 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 pital was started with a crib in front of its doors, 
 but now it has been taken into the hall, because 
 it was always filled on the outside. Maternity — 
 that most sacred thing in all the human family — 
 maternity is smothered by the tenement-house 
 life and by poverty. 
 
 The infinitely most fiendish method of child- 
 murder is the pretense of adoption, which is the 
 taking of children and literally starving them to 
 death for a small amount of cold cash. It is 
 called the farming process. And the diabolical 
 business is progressing just the same as if it were 
 within the borders of hell itself. Insurance 
 upon the lives of little children has been com- 
 pelled to receive a check from the insurance 
 companies themselves. Was there ever such a 
 statement made to tell us of the barbarism of 
 human society as that? 
 
 This " murder of the innocents " is making 
 still further progress by virtue of early toil. 
 Hundreds and thousands are in the homes, fac- 
 tories, and sweat shops, some of them as young 
 as four years of age, sewing buttons on garments 
 for a small pittance, to help save the rest of the 
 family from starvation. These little innocents, 
 with their worn, haggard, and old faces, that 
 
THE MURDER OF THE INNOCENTS. 23 
 
 ought to be beaming with smiles because privi- 
 leged to play, are bound down to toil from morn- 
 ing until night — veritable white slaves. Hun- 
 dreds and thousands of little fingers work over 
 tobacco leaves; stripping tobacco and making it 
 ready for gentlemen's lips. They do this in the 
 very center of the dirtiest and filthiest places on 
 earth; tobacco on the floor, tobacco everywhere, 
 gathering into itself the germs of disease and 
 filth which make it anything but sweet and any- 
 thing but healthful. The very disease that may 
 take you out of this world may be the direct 
 result of the tenement-house life and the unjust 
 burdens of childhood. The slavery has not all 
 been banished from American soil while chil- 
 dren are under the lash. 
 
 A girl of less than fifteen years and very small 
 for her age appeared before the authorities, just 
 recently, and asked them to please take care of 
 her brother Willie, ten years of age. " Why, 
 what is the matter with him?" "Mother is 
 dead, and I have ten brothers and sisters, and 
 they are all younger than I am. Father goes 
 away before daylight in the morning and gets 
 back very late at night. I have to take care of 
 the children. I am getting along very well with 
 
24 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 all the children except Willie; he is such a 
 bother." Poor little housewife; poor little crea- 
 ture! Into the streets of a dreary world a little 
 girl comes out of a home where father is in bed 
 sick, and mother is sick, and eight children to 
 be supported, and one of these children earning 
 two dollars a week. She begs — she is forced to 
 beg; she is arrested for begging. The walls of 
 the courtroom echo with her sobs; the cold 
 world rolls on like an iceberg. Oh, how those 
 suffering children are borne down by the fearful 
 burden of early toil until they are carried out of 
 a single-room tenement in a box, and then 
 carried out into the Potter's Field! Many of 
 these poor parents have the tenderest feeling 
 toward those w T ho are their flesh and bone; 
 they love them, and it is the saddest part of life, 
 and makes life unbearable, when the children 
 suffer and cry, the response from the parents is 
 always, i( Xot for myself, but for the clear little 
 ones." 
 
 The hundreds of toiling newsboys are driven 
 out and kicked about on the streets of the city. 
 They are pushed out of these tenement homes to 
 shift for themselves, when they ought to be sleep- 
 ing in quiet and respectable homes in a bed, 
 
THE MURDER OF THE INNOCENTS. 25 
 
 where they could get proper rest, and in the 
 morning rise refreshed for school and receive 
 their education. Instead of this they are sleep- 
 ing in wagons, sleeping in cellars, and sleeping 
 anywhere they may, in a poorer place than a 
 large part of the animal world; and sleeping in 
 these ragged forms are some of the greatest pos- 
 sibilities of humankind. I stood at the end of 
 the Bridge in New York city some time ago 
 and wanted a New York Times A little fellow 
 came up to me and said, " Can I sell you a paper, 
 sir?" His feet were bare and he scarcely had 
 enough upon him for cover, and nothing to keep 
 the cold out. He said he did not have the 
 Times, but he would get it for me. I gave him 
 a quarter of a dollar. A friend said, " You will 
 never see that quarter again." I said, " I will 
 see that again. That little fellow has an honest 
 stamp in his face; I am going to wait until he 
 comes. He will surely be back." I had hardly 
 finished the sentence when he came rushing up 
 with the paper and handed me all my change out 
 of a cleaner hand than many a one in Wall 
 Street or on the Stock Exchange. 
 
 The day before Christmas I stood on the prin- 
 cipal street of Brooklyn, where people were 
 
2 6 
 
 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 pouring by, possessed of all that this world 
 could give. In the midst of all this throng I 
 saw one of these outcast boys, thinly clad and 
 shivering in the cold. I saw him go up to a 
 barrel and pull out the chief bone of somebody's 
 gobbler, and lick it with more relish than a hun- 
 gry dog ever ate a bone. I said, " Heaven 
 have mercy on the boy who has taken the last 
 remnants of that which has given dyspepsia to a 
 whole family, and thus gets his Christmas dinner 
 from the garbage barrel." And then I saw, com- 
 ing up the same street, female butterflies with 
 dogs fastened to a chain, and male grasshoppers 
 with dogs fastened to a cane, absolutely regard- 
 less of the great needs that existed right at their 
 very sides, when someone made in the image 
 and likeness of the same God was taking his 
 food from the refuse of a selfish world. 
 
 These burdened, down-trodden children of 
 heredity, environment, and toil are also turned 
 from the fountains of success by virtue of neg- 
 lect — neglected in the alleys, neglected in the 
 streets, neglected everywhere. When one of 
 the newsboys at the Brooklyn Bridge entrance 
 tumbled down in a fit, a policeman picked him 
 up and carried him to the waiting room and tele- 
 
THE MURDER OF THE INNOCENTS. 27 
 
 phoned for an ambulance. Before the ambu- 
 lance came he was out again at his toil. 
 Someone asked a woman, who was selling 
 papers, who that little fellow was. She said, " It 
 was little Maher." " And does no one care for 
 him?" said he. "Nobody cares for him, sir, 
 nobody but God; and he is too busy with other 
 people to pay much attention to him." This is 
 just the situation of hundreds and thousands 
 entirely neglected by the world; the only atten- 
 tion paid them is that which comes from heaven. 
 
 The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty 
 to Children in New York city has taken up 
 already in its history 150,000 of these cases, 
 and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty 
 to Children in Brooklyn has in the last six- 
 teen years taken 16,000 of these cases out of 
 the streets. I have seen in that society's 
 office a long line of implements used by 
 drunken parents, by brutal parents, by inhuman 
 parents, by guardians, and by people who have 
 no relation to the children at all, to destroy 
 child-life. I have seen the club and the ax and 
 the kettles and the stones and all sorts of bar- 
 barous means, as inhuman and as brutal as any- 
 thing that has ever been used in Central Africa. 
 
28 
 
 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 I have seen records of where they have beaten 
 the children, crippled their little forms for life, — 
 and in some instances have taken their lives, — 
 and much of such treatment remains unhindered 
 in the center of our civilization. In this city of 
 Brooklyn there is not one single room, ten feet 
 square, where a boy under twelve years of age 
 found in the streets can be placed, except in 
 Raymond Street jail. They are there now for 
 no crime, mingling with criminals, being edu- 
 cated to become chief criminals themselves. 
 Every outcast boy picked up in the streets is 
 placed in jail. We need to rise up with all the 
 power that God has given us to demand better 
 provisions and demand more of the spirit of the 
 sacrificial Gospel of the Son of God to take 
 possession of the world, and this " murder of 
 the innocents " be made to cease. " Am I my 
 brother's keeper?" Yes! His blood is crying 
 out from the ground against me. I am his 
 keeper. 
 
 Thomas Hovenden, the great American artist, 
 while standing at a railway station, saw an 
 engine dashing into the station. He saw, just in 
 front of the iron horse, some mother's darling 
 little child, and instantly, without a moment's 
 
THE MURDER OF THE INNOCENTS. 29 
 
 hesitation, he dropped his satchel and sprang in 
 front of the engine. He snatched the little dar- 
 ling in his arms, only to be crushed and ground 
 beneath the wheels of the conscienceless mon- 
 ster. Thomas Hovenden never made a more 
 wonderful picture in his life. His paintings 
 were seen at the World's Fair. This one will be 
 admired in heaven — a picture worthy to hang 
 in the palace of God : magnificent heroism, God- 
 like self-abandon, to save a child! The old iron 
 horse of selfishness comes down the tracks of 
 our civilization, and behind it roll the cars of 
 carelessness and oppression and ignorance and 
 inhumanity at a terrific rate of speed. Children 
 by the thousand are on the track. God give us 
 heroism to do our best for their rescue and their 
 salvation! One of the first things the Christ 
 would do, if He came down to these cities now, 
 would be to take the poorest children from the 
 tenements in His arms and bless them, and to 
 our civilization He would say, " Forbid them 
 not, forbid them not ; suffer the children to come 
 unto Me." 
 
 A father's little child came to his side one 
 morning and she said, " Papa, I want to tell God 
 something, but my little voice cannot reach as 
 
30 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 far as the heavens. You have a big man's voice, 
 and I want you to talk with Him; He will be 
 sure to hear you; He will hear a man." And 
 the father took the little loved one in his arms 
 and said, " If God were in the heavens and all 
 the angels were round about the throne, and they 
 were making the sweetest music with their harps 
 and their voices that heaven ever heard, God 
 would say, ' Stop the music, stop the music, 
 stop it now; because there is a wee little girl 
 away down on the earth who wants to whisper 
 something in my ear.' " Almighty God would 
 do that for every waif on the street or child 
 in the slums. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE CLOUDS ABOVE RICH HOMES. 
 
 In a lone room of a rear tenement, in the gar- 
 ret or in the cellar, live hundreds and thousands 
 of families in a single city of this country in per- 
 petual nightmare over the fear of not being able 
 to pay the exorbitant rents for their cattle pens. 
 They live in constant dread of Shylock's knife, 
 while William Waldorf Astor would have to pay 
 $178,000 a year had the income tax become a 
 law; and John D. Rockefeller $152,000; and 
 Russell Sage, $90,000; and Jay Gould's estate, 
 $80,000; and Cornelius Vanderbilt, $80,000; 
 and William H. Vanderbilt, $75,000; and Henry 
 W. Flagler, $60,000; and William Rockefeller, 
 $60,000; and John Jacob Astor, $50,000; and 
 Moses Taylor, $50,000; and Hetty Green, 
 $30,000. May Heaven pity their extreme pov- 
 erty, and Heaven be praised for the decision of 
 the courts in their favor! When there are hun- 
 
 31 
 
3 2 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 dreds of thousands in these twin cities on the 
 verge of that fearful precipice of starvation, there 
 are just a few of their fellow men who hold in 
 their grasp millions and millions of dollars of an- 
 nual income. The rich are growing richer and 
 the poor are growing poorer, and in that solemn 
 fact is one of the greatest perils to the American 
 people. Some day there will be a tremendous 
 uprising, and justice will lead on this poverty- 
 stricken mob to victory. There seems to be 
 something radically wrong with a civilization 
 which permits in a single city such astounding 
 extremes in society. 
 
 If riches are gotten honestly and used un- 
 selfishly, the very dew of heaven falls upon them. 
 But if they come from the mint of dishonesty 
 and oppression and are held selfishly, they have 
 passed through the fires of hell, and their blood- 
 red heat is burning all the sweetness out of 
 their owner's life as well as that of countless 
 others. 
 
 In the clouds above the homes of the rich are 
 the fires of discontent and dissatisfaction. I 
 have seen those tongues rise up along the lace 
 curtains and draperies and lick them as a hungry 
 wolf would lick a drop of blood. I have seen 
 
THE CLOUDS ABOVE RICH HOMES. 
 
 33 
 
 those flames creep across the axminster and 
 velvet, scorching them and taking off the last 
 remnant of beauty from the palace floor. I have 
 seen those fires of discontent and dissatisfaction 
 burn with a greater blaze in the mansion than I 
 ever saw them in the hovel. I was in the home 
 of a rich woman recently, who said to me, " Oh, 
 life is getting to be absolutely unbearable ! " 
 With everything that heart could wish, in a pal- 
 ace, what could be absolutely unbearable? She 
 said, " Life is a torment from night until morn- 
 ing. These servants take all the comfort and 
 peace out of my life, and take all the patience 
 out of my heart. It is a constant rapping at 
 the door, and a constant answering of questions. 
 First the coachman is in trouble, then the par- 
 lor-maid is in trouble, then the cook is in trouble, 
 then the upstairs girl is in trouble, and then they 
 are all in trouble, each one quarreling with the 
 other; and so it goes from the time I get up in 
 the morning until I retire at night, which makes 
 life far from pleasant here. Oh, those miserable 
 servants ! " What a comfort for the woman who 
 sweeps her own small house and washes her own 
 dishes and her own children! 
 
 I rode up one of the richest streets in the 
 
34 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 world with one of the old residents, and it 
 was a lesson most impressive. He was ac- 
 quainted with almost every residence on either 
 side of that street, and he described the house and 
 the members of the family, and the condition 
 within many of those four walls. It was startling 
 and astonishing to hear of a skeleton, not only in 
 every closet but in every room of every house 
 along that entire street where riches were 
 counted by the millions. In this house was the 
 breaking up of family relations, and a divorce 
 had taken place; and in this house death had 
 taken one member after another; and in this 
 house dyspepsia had done its work; and in that 
 house other diseases had done their work. Here 
 lived an old paralytic, a man of rich possessions. 
 Where could he enjoy his wealth — now upon a 
 bed, an invalid? The catalogue was something 
 beyond description. There was scarcely an ex- 
 ception, along the entire street, to that same sad 
 story of dissatisfaction with life and discontent 
 here upon earth. Content and rest are never 
 carried in the largest purse in the world. Dis- 
 satisfaction and discontent are burning with 
 fearful heat in many a palace. 
 
 I care not how elegantly the house may be 
 
THE CLOUDS ABOVE RICH HOMES. 35 
 
 furnished, nor how artistically it may be con- 
 structed, nor how rich may be all the draperies 
 and the chairs and the rugs, nor how costly may 
 be the garments in the wardrobe; dissatisfac- 
 tion and discontent reign supreme in many of 
 the richest homes of this land. 
 
 The railroad train moved at a rapid rate of 
 speed, and I looked out of the window and ad- 
 mired the beauty of the country as we passed 
 through. The waters of the river rolled on to- 
 ward the sea. The hills rolled on toward the 
 horizon. The trees were decked with the white 
 crystals of the snow. The fields were all covered 
 with those same white robes, which made a 
 scene beyond any power of the artist's brush to 
 paint or an orator's word to describe. I was 
 admiring the beauty that God had seen fit in 
 the winter time to place upon the world for 
 human vision, when suddenly " Castoria " broke 
 in to mar the scenery. " Hood's Sarsaparilla " 
 loomed up in the distance. In the richest home 
 of earth there will be something to come and 
 destroy its beauty. 
 
 When Alexander III. of Russia met the 
 children of Prince Bismarck, history tells us that, 
 as the tears rolled down his cheeks, he said: 
 
3^ MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 " You go back to your beautiful home in Ger- 
 many, and I go back to my prison in Russia." 
 When one of his ministers bade him good-by, 
 Alexander III., with all the wealth of the world 
 in his hands and servants without number be- 
 neath his scepter, said with tears again, " If I 
 could only get out of this palace, this dungeon; 
 I wish I might go down into the country and 
 breathe the air and see what the peasant people 
 see." All that which strikes a man's life can 
 strike in a palace as well as the hovel. When 
 the Czar's wife the other day lost her baby boy 
 by death, her heart was bursting out of its prison 
 bars. And she in her heart-sobs declared that 
 she had, in her prison life, at least the privilege 
 of a peasant woman after ill, when the Czar for- 
 bade her going to the cemetery with her own 
 baby boy. In the carriage she held the little 
 casket. That which strikes the life, and takes 
 out of it satisfaction and beauty, strikes with a 
 harder blow, oftentimes, the richest home on 
 earth than it does the hovel. The thunderbolt of 
 selfishness falls upon the rich homes. I have 
 seen soul-life gradually becoming more and more 
 shriveled, as a pea becomes shriveled in the 
 autumn days in the dryness of its pod, and the 
 
THE CLOUDS ABOVE RICH HOMES. 37 
 
 miserly expression taking possession of every 
 feature and move of the human form; and that 
 is one of the saddest statements that can be made 
 about the rich home. It is a veritable con- 
 servatory of selfishness. 
 
 I told an extremely rich man of two women, 
 both having consumption and unable to earn 
 their own living, in the third story in a single 
 room, and shivering under the winds of the 
 winter for want of coal ; becoming more pale and 
 emaciated for the want of food — that his blood 
 coursed through their veins, and they were his 
 cousins. I plead that out of his millions he would 
 give them some little relief in these poverty- 
 stricken circumstances. He replied to me that 
 he did not recognize such cousins. He turned 
 around from that reply and gave to a uni- 
 versity. The blind, flattering world says 
 "generosity"; but Heaven says, "Thou in thy 
 lifetime hadst thy good things; not a drop of 
 water now for a parched tongue." If that is 
 what millions do for a man's soul, then it is the 
 greatest curse that ever came into mortal life. 
 
 Robespierre, that bloodthirsty Frenchman, 
 who cut the heads from other men, with 
 apparent delight listened to a lady who plead, 
 
33 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 as hot tears scalded her cheeks, that he would 
 save the life of her husband. He sternly re- 
 fused, and said he must have his blood. As she 
 passed out with a broken heart she happened to 
 touch her foot against a dog which was there, — 
 a member of his own family and one of his own 
 kind, — and as the dog howled he turned around 
 and, pushing her through the door, said, 
 " Woman, have you no humanity? " Robes- 
 pierre was not the only man with just as little 
 sense of what humanity meant as that. It has 
 again and again occurred, in these great cities of 
 ours, that the blood of the dog is more precious 
 than that of humankind. 
 
 What oppression is it when the " coal com- 
 bine " increases the price of coal in order to put 
 up more draperies in rich homes in New York 
 City, and in order to increase their millions by 
 the increase of a few cents a ton for coal, and 
 then gain some more millions by another in- 
 crease, while in the tenement children are shiver- 
 ing, and fathers and mothers are suffering for 
 want of a few pounds of coal; and when, by 
 virtue of their poverty, they are compelled to pay 
 already ten dollars a ton for that which they re- 
 ceive because they buy it by the quart. Out of 
 
THE CLOUDS ABOVE RICH HOMES. 39 
 
 those tenements and hovels has been taken this 
 very hour the last ounce of coal by Wall Street 
 millionaires who ought to be sent to Sing Sing. 
 
 May God's throne bring justice speedily for 
 the bloodthirstiness of men who, with millions 
 and uncounted millions in their possession, are 
 placing the knife at the throat of millions of their 
 fellow-men. Basest hell-born injustice! Bar- 
 barism deeper-dyed than ever was found on 
 Cannibal Islands! 
 
 Out of the black clouds above rich homes 
 comes the storm of unhappiness and insecurity 
 of connubial relations. There you find one of 
 the chief evils in our present day at the very 
 height of its power. In a single paper, on a 
 single page, we can read in one of the richest 
 families of this country two divorce cases, black 
 with scandal which the millions cannot cover up. 
 That which is the very foundation-stone of our 
 security, that upon which the whole super- 
 structure of our modern society must rest for 
 its safety, is crumbling in the highest circles of 
 society. There has been a proposition made by 
 some of these women, and an effort made to 
 have it established by law, that when a marriage 
 ceremony is performed, instead of " until death 
 
40 MIDXIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 do us part," it shall read, " until love and self- 
 respect disappear." That is the ideal of some 
 of the " richest " in this world. 
 
 I walked from the lowest place on the Bowery 
 on the same night up to one of the palace bar- 
 rooms of this world. I went from one extreme 
 to the other, in order to see the evil at both ends 
 of the line. In that barroom there gathered at 
 that midnight hour men dressed the finest, 
 with largest diamonds, coming from the richest 
 homes of New York City, drinking and carous- 
 ing together. I said, " As black is the iniquity 
 as that in the lowest downtown dive; and just as 
 far-reaching in its fearful results." The wives 
 were somewhere else, or at home, mourning 
 over a life in which they had been foolish enough 
 to imprison themselves, and mourning the want 
 of love and respect which all the wealth in their 
 possession could not furnish them; waiting in 
 sorrow for relief of easy divorce. The news 
 from the Old World tells of some American 
 heiress who has married a prince, and that de- 
 bauchee, who has been too bad and dissipated 
 to enter a respectable home, has taken her across 
 the water and determined to himself that he 
 would take out of her all of her American in- 
 
THE CLOUDS ABOVE RICH HOMES. 4* 
 
 dependence; and she has found herself over there 
 in misery and anxious to get rid of her prince. 
 That wretchedness prevails from the time that 
 the bridal veil is worn in these cities of ours 
 until the divorce law does its work. 
 
 I have been in the clubrooms of the city, and 
 I said as I entered, " These are like the palace 
 of Circe, built of beautiful marble, snow-white 
 with its purity and wonderful, unexplained 
 mystery of beauty, standing in the world, attract- 
 ing humankind"; in those very centers of at- 
 traction stood the finest works of art; there were 
 the most expensive pieces of literary work; there 
 were the thousand-candled chandeliers; there 
 was the richest plate; and the flowers were 
 blossoming and giving their fragrance lavishly; 
 there were lovely forms moving through the 
 corridors and across the parlors; there was won- 
 derful and almost entrancing music heard from 
 the mystic recess where orchestras and sing- 
 ers were gathered ; and all of a sudden the queen 
 of the palace, Circe, came out and passed 
 through the halls and through the reception 
 rooms and the parlors, and swung her wand, 
 and men fell down like swine on the floor and 
 wallowed in their sties. Like the palace of Circe 
 
4 2 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 are many of the clubrooms in these cities of 
 ours — men are simply brought from that which 
 is high and noble to the very position of the 
 animal world, to the destruction of all sacred- 
 ness and sweetness in life and home. 
 
 Said one woman to another, in her agonies, 
 " Here it is getting near midnight, and I have 
 been waiting two hours for my husband." 
 " That is nothing," said the other, " I have been 
 waiting twenty-five years for a husband." But 
 she might wait one hundred and twenty-five 
 years or an eternity for a husband rather than 
 have the one which the other woman possessed. 
 There can be no happiness or home life where 
 the marriage relation is held with so little sacred- 
 ness as it is in the larger part of the rich homes 
 of the city. For some young women every year 
 is a leap year, and they leap too quickly. They 
 leap in the dark, they leap for the prize of wealth, 
 but in the endeavor to reach it they fall down 
 over the precipice and down the mountain side, 
 striking in the chasm, bleeding and mangled 
 and broken-hearted. Many a young woman in 
 the richest homes of these cities has been guilty 
 of that crime of suicide by thrusting the knife of 
 false love into her heart. 
 
THE CLOUDS ABOVE RICH HOMES. 43 
 
 The ruination of children composes a part of 
 the blackening of these clouds. How many ele- 
 ments are there to make children weaker morally, 
 mentally, and physically? They stand in the 
 greatest danger of almost any class of children 
 on the face of the earth. They are weakened 
 by those very forces which move through the 
 homes of the rich. How does luxury affect the 
 man or woman's soul? How does luxury 
 affect the body? How does luxury affect the 
 mind? Did you ever know the life which had 
 been spent in eating too luxuriously, and eating 
 too much, and eating too often, to amount to 
 anything in this world? Did you ever know 
 success to follow the life which had been 
 tied with ribbons into a mummy-like form, and 
 donned the cast-off clothing of the ostrich and 
 peacock, or of other vain birds of the world, 
 and been pressed out of shape by the jaws of 
 a whalebone, or of anything else that is in the 
 world of fashion? I say, " Heaven pity the boy 
 or the girl who lives in the home of fashion, the 
 home of luxury, and the home of idleness, be- 
 cause that is the home of ruin." 
 
 They are growing up into manhood and 
 womanhood with weakened, emaciated, round- 
 
44 
 
 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 shouldered, consumptive, and dyspeptic bodies; 
 with brains which have never been allowed to en- 
 large or increase in power, and souls withered 
 and shriveled and blasted. In the time of storm 
 our sympathy reaches out to those on the deep 
 waters and the high seas, but there has been a 
 greater storm rolling over New York city and 
 Brooklyn than ever tossed the old Atlantic. 
 More men and women are wrecked in these 
 cities than on the seas. All the music is 
 gone when the singer is wrecked on the high 
 C's, but I would rather have the sweet voice 
 wrecked forever than to have the music of life 
 gone when an immortal soul, and that body made 
 in the image and likeness of God, and that mind 
 which has the power to reach out into the very 
 eternities itself, are wrecked on the high seas 
 of society. 
 
 A father who lives in one of the richest homes 
 I have ever entered and in which I enjoyed to 
 be, because of his humble Christian character, 
 and of his intellectual and conversational powers, 
 said in my presence and with tears in his eyes, 
 as he talked to me concerning his boy grown up 
 into manhood (his highest ambition to carry 
 a cord-wood stick for a cane, and a single eye- 
 
THE CLOUDS ABOVE RICH HOMES. 45 
 
 glass for spectacles, wearing the best clothes 
 that he could put on his back, his brain soften- 
 ing and his heart hardening), " I saw the time 
 when I had less, when I lived in two rooms and 
 my wife did her own work. Then I had the 
 highest happiness of my life. In that hour I 
 might have saved my boy, but he is beyond my 
 reach now." 
 
 Into my home came a young man dressed in 
 the best the tailor could furnish. He sobbed like 
 a child as he told me about his home and his par- 
 ents, and said that they had driven him out of 
 doors and told him never to enter again. With- 
 out money he had been walking the streets, 
 even begging. He would never go back in his 
 pride; he said he would never go back, for they 
 told him never to enter again. Because of his 
 dissipation, the father had literally pushed the 
 boy over the doorsill, and told him to get out into 
 the cold world and into the depths of the earth, 
 and then to hell itself. He said that on their 
 sideboards and on their tables wines, the best, 
 could always be had. The father and mother 
 of the family never went to church. They never 
 had a Bible in the house. Everything was there 
 of the best to drink and eat. " Living in that 
 
46 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 stale of luxury has brought me to this time in my 
 life without a trade and without the power to 
 earn a cent — a drunken, dissipated wretch, ask- 
 ing you for something to eat." We knelt down 
 there and prayed, while my heart ached for that 
 poor boy, clothed in the best of garments and 
 sobbing over his sin and envying the poorest 
 lad his home-life. 
 
 When Cyrus W 7 . Field died he did not talk 
 about the Atlantic cable or the wonderful 
 achievements of his life, but he said, " My life is 
 wrecked, my home is destroyed, my fortune is 
 gone. How bad I was; how bad I was to my 
 son! I thought I was kind to him, but I 
 ruined him. If I had only taught my boys and 
 compelled them to earn their own living, I would 
 have saved them, and saved myself and my 
 home." Out of a life noble, and a life rich like 
 that came the sad and pathetic cry/' Oh, if I had 
 only taught Edward differently; if I only had! " 
 In that kind of world, in that sort of atmosphere, 
 boys and girls grow to young manhood and 
 womanhood, with their eyes dead to human 
 suffering, and their ears dead to the cry of dis- 
 tress, and their fingers dead to the touch of pity, 
 and their feet dead to the paths of usefulness, 
 
THE CLOUDS ABOVE RICH HOMES. 47 
 
 and their brain dead to thoughts uplifting, and 
 their heart dead to the sound of anguish — 
 over their entire life is thrown a blanket which 
 smothers out the last spark of divinity. 
 
 The winds of idolatry sweep from the lower 
 world through the clouds above the homes of 
 the rich. It is the old story the rich young man 
 gave the world when he came to Christ with his 
 great possessions and wanted to inherit eternal 
 life; and Jesus said, " You must give up your 
 selfishness, you must give up your inhumanity, 
 and you must give up your riches if you are to 
 enter the Kingdom of God." But the poor fellow 
 turned away sorrowful, for he wanted to keep his 
 clothes, and keep that farm, and those riches of 
 his. " How hardly shall they that have riches 
 enter into the Kingdom of God." Riches do not 
 keep a man out of the Kingdom of God. You 
 say, " Money is the root of all evil." That is 
 not in the Bible. " The love of money is the 
 root of all evil." In that man's life who has had 
 his whole education directed toward the getting 
 of riches there has been going on also an educa- 
 tion toward selfishness and covetousness and 
 miserliness, and it is that trust in his riches in- 
 stead of trusting in God which destroys a man's 
 
4§ MIDNIGHT IN A GREA T CITY. 
 
 soul-life and makes him forgetful of God. He 
 bows down to 
 
 " That false god of gold, gold, gold ; 
 Bright, yellow, hard, and cold, 
 Molten, graven, hammered, rolled ; 
 Light to get and heavy to hold ; 
 Spurned by the young, and hugged by the old 
 To the very verge of the graveyard mold ; 
 The price of many a crime untold, 
 Gold, gold, gold, gold." 
 
 Before that god he falls down and gives his 
 worship. That is the penalty man pays for 
 trusting in this world's goods. You may have 
 the most beautiful home on earth, built of 
 marble the finest the quarries of earth can give, 
 and before which the sculptor, the best and 
 most skillful, has stood, and his hammer and 
 chisel have done their best work, and he has 
 said proudly, " It is finished." The doorway 
 stands with all of its arched glory as the most 
 hospitable welcome ever given to mortals. In 
 the corridors you find the richest draperies and 
 most expensive of artists' pictures. In the recep- 
 tion room and the parlors and the library lie the 
 plush, axminster, and velvet. Rare embroideries 
 hang from the walls and rest upon the floor 
 
THE CLOUDS ABOVE RICH HOMES. 49 
 
 under the brilliancy of those hundred-candled 
 chandeliers. On the walls hang the latest and 
 most expensive works of art. In the library are 
 the books in which the mind could revel. In 
 that kind of home, in that center of luxury, 
 where the dining table is breaking beneath the 
 weight of the best that the trees and grounds of 
 the world can give, the very best that the forests 
 and streams could furnish, in that palace of 
 beauty and glory, I declare with the strongest 
 emphasis that important fact for the knowledge 
 of modern society — this is not home. These are 
 not the lines in the structure of that beautiful 
 word H-O-M-E. Wealth does not make it; 
 love and character make it. They build it on 
 earth and they build it in heaven. 
 
 There is a more beautiful mansion than any 
 that ever stood on the ground of earth — a man- 
 sion to whose door-sill the lowest denizen of the 
 tenement house can come and walk in and say, 
 " This is mine, this is mine." For Jesus the son 
 of God enters the tenements and stands be- 
 fore the poverty-stricken ones without coal 
 or food or raiment, and in His infinite sym- 
 pathy, and Godlike pity and unbounded love, 
 says, " Child, have patience. I go to pre- 
 
5° MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 pare a place for you, and if I go and prepare 
 a place for you, I will come again and re- 
 ceive you unto myself." As the gates of pearl 
 stand ajar, I look through into the city and I 
 see one walking up the pavements of gold, with 
 angels on either side, with friends behind and 
 friends before. I see him going on toward one 
 of the most beautiful mansions in Heaven and 
 entering that palace while the angels tell him 
 that this is the one that Christ gave him, and I 
 look at him carefully and I say, " Angel, angel, 
 who is it? Who is that? Is he a prince of the 
 world? " The angels say, " No, no; look again, 
 you know him, you saw him," and I say, " Is it 
 possible? Is it possible? Where are the rags; 
 where is the hunger ? Is it possible that I see 
 in him that poor man in the seventh story of a 
 back-yard New York tenement, in a single room, 
 dying with consumption ? " " Yes," the angel 
 guards say, " Yes, it is he, and you heard him say 
 just before he left the world, ' I am going to 
 Jesus; I am going home.' Out of the New 
 York tenement and hovel, he is in heaven." 
 Then I stepped back and thought of one of the 
 richest men of his day in New York city, in a 
 
THE CLOUDS ABOVE RICH HOMES- 5 1 
 
 palace in his room on downy pillows and 
 softest mattress, but in greatest agony. One 
 week 'before an eminent minister had entered 
 his office and said to him, " I have seen you 
 so often in church, your wife with you, and I 
 have been anxious for your salvation; with 
 all that this world has given you, you must 
 have Christ if you are going to be saved." He 
 told him of his anxiety and pleaded with him 
 to make his peace with God. The man wheeled 
 around in his chair, looked at him for a moment, 
 and said, " Sir, I am always glad to have you 
 come and see me ; you are welcome to this office, 
 but you need never come and say another word 
 to me about my soul. I have no use for Jesus 
 Christ as a personal saviour; never mention the 
 subject to me again." The next Monday morn- 
 ing before daylight, that same man of God was 
 called by messenger to come to this palace in 
 New York city. He entered the bedroom where 
 the wife and children were gathered around the 
 couch of the dying man. Tears were falling 
 upon the white counterpane and hearts were 
 breaking with sobs. But it was too late, it was 
 too late; the final moments had come; and with 
 
52 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 the last breath that crossed the threshold of the 
 dying millionaire's lips came these words : " Oh, 
 who, who will carry me over the river? " Better 
 the pierced hand of Christ in human hand than 
 all the wealth of the world. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE CENTER OF INIQUITY. 
 
 I have stood in front of the saloon door and 
 read along the lines of the green screen this ter- 
 rific indictment: 
 
 " The saloon cuts down youth in its vigor, 
 manhood in its strength, and age in its weakness. 
 
 " It breaks the father's heart, bereaves the 
 mother, extinguishes affections, erases conjugal 
 love, blots out filial attachments, blasts parental 
 hopes, and brings down mourning age in sor- 
 row to the grave. 
 
 " It produces weakness, not strength; sick- 
 ness, not health; death, not life. 
 
 "It makes wives widows; children, orphans; 
 fathers, fiends — and all of them paupers and 
 beggars. 
 
 " It feeds rheumatism, nurses gout, welcomes 
 epidemics, invites cholera, imparts pestilence, 
 and embraces consumption. 
 
 53 
 
54 MWMGUT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 " It covers the land with idleness, misery, and 
 crime. 
 
 " It fills your jails, supplies your almshouses, 
 and demands your asylums. 
 
 " It engenders controversies, fosters quarrels, 
 and cherishes riots. 
 
 " It crowds your penitentiaries and furnishes 
 victims to your scaffolds. 
 
 " It is the life-blood of the gambler, the ele- 
 ment of the burglar, the inspiration of the high- 
 wayman, and the support of the midnight 
 incendiary. 
 
 " It countenances the liar, respects the thief, 
 esteems the blasphemer. 
 
 " It violates obligations, reverences fraud, 
 honors infamy. 
 
 " It defames benevolence; hates, scorns virtue, 
 and slanders innocence. 
 
 " It incites the father to butcher his helpless 
 offspring, helps the husband to massacre his 
 wife, and the child to grind the parricidal ax. 
 
 " It burns up men, consumes women, detests 
 life, curses God, and despises heaven. 
 
 " It suborns witnesses, nurses perjury, defiles 
 the jury box, and stains the judicial ermine. 
 
 " It degrades the citizen, debases the legis- 
 
THE CENTER OF INIQUITY. 
 
 55 
 
 lature, dishonors the statesman, and disarms the 
 patriot. 
 
 " It brings shame, not honor; terror, not 
 safety; despair, not hope; misery, not happi- 
 ness, and with the malevolence of a fiend it 
 calmly surveys its frightful desolation, and un- 
 satisfied with its havoc, it kills peace, ruins 
 morals, blights confidence, slays reputation, and 
 wipes out national honor; then curses the world, 
 and laughs at its ruin. 
 
 " It does all that and more — it murders the 
 soul. 
 
 " It is the sum of all villainies, the father of 
 all crimes, the mother of all abominations, the 
 devil's best friend, and God's worst enemy." 
 
 I have entered the lowest saloons in the city, 
 and heard the clanking of chains, and seen the 
 orgies of demons, and witnessed the sufferings 
 of the damned — and have said that awful indict- 
 ment is true, every word of it is fact and can 
 never be contradicted. The chief curse of our 
 modern social world is the saloon. It is the 
 strongest force sent out for the destruction of 
 this planet. It is the very hot-bed in these great 
 cities where grow all other sin and ruin. It 
 swings open more doors to perdition than any 
 
56 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 other demon hand. It is the prince of de- 
 stroyers in home and government and body and 
 soul. It is the supreme opposition to the prog- 
 ress of the Kingdom of God. It stands at 
 nearly every corner to disgrace civilization, to 
 mock Christianity, and to remind us that it shall 
 be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in 
 the judgment day than for that city. Here is 
 the home of anarchy, and above it floats the* 
 American flag. I have seen its crimson bars 
 running parallel to that other crimson bar and 
 made to be the companion of its blood. That 
 most beautiful emblem ever unfurled to the 
 breezes in any part of the world is dragged 
 through the filth and crime and lawlessness of 
 ten thousand times a thousand saloons. Oh, 
 for more patriotic souls like an Ellsworth to love 
 it as his life, or a Barbara Frietchie to shout, 
 
 " Shoot if you must this old gray head, 
 But spare your country's flag." 
 
 We rejoice in our liberty, but are forgetting 
 the tremendous price we paid for liberty, and the 
 definition of liberty. Liberty too often means 
 license. The greatest peril to our liberty is law- 
 lessness. The hand that will tear your glorious 
 
THE CENTER OF INIQUITY. 57 
 
 banner with seam and gash is the hand of 
 anarchy, and the hand of anarchy is the saloon. 
 The very chief of law-breakers in the great cities 
 are the saloon keepers and those associated with 
 them. They are dragging the only king in this 
 country from his throne and hurling him in the 
 mud and filth of earth. We see law trampled 
 upon and stand by without making a single pro- 
 test, while out of the throat of anarchy comes 
 the cry of liberty. I would rather have King 
 George pour his taxation tea down my throat 
 the rest of my natural life than to have that 
 which the saloon calls liberty. 
 
 On the Sabbath day, out of one of the dens 
 established on this earth by his Satanic Majesty 
 to carry on his most nefarious business, a 
 drunken man stumbles out across the sidewalk 
 and pushes me into the gutter. Is that liberty? 
 He did it, and the only possible thing for me to 
 do was to strike the drunkard, and I might 
 rather strike a stone. Is that liberty? A 
 drunkard was going through the streets of Balti- 
 more, swinging his hands right and left until one 
 of them came in contact with another man's 
 nose. Instantly the man clenched his fist and 
 tumbled the fellow over into the gutter. He 
 
5$ MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 picked himself up and rubbed that place where 
 he had been hit, and said, " I would like to 
 know if this isn't a land of liberty." " Yes," 
 said the other man, " but your liberty ends where 
 my nose begins." 
 
 If the German does not like America, let him 
 go back to Germany. If the Irishman does not 
 like America, let him go back to Ireland, and I 
 will say good-by with great pleasure, and if any 
 other man on the face of the earth does not like 
 this country, and is not satisfied without his Sab- 
 bath desecration and his beer gardens or open 
 saloons, let him stay where he came from, and 
 stay there forever until he gets where they have 
 seven days of his Sunday. I went into the home 
 of a beautiful Christian girl, a member of my 
 church. In that little hovel the paper had been 
 torn from the walls by the hand of a drunken 
 father, and an old lounge stood with its covering 
 nearly torn from its frame, and the plaster had 
 been knocked out of the wall, and a stove was 
 there with only two or three legs under it. I 
 often had wondered why it was that she did not 
 want me to come and see her. At last I went 
 and found her at home. As I came in the door, 
 out of a little back room she rushed into my 
 
THE CENTER OF INIQUITY. 59 
 
 presence for me to rescue her. Her pretty face 
 was bruised, and blood was streaming down her 
 cheeks. The drunken father rushed in, and to 
 save my own life and hers we had to escape. Is 
 that liberty? It is the crudest slavery that ever 
 bound the wrists of human form. Never did the 
 black man of the South know the bitter slavery 
 of that poor white girl of the North. 
 
 A mother had a son who was her only support 
 in her old days. He was accustomed to spend 
 his last dollar for whisky, and this made her life 
 so miserable and unbearable that at last she 
 made up her mind to commit him as an habitual 
 drunkard. When the day came and she was 
 summoned to swear to the offense, it was too 
 much for the broken heart to stand. As she was 
 about to say what they wanted her to say, she 
 fell prostrate to the floor with the cry, " It is 
 breaking my heart." Is that liberty? If that is 
 liberty, then give me slavery. Let the shackles 
 rattle about my hands and about my feet; let 
 the snap of the lash be heard above my head; let 
 me live in the home of the black man in the 
 sunny South before your fathers and brothers 
 and loved ones shed their blood for his liberty, 
 if that is liberty. That is a million miles away 
 
60 MIDNIGHT IN A GREA T CITY. 
 
 from liberty. If that is liberty, why in Heaven's 
 name did they drag William Lloyd Garrison 
 through the streets of Boston? If that is liberty, 
 why are there so many countless and unknown 
 graves in the Southland now? If that is liberty, 
 why did Ulysses S. Grant lead the armies of the 
 North through the pathway of struggle and 
 slaughter to triumph? If that is liberty, why 
 did Abraham Lincoln with trembling hand and 
 with his own blood write the Emancipation 
 Proclamation? It is a shame for the flag of 
 liberty to rise above such sin and infamy as that 
 and be disgraced by its slavery. 
 
 I have seen in the saloons the poison sold to 
 children. There is a law against that, but law 
 kept just like every other law that rests above 
 the saloon keeper's head. A law which should 
 be most sacred is broken in hundreds and thou- 
 sands of cases, every day, in these cities. A 
 beautiful curly-headed little fellow of five sum- 
 mers attracted my attention going into a saloon, 
 and I waited for him to come out, when I saw 
 that he had a pail filled with the infernal stuff, 
 coming out of the door. I stepped back and 
 put my hand on his head, and I could not help 
 raising my eyes heavenward and saying, 
 
THE CENTER OF INIQUITY. 
 
 61 
 
 " Almighty God, bring justice on earth and save 
 the boy." A saloon is the home of the an- 
 archist, for all anarchists are graduates from the 
 saloon. We ought to hang the real anarchist 
 who has the red light on the corner, and let the 
 other fellow live, because in that nursery is born 
 all your anarchy and lawlessness. I saw in the 
 lowest saloon on the Bowery the newspaper 
 account of that institution breaking the law, 
 framed in an oak frame and hanging on the wall 
 because of pride in anarchy. A gentleman went 
 out at one o'clock at night in a certain part of 
 New York city and found a little fellow five 
 years of age, almost too small to carry the pail 
 he had, going into a saloon for a pail of beer. 
 He said, " I went in and forbade the bartender 
 to sell him that stuff." The bartender looked 
 at him with much astonishment, as though he 
 had come in there to throw everything into the 
 street. The bartender ordered him to get out 
 until he had sold the stuff. That little fellow 
 had to carry it home to his drunken parents. 
 All day long a boy was carrying the poison from 
 one saloon in the city to a company of work- 
 men, until at night they missed him. It was 
 Saturday night; Sunday night, they went almost 
 
62 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 crazy when they sobered up and could not find 
 him. Monday they found him in an old cellar 
 inhabited by rats, and the rats had eaten his little 
 form half up by that time. He died of drunken- 
 ness, because during the entire day he had taken 
 his share from that which he had carried to the 
 men, and then made food for the animal world. 
 
 Recently a reporter of one of the New York 
 newspapers found this same diabolical custom 
 continuing at such a rapid pace that he made up 
 his mind to investigate, and almost the first 
 thing he discerned was a little boy and girl buy- 
 ing that accursed stuff and then carrying it into 
 one of the tenements. He followed them, and 
 they stopped twice on their way and drank 
 nearly half of it. Then he came back to the 
 barroom, and the bartender said, " That is just 
 the way they do it all the time. That mother 
 will swear at me because I didn't give her half 
 measure, when I gave her big measure." He 
 said, " The children do it ; and more than that/'* 
 he said, " one-half of all the proceeds of this con- 
 cern comes through the children buying it, and 
 that is the way the drunkards are made." 
 These children are taken right out of the very 
 circumference of your law and placed right over 
 
THE CENTER OF INIQUITY. 63 
 
 into that area, which is to be not only their 
 temporal but their eternal destruction. In the 
 name of humanity and the name of God, is the 
 clock not striking the hour for the prosecution 
 of those scoundrels and for the salvation of tens 
 of thousands of children? "A saloon can no 
 more be run without using up boys than a flour- 
 ing mill without wheat, or a sawmill without 
 logs. The only question is, " Whose boys? 
 yours or mine? Our boys or our neighbor's?" 
 
 In the saloon I saw the match which was 
 burning up the homes. I have seen in these 
 saloons, in the middle of the night, so many men 
 that they completely packed the place, and 
 admittance for anyone else was impossible. I 
 did not see one with an overcoat upon his back, 
 although it was a cold night, nor did I see one 
 with any sign of respectability about him; but I 
 saw them stand by the bar and spend their last 
 farthing for that which was not only to destroy 
 themselves but to put fire beneath their tene- 
 ment home. They were making beasts of them- 
 selves and doing that which they knew would 
 take the very life out of the body and life out of 
 the soul. In that presence I heard a sound, and 
 I listened, and I remember that sound now. I 
 
64 MIDNIGHT IN A ORE A T CITY. 
 
 listened, to hear the saddest sound that ever falls 
 on mortal ears — I heard the children crying for 
 bread. And then I heard a sound coming from 
 another direction; it came up from the lower 
 world, and it was the very laughter of the 
 demons as they beheld the sight and heard the 
 children cry. Right in the center of the saloons 
 in New York city and in Brooklyn, in the center 
 of the tenement districts, we find the pawn 
 shops numbered by the scores and almost 
 hundreds. How do they thrive? I will tell 
 you. A poor fellow who had spent his last 
 farthing was forced to pawn his overcoat, for 
 which he had paid fifteen dollars, and pawned 
 it for three dollars. After a short time he came 
 to me and begged me to go to the pawn shop 
 that I might be able, with some influence at- 
 tached to his, to redeem the coat, as the winter 
 had become more severe. I went with him to 
 the pawn shop, and almost literally had to fight 
 to secure that garment. I then discovered, by 
 reference to their books, in order to find his coat, 
 that in a single day, across the threshold of that 
 damnable place came no less than seven hun- 
 dred human beings with the last remnants of 
 home carried in there to buy food or to buy 
 
THE CENTER OF INIQUITY. 65 
 
 whisky — seven hundred in a day. And I said, 
 "Whose is that watch?" "That is a father's 
 watch." And I said, "Whose is that shawl?" 
 " A mother's shawl." And I said, " Whose are 
 those shoes?" "A baby's shoes." Someone 
 went into one of these places and found there a 
 man, who walked up to the counter and threw 
 down a little pair of pink slippers and said, 
 " Give me ten cents." With some real heart — 
 you would not suppose it was there — the pawn- 
 broker said, " Where did you get them? " He 
 said, " It's baby's shoes." Then he said, " You 
 had better take them back. Your wife will feel 
 bad." " Yes, wife will feel bad about them, but 
 I want another drink." " Well," said the pawn- 
 broker, "baby will need them; you had better 
 take them back." " No, baby will not need 
 them. Baby died last night, and is home in the 
 house dead now. Baby will not need them, give 
 me ten cents." The pawnbroker took the little 
 slippers and passed out ten cents, and the infer- 
 nal business moved on. He was in partnership 
 with the saloons all about, for the destruction of 
 home and the making of misery. 
 
 I saw in this vestibule of perdition, that sacred 
 element in human life called friendship turned 
 
66 MIDXIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 into a fiendish farce. I saw the free lunches. 
 But it was a strange thing to find the men eat- 
 ing the free lunch, clothed in rags, and the man 
 who owned the institution clothed in broadcloth 
 and wearing his diamonds. That free lunch was 
 the introduction to his drink of the lowest 
 order — that drink cost the saloon keeper less 
 than one-half a cent, and the man paid his five 
 cents for it. He takes hold of that bait and 
 pays his last cent into the saloon keeper's till. 
 These places where in friendship they give away 
 so much are the most handsomely decorated and 
 most beautifully lighted, burning hundreds of 
 electric lights in a small room. In the center of 
 a tenement-house district, where there has been 
 the cry of starvation more than once in recent 
 years, there is a saloon where the floor is literally 
 paved with silver dollars. It is a strange thing 
 that these men come out of there, with their 
 wealth, and come to be your aldermen and 
 officials, and the free lunch is served out of pure 
 friendship and love for humanity. The chief 
 difficulty with the American saloon is because it 
 is a social institution, and because they cater to 
 the social elements of man, and through that 
 pathway of sociability they lead their victims. 
 
THE CENTER OF INIQUITY. 67 
 
 I saw three young men walking along the 
 street, arm in arm. When they came to a cor- 
 ner, one of them said to the young man in the 
 center, " Come in and have a drink." " No, no, 
 I don't want a drink to-night." They said, 
 " Come on; come, have a drink." He said, " No, 
 I don't want any." At last he literally pulled 
 himself away from them and rushed on, getting 
 out of their way, and they damned him for not 
 accepting their friendship. I saw a business 
 man taken out of his place of business by two 
 men dressed in the very highest fashion, one 
 holding on to each one of his arms, undertaking 
 to force him across the street into one of the 
 lowest saloons of the city. I followed, and I 
 heard him say, "No, no!" They said, " Yes, 
 you must;" and they literally compelled him. 
 He said, " I don't drink anything any more." 
 They said, "It don't make any difference; you 
 have got to drink something with us." He 
 thought of the wife and babies at home. With a 
 trembling voice he said, " I have given it up, T 
 don't drink any more." They kept moving him 
 along until at last, literally by force, and by 
 fiendish muscle, they moved him across the 
 threshold behind the doors to drink the tears of 
 
68 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 a suffering wife and babies at home. That 
 satanic principle of treating in the name of friend- 
 ship is a tremendous power for the ruin of men. 
 That young man who asks another to drink with 
 him is his greatest enemy. 
 
 I saw in these places hundreds of instances 
 where manhood was being dragged from its 
 throne and some evidence given, in many a 
 case, of noblest manhood brought lower and 
 lower and lower, until at last there was complete 
 destruction. We have become almost tired of 
 statistics and we have come into a position 
 where we are statistically hardened. Seventy- 
 five per cent, of the paupers are paupers because 
 of the saloons; twenty-five per cent, of the 
 insane people of this country are insane because 
 of the saloons. The drink bill is one thousand 
 million dollars in this country. It costs the 
 American government to-day a hundred million 
 dollars a year to care for these paupers and 
 insane, making a total of eleven hundred million 
 dollars a year expense to this nation, and we are 
 not startled by that statement. If I could 
 furnish a lake in which to hold all the hot, 
 scalding tears produced by the saloons, and then 
 provide a vast area which should contain all the 
 
THE CENTER OF INIQUITY. 69 
 
 wreckage made by the saloons, and then there 
 could sound some sort of music, coming from 
 the diapason of the organ, to give us that volume 
 which should contain the cries and groans of 
 the suffering, and I could march, in the presence 
 of that scene, a line of men which would reach 
 around this entire globe, ruined by the saloon, 
 and I should say that three hundred of those 
 men, every twenty-four hours of our history, 
 are dumped out of the saloons into drunkards' 
 graves; if I could bring before you the scenes 
 of poverty and wretchedness and suffering and 
 desolation, rising up and pleading for mercy and 
 pleading for power to destroy the saloons and all 
 their accessories — then conscience might rise to 
 the throne and heaven witness victory for suffer- 
 ing humanity. 
 
 To help in this destruction of manhood every 
 saloon in these cities is day and night a gam- 
 bling den, and the home of every other force of 
 evil. On the walls are all the pictures, impure 
 and pugilistic, that can be gathered from the 
 four quarters of the world, and almost from hell 
 itself — literally covering the ceilings and walls, 
 telling of gambling and prize-fighting and im- 
 purity. In connection with the saloon is the 
 
70 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 resort of evil women. Impurity is working 
 high-handed, and scarcely a check is being 
 placed upon it. In the saloons in these great 
 cities thousands of these women are making 
 their habitation and destroying all the kingship 
 that God ever placed in man. The very blas- 
 phemy of womanhood is that woman should 
 be in a saloon, and women should drink, and 
 women should gamble. 
 
 I looked at the head of a barrel of rum, as it 
 lay in the low saloon, and saw an angel writing 
 on it: 
 
 4 ' A barrel of headaches, of heartaches, of woes ; 
 A barrel of curses, a barrel of blows ; 
 A barrel of tears from a world-weary wife ; 
 A barrel of sorrow, a barrel of strife ; 
 A barrel of all unavailing regret ; 
 A barrel of cares and a barrel of debt ; 
 A barrel of crime and a barrel of pain ; 
 A barrel of hope, ever blasted and vain ; 
 A barrel of falsehood, a barrel of cries 
 That fall from the maniac's lips as he dies ; 
 A barrel of agony, heavy and dull ; 
 A barrel of poison — of this nearly full ; 
 A barrel of liquid damnation that fires 
 The brain of the fool who believes it inspires ; 
 A barrel of poverty, ruin, and blight ; 
 A barrel of terrors that grow with the night ; 
 A barrel of hunger, a barrel of groans ; 
 
THE CENTER OF INIQUITY. 7 1 
 
 A barrel of orphans' most pitiful moans ; 
 A barrel of serpents that hiss as they pass 
 From the bead on the liquor that glows in the glass." 
 
 Here the very last vestige of womanhood 
 goes, and the last trace of manhood vanishes. 
 Look at the bloated lips and rheum eyes and 
 scarlet nose and shattered souls. I saw a young 
 man coining out of a saloon with a pair of skates 
 on his arm. He had skates on his feet, and 
 skates on his head, and skates on his ears, and 
 skates all over. He cut more curves than he 
 ever cut on any ice in the world. At last he 
 came to a tremendous obstacle. As he crossed 
 the street he came up to the curbstone and 
 thought it was a Rocky Mountain range; and 
 then he made a courageous effort to cross it, but 
 came back; and then he looked at his great 
 mountain range again, made another effort and 
 back he went again; and up he came again, this 
 time with a fearful plunge, and over it he went. 
 He looked around at it with more pride than 
 Napoleon when he crossed the Alps, and said, 
 " There shall be no Alps." Then a little dog 
 came running along and bounded gracefully 
 over the great obstacle. Which was better, dog 
 or man? 
 
72 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 The saloon keeper makes the following pro- 
 posal to his Satanic Majesty: 
 
 " Dear Sir: I have opened apartments, fitted 
 up with all the enticements of luxury, for the 
 sale of Rum, Brandy, Gin, Wine, Beer, and all 
 their compounds. Our objects, though differ- 
 ent, can be best attained by united action. I 
 therefore propose a copartnership. All I want 
 of men is their money. All else shall be 
 yours. 
 
 " Bring me the industrious, the sober, the re- 
 spectable, and I will return them to you Drunk- 
 ards, Paupers, and Beggars. 
 
 " Bring me the Child, and I will dash to the 
 earth the dearest hopes of the father and 
 mother. 
 
 " Bring me the Father and Mother, and I will 
 plant discord between them, and make them a 
 curse and a reproach to their children. 
 
 " Bring me the Young Man, and I will ruin his 
 character, destroy his health, shorten his life, 
 and blot out the highest and purest hopes of 
 youth. 
 
 " Bring me the Mechanic or the Laborer, and 
 his own money — the hard-earned fruits of his 
 
THE CENTER OF INIQUITY. 73 
 
 toil — shall be made to plant poverty, vice, and 
 ignorance in his once happy home. 
 
 " Bring me the Warm-hearted Sailor, and I 
 will send him on a lee shore, and make shipwreck 
 of all fond hopes fqr evermore. 
 
 " Bring me the professed follower of Christ, 
 and I will blight and wither every devotional feel- 
 ing of the heart. I will corrupt the Ministers of 
 religion, and defile the purity of the Church. 
 
 " Bring me the patronage of the city and of the 
 Courts of Justice — let the Magistrates of the 
 State and the Union become my patrons — let 
 the lawmakers themselves meet at my table and 
 participate in violation of law, and the name of 
 law shall become a hissing and a byword in the 
 streets. 
 
 " Bring me, above all, the moral, respectable 
 man; if possible, bring the moderate temperance 
 man — though he may not drink, yet his presence 
 will countenance the pretexts under which our 
 business must be masked. Bring him to our 
 Stores, Oyster Saloons, Eating Houses, and 
 Hotels, and the more timid of our victims will 
 then enter without alarm. 
 
 " Yours faithfully, 
 
 " RUMSELLER." 
 
74 MIDXIGIIT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 Satan said, " I am delighted with your propo- 
 sition, and it shall be done " — and a carnival was 
 held in the lower world. 
 
 I have seen this great Juggernaut, rolling 
 through your streets, and beneath its wheels 
 were pale-faced and haggard women, with 
 pinched babies in their arms and the babies 
 crying for food from starving breasts, and 
 the mother crying for mercy. I have seen 
 the mother, with tear-stained face and broken 
 heart, dragged beneath the wheels of this mon- 
 ster, as she fell on her knees before it and pleaded 
 for deliverance for her boy. And I have seen 
 beautiful sisters fastened to this Juggernaut of 
 heathenism and dragged through the very filth 
 and mud of the streets, because of their relation 
 to drunken and ruined fathers and brothers. I 
 have seen little children, bright-faced boys and 
 curly-haired girls — crushed, literally crushed, 
 beneath the wheels of that barbarous machine, 
 I have seen countless beggared and ruined 
 men beneath the wheels of our American Jug- 
 gernaut, with the last remnants of the image 
 and likeness of God obliterated, and the last 
 atom of human life destroyed. I have stood 
 in this blood, in the presence of a regard- 
 
THE CENTER OF INIQUITY. 
 
 75 
 
 less world and a rejoicing hell and a waiting 
 heaven, and I declare that, as long as Almighty 
 God gives me power, I shall use it to strike a 
 death-dealing blow against the head of earth's 
 most cruel monster — the damnable saloon. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE HOSPITAL WARDS. 
 
 As the city grows in size, it grows in danger 
 — danger to the moral, mental, and physical in 
 man. Character stands in greater peril, the 
 mind is less apt to be developed rightly, and the 
 body is subject to more of disease and suffering. 
 Crowded in home and strained in toil, living in 
 a world of machinery and brick, instead of sun- 
 light and flowers — what a vast amount of sick- 
 ness and appalling numbers of accidents there 
 are in the great cities! In their sky hangs a 
 black cloud, heavy with its thunder of accumu- 
 lated sigh and groan, and carrying a mighty 
 shower of tears to fall upon all its stirring life. 
 But circling that cloud is the beautiful rainbow, 
 caused by the shining of the sun of righteous- 
 ness in a world's sky. It is lined with all the 
 colors of love and sympathy and sacrifice and 
 tenderest care for the suffering part of the human 
 7 6 
 
THE HOSPITAL WARDS. 77 
 
 family. What a spectacle would be presented 
 if in one place in the city could be gathered 
 from street and store, and factory and home, and 
 hospital and asylum, all the crippled and pain- 
 racked human forms! If the blind eyes and 
 deaf ears, and lame feet, palsied hands and con- 
 torted limb, and speechless lip and diseased 
 blood, and bodies the home of pain; if the suffer- 
 ers from hereditary and accidental and self-im- 
 posed ailments all should be gathered together 
 for human vision; could eye or heart behold it 
 without a turning away or the breaking of a 
 chord? Beyond all human comprehension 
 would be the immensity and the dreadfulness of 
 such a spectacle. It is impossible to realize 
 what a large proportion of the city population 
 is subjected to the ravages of disease. Thou- 
 sands and tens of thousands are wearing 
 throughout the hours of day and the hours 
 of night, and the days and nights of the year, 
 and oftentimes the years of life, the shackles of 
 this mighty slave-holder. The pain and 
 anguish are never silenced by all the uproar 
 and rumble and confusion of city life. They 
 stealthily glide through the place of toil and the 
 place of rest and the place of joy, as well as be- 
 
73 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 tween the cots of the hospital ward. They walk 
 unopposed through the very ranks of the 
 strongest guards, and no hand can strike them or 
 foot run away at the sound of their voice. 
 
 We speak of the cyclone of the prairie, and the 
 flood of the Conemaugh, and the fires of 
 Chicago, and the earthquake of Charleston, but 
 seldom think of the incomprehensible amount of 
 suffering and death in the great city every day, 
 beneath the cyclone, and the earthquake, and 
 the fires and the flood of ravaging disease. 
 Hundreds of blind in constant darkness, hun- 
 dreds of lame on roughest road, hundreds of 
 crippled on an unending stairway, hundreds of 
 dumb in dread silence, hundreds of deaf without 
 a musical note! Life is a bush with thorns and 
 no roses for their withered hands. For them 
 the pathway is mire out of which no diamond 
 has yet been formed. But the sweetest sound 
 to drown this anguish of pain is the word 
 Charity; and the brightest spot in all this dark 
 picture of city life is the place where the hospital 
 stands. It is the saddest place, and yet the place 
 of greatest blessing. It was the pierced hands 
 that took the trowel and with the cement of love 
 laid the corner-stone for every one of these insti- 
 
THE HOSPITAL WARDS. 
 
 79 
 
 tutions of mercy. They are the gift of Chris- 
 tianity to a suffering world. 
 
 An old sailor declared that he had found 
 Christ; that he had found him not at first in 
 the Gospel, not in a prayer meeting, not at an 
 altar, not in sermon nor song, but in the house 
 erected for the shelter of shipwrecked manners 
 on the coast of Cape Cod. He had been ship- 
 wrecked on one of the coldest days of winter, 
 and, washed ashore, had found the shelter pro- 
 vided by Christian people for just such as he. In 
 that exhibition of Christianity he had seen Christ. 
 His idea was true to fact — every shelter for the 
 wrecked mariner, every almshouse for the pov- 
 erty-stricken, every asylum for the distressed, 
 every orphanage for the waif, every hospital for 
 the sufferer, speaks in loudest tones of the Christ. 
 They are better than an apology for his gospel, 
 even though that apology falls from the pen of 
 deepest learning and clearest rhetoric and most 
 skillful logic. I challenge the mouth of infi- 
 delity to utter its blasphemy within their walls. 
 Their plans were made in heaven, and angels 
 are in their wards. They might appropriately 
 be built in the form of a cross, because their 
 foundations are the stones from Calvary's 
 
8o MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 Mountain. In the heart of every passer-by they 
 should inspire deepest gratitude. 
 
 I have seen in the hospital ward, with all its 
 pain and sorrow, the sublimest illustrations of 
 courage and heroism. We recall with thank- 
 fulness and pride the heroism displayed on 
 many a bloody battlefield in the struggles of 
 this great nation. I stand in the hospital ward 
 and recall the history of a Bunker Hill and a 
 Saratoga. I behold Washington with his heroic 
 soul leading the forces of the American patriots 
 on to triumph, even through the ice-barred Dela- 
 ware at Trenton, and on Long Island, and 
 around New York Harbor, and up the Hudson. 
 I think of Lincoln's heroism in signing with his 
 own blood the Emancipation Proclamation; and 
 Grant and Sheridan and the rest of the noble 
 catalogue of leaders, carrying that crimson docu- 
 ment on to its effect. I think of the common 
 soldier behind the stone walls, and in the wheat- 
 fields of Gettysburg, among the trees and 
 swamps of the Wilderness, on the bridges and in 
 the thunders of Antietam, climbing over the 
 dead bodies of their comrades to the top of 
 Lookout Mountain; and I turn to the cot upon 
 which lies a body tortured with pain for weeks 
 
THE HOSPITAL WARDS. Si 
 
 and months, meeting a mightier foe, and in a 
 longer conflict, with a greater demonstration of 
 unadulterated heroism. 
 
 When Satan failed to conquer Job by all 
 other means, he touched his bone and flesh and 
 revealed that sickness was the greatest test. 
 Nerves may be shattered beyond the endurance 
 of the sound of a bird's note, and appetite may 
 loathe the most luxuriant fruit and most tempt- 
 ing viands and cause the palate to turn in dis- 
 gust from the platter. The whole body may be 
 thrown into a very blaze of fever, and the knife of 
 pain strike through the side or across the brow 
 or into the heart itself. Excruciating neural- 
 gia and rheumatism do their very best to torture 
 in the dead silence of the night, in the dim light 
 of the ward, and an unseen hand is tearing at 
 the muscles and rasping the nerves. That is an 
 infinitely stronger trial of the heroic in the soul 
 than the shot and shell of the battlefield. 
 
 I stood before Nathan Hale's monument in 
 New York city and recalled that event of 1776, 
 after the battle of Long Island was fought with 
 such disastrous results to the American arms. 
 Washington had retreated across the river to 
 Harlem Heights; and General Howe with his 
 
82 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY, 
 
 twenty-five thousand men occupied the hillsides 
 above Brooklyn and also the city of New York, 
 while a great fleet of English warships lay at 
 anchor in the Harbor. It was necessary that 
 Washington should know the intentions of the 
 British commander. Upon this knowledge prob- 
 ably hung the salvation of the American army. 
 Washington summoned before him a number of 
 officers, to whom he revealed his plans and 
 asked if there was one who would volunteer to 
 attempt the hazardous enterprise. There was 
 silence. No one responded, until at last a tall, 
 stout young man, with determination in his 
 heart, stepped forward and in thrilling tones 
 said, " I will do it." I recalled that dangerous 
 undertaking, and the opposition of his comrades, 
 and his most patriotic reply. I thought of his 
 going to Norfolk, and doffing his uniform, and 
 donning that brown suit and broad-brimmed 
 hat; then crossing the Sound in a sloop, and 
 landing in Huntington Bay, and boldly advanc- 
 ing into the enemies' lines. I thought how he 
 successfully performed his errand and repassed 
 the lines in safety, with papers hidden between 
 his foot and stocking. But, while waiting for 
 a boat, he was recognized and betrayed and 
 
THE HOSPITAL WARDS. 
 
 8.3 
 
 arrested, and brought before General Howe. 
 Without a denial from his lips, he was sen- 
 tenced to be hanged the next morning at day- 
 break. The rest of the sad story came with 
 increasing vividness to my mind. Securely 
 pinioned, the noble patriot was marched to the 
 place of execution, where now his monument 
 stands, and there, as the light came on that 
 early autumn morning, he stood with white cap 
 drawn down over his head, the noose around 
 his neck, and a rough pine-board box for a 
 coffin in front of him. I stood on that sacred 
 spot and read those last words now carved in 
 the granite, " I wish I had more lives to give for 
 my country." I would not take one atom of 
 glory from such a royal brow as that. No, I 
 would place another laurel leaf in that never- 
 dying wreath, if I could. 
 
 But I stood in another place recently and saw 
 heroism as great as that, in the hospital ward, 
 by the cot of a little six-year-old sufferer. 
 Every moment of his short life had been a 
 moment of pain; every breath had carried a sigh, 
 and he was now waiting for the small remnant 
 of life to vanish. Kis pinched features told the 
 most beautiful story of courage I had ever 
 
84 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 known. Not a sound of weakness had ever been 
 heard from that weakened little frame. He has 
 stood for those six years, and the only six years 
 of his life, without friend and alone, in that 
 awful fight with disease. He held his teeth 
 firmly set, and his shriveled hands firmly 
 clinched in face of that giant-like enemy. Every 
 move as well as word evidenced his magnificent 
 courage. Give Nathan Hale his monument, but 
 there will be a monument somewhere to the 
 eternal memory of that splendid hero of the 
 hospital ward. 
 
 I have seen in the hospitals, in the presence of 
 this heartrending suffering, some of the most 
 beautiful and fragrant flowers that have ever 
 blossomed upon earth. No human hand ever 
 placed them at the side of the cot, because they 
 are seen oftentimes where love had never placed 
 earth's flowers. They were flowers plucked by 
 angel hands in the gardens of the upper world, 
 dipped in the stream which flows under the 
 throne — fresh, and fragrant, and heavenly. I 
 mean the flowers of patience, so rarely seen in 
 the world, are seen in such beauty in the ward. 
 A four-year-old boy, with his little limbs twisted 
 into inhuman shape, was trying to help himself, 
 
THE HOSPITAL WARDS. 85 
 
 but could not make any progress. I watched 
 him in his struggle, and saw him better through 
 a tear. He made hardest effort to move and 
 continued his repeated attempts in agony, but 
 was fastened to one place with the heaviest 
 shackles that could rest upon human form. In 
 his face were the clearest marks of a Christ-like 
 patience that my eyes had ever seen. Under- 
 stand it if you can, but his vain struggles to 
 move were beautiful. I will explain it. The 
 beauty was in the effect. His crippled body 
 was like the thorny stems of the bush on which 
 blossomed the richest and sweetest flowers of 
 patience. I had seen another boy just his age, 
 the picture of robust health, not a blemish mark 
 upon his body, and the meanest specimen of 
 childhood I could recall — most impatient, most 
 unloving, most unkind. In his unbounded rest- 
 lessness and unrestrained temper he was ruin- 
 ing his home, destroying all its happiness, 
 covering mother's brow with care and loading 
 father's heart with burdens; the most distinct 
 prophecy of a ruined life and a blasted eternity. 
 I declared then, and I declare now, that my 
 holiest prayer would ask that my boy be the one 
 in the hospital ward rather than the one of per- 
 
86 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 feet health. A thousand-fold better to be 
 crippled in body than crippled in soul. Better 
 to have twisted limbs and a beautiful spirit than 
 health without the touch of patience. The 
 flower of patience is so seldom seen in this world 
 that we must rejoice in that part of the hospital 
 production. The business world, and the home 
 world, and the professional world, and even a 
 part of the church world, are the scene of ex- 
 treme restlessness and discontent and selfish 
 struggle and extreme impatience. But in the 
 very midst of suffering have often blossomed the 
 rarest flowers. 
 
 Genius has ever had to be crucified before it 
 could rise from the dead. Pascal must suffer 
 deeply before he could write sweetly and sympa- 
 thetically. Milton must drink of that same cup 
 for four-and-sixty years before he could sing of 
 Paradise. Carlyle must know the meaning of 
 pain before the literary world knew him. Jean 
 Paul must live in the very cage of the bird about 
 which he sings before he could sing sweetly. 
 Robert Hall must be crippled with spinal disease 
 before the world thrilled with his matchless elo- 
 quence. There are the traces of tears and 
 sighs on every great page. A tear is a strange 
 
THE HOSPITAL WARDS. 
 
 87 
 
 chisel or brush, but its art has shaped the 
 finest statue and left its lines upon the grandest 
 canvas. The fires make sapphires, rubies, and 
 diamonds out of common clay. The crown of 
 thorns is before the diadem; the mocking reed 
 before the scepter; the polluted purple before the 
 royal robes of glory. The spit of scorn is be- 
 fore the bending knee of obeisance; the cross 
 before the throne; a Calvary before a Heaven. 
 I have seen all the colors of the rainbow in a 
 single tear, 
 
 " The mightiest tone that music knows, 
 
 But breaks the heart's-string with the sound, 
 And genius still, the more it flows, 
 But wastes the lamp whose life bestows 
 The light it sheds around." 
 
 The dull, leaden clouds of pain and the chilly 
 rains of sorrow are at last transformed into 
 golden mountains and into mists of fire, and 
 every water-line of tears becomes an effulgent 
 thread connecting earth and heaven. 
 
 I sat by the side of a cot in the hospital ward. 
 She who occupied it had started life with bright- 
 est hope and best of health. She had grown 
 into young womanhood, when suddenly the 
 knife of disease had been thrust into her perfect 
 
88 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 form and crippled her hip and spine until she 
 was fast becoming helpless and shapeless. I 
 told her of the great Sufferer and His sublime 
 patience, and that in His footsteps she would at 
 last reach the gates of pearl and enter that better 
 city where there would be no hospitals, no days 
 of suffering, and no long nights of wakefulness, 
 and no sorrow because of a crippled body. There 
 every tear would at last become a jewel, and a 
 cold, friendless world would for her become 
 a heaven. With a sweet, submissive expres- 
 sion she turned her eyes to the western sky 
 and the glory of the setting sun. She thought 
 that was the gateway, and her face lighted up, and 
 her heart said, " I'll wait and her eyes saw the 
 beauties and the perfection and the health 
 and the happiness of that other world. She 
 said, "Who are those in white robes?" And 
 an angel said, " Those are they who suf- 
 fered patiently on earth, and have washed their 
 robes and made them white in the blood of the 
 Lamb." And I saw the very sunset of glory 
 and peace in her face, and the light of the 
 eternal throne on her brow, and her head resting 
 on the downy pillow of divine promise, " The 
 eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the 
 everlasting arms." 
 
THE HOSPITAL WARDS. 
 
 89 
 
 I have seen in these wards the banishing of 
 pain by love's tender touch. Splendid skill from 
 the greatest physician is not sufficient. The 
 best doctor has been a learner in the school of 
 the Great Physician, who, when upon earth, 
 with tenderest love and divinest sympathy 
 clothed even the madman after he had torn off 
 his garments, and turned the scabs of leprosy 
 into fairest complexion, and swung wide open 
 the windows of blindness, and opened the 
 fountains of blood for palsied limbs, and straight- 
 ened out rheumatic forms into those of grace 
 and comfort. 
 
 Some additional darkness is thrown around 
 the hospital ward by the presence of dis- 
 crimination. There is oftentimes an unjust 
 discrimination witnessed, which is worthy of the 
 most extreme condemnation on earth as well 
 as before the eternal throne. The poor some- 
 times suffer doubly. They can stand the absence 
 of flowers and fruit, but in their humanity they 
 cannot endure the absence of sympathy and the 
 presence of a hard-hearted carelessness and in- 
 human treatment. Their bodies are just as 
 tender as those which lie on the palace couch. 
 Their nerves are just as sensitive and their hearts 
 
9° MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 are as easily broken. Shame! shame! when- 
 ever the cruel hand instead of the hand of love 
 rests upon their pain-racked body. But many of 
 the most self-sacrificing and humanity-loving 
 of earth are found among physicians and nurses 
 of the hospital and the sick room. Some of 
 these nurses appear angelic as they move in 
 love's pathway around the cots, and tenderly 
 place their hands on the fevered brows, and 
 sweetly whisper the comforting word and skill- 
 fully administer the healing medicine. 
 
 There are more Florence Nightingales than 
 one. Wounded soldiers kissed her shadow as 
 it fell on the hospital wall. Other shadows have 
 been kissed and other heads shall be crowned 
 for like service. If there is any place on earth 
 which is standing as a supreme witness to 
 woman's power of pre-eminence over man, 
 it is within the walls of the hospital. Walter 
 Scott's lines are not all satire: 
 
 " Oh, woman, in our hour of ease 
 Uncertain, coy, and hard to please ; 
 When pain and anguish wring the brow 
 A ministering angel, thou." 
 
 Men fought the battles of the field, but woman 
 fought those of the hospital. It was her hand 
 
THE HOSPITAL WARDS. 9 1 
 
 which administered the cordial, and watched the 
 dying couch, and touched the hot cheek, and 
 wrote the last message home. Tens of thou- 
 sands of the wounded were made better, or to die 
 easier, by her power. Man's rough hand and 
 heavy foot and impatient bearing are out of place 
 here. She seems to have the superlative right 
 of comforting the sick. 
 
 But I have witnessed in the hospital ward 
 another loving attendant. I looked into the 
 children's ward and, in the presence of the little 
 ones fighting pain and death, I saw Him and 
 heard Him say, " Suffer the children to come 
 unto me," and then it seemed He took them in 
 His arms and blessed them. His divine sympa- 
 thy was at the side of every one of those little 
 cots, and when I went into the next ward He 
 was there. He moved from one to the other 
 without distinction, and touched them with His 
 finger of love and power just as He did when 
 upon earth in human form. As I stood at the 
 doorway of the next ward I saw Him again on 
 the same errand of mercy, and heard Him say 
 distinctly again, " Thy sins be forgiven thee." 
 
 There is another frequent visitor in these city 
 hospitals — the black phantom of Death. Oh, 
 
9 2 
 
 MIDXIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 how often he moves with his dread step, abso- 
 lutely unhindered, through every hallway and 
 into every room and ward. The old Duke of 
 Northumberland, when he was dying, called for 
 his armor. It was given him, and in his weak- 
 ness he raised himself from his bed, and the 
 hard steel clasps were fastened about him, and 
 as the sweat of extreme weakness came out on 
 his brow, he asked for his lance, which had car- 
 ried his colors in triumph on many a battle- 
 field. It was placed in his hand, and the valiant 
 old warrior faced the last enemy with lance 
 at rest. Death simply mocked at his armor 
 and his spear. It was a poor act with which to 
 close the tragedy of life. 
 
 How much grander that scene in the hospital 
 when noble Tucker, my fellow-laborer in the 
 work of the Church, was facing death! Oh, how 
 we loved him, and what splendid promise was 
 in his life! He lay submissive beneath the sur- 
 geon's knife, and came from the operation like 
 a hero in triumph; but, alas! alas! to discover 
 a more serious danger. The physicians fought 
 death for him, and he fought like the bravest for 
 himself. And when we told him that he must 
 die he said, without a tremor in his voice or his 
 
THE HOSPITAL WARDS. 
 
 93 
 
 body, " Well, if I must, I wish to leave a message 
 or two of love." And as calm as an angel in 
 heaven, he waited on earth for the final summons, 
 and when he passed into his delirium, he thought 
 he saw an opening through which he wanted to 
 pass, but in his anxiety to go he was hindered. 
 He tried to move toward it, and I know that 
 that opening was the gates of pearl. At last his 
 old father, with tear-stained face and broken 
 heart, leaned over his only boy and said lovingly, 
 " Frank, you can go, you can go." And he said, 
 with the look of rest and satisfaction, "All right, 
 father!" He fell back on his pillow and fell 
 back into the arms of Christ, and was gone. 
 When I recall that hospital scene, and that 
 eternal triumph, and the enthroned Tucker, I 
 share the angelic chorus and shout, "Hallelujah! 
 hallelujah!" 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE SHADOWS FROM THE FOOTLIGHTS. 
 
 "As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so 
 is the laughter of the fool." That philosophy of 
 amusement is divine. A snapping and crack- 
 ling without any heat or blaze, and the food un- 
 cooked and the life unfed! God made every 
 human being with the desire for amusement, and 
 the capacity for enjoyment. He placed within 
 the structure of every man a laughing machine, 
 and it is sin to allow it ever to become rusty 
 by disuse. Some people seem to have been 
 made according to contract, but their shriveled 
 forms and sour features are the abuse of Heaven's 
 handiwork. A hearty laugh, coming from a 
 robust, happy soul, is a part of the sweetest music 
 of earth. A heart's joy, running over upon the 
 face, is a part of earth's beauty. Innocent 
 pleasure is a foretaste of the upper world. 
 Angels rejoice in seeing every man, woman, and 
 
 94 
 
THE SHADOWS FROM THE FOOTLIGHTS. 95 
 
 child have the best time the world can give. 
 Some of the brightest men of earth never left 
 their boyhood sports. Martin Luther in old 
 life romped and played with children, as one of 
 them; and the immortal Chalmers found his 
 greatest delight in the amusement of his early 
 days. The noblest men can laugh the heartiest 
 and enjoy themselves the most. There are 
 some people so small and so dry that you could 
 soak them in a joke for a month, and then they 
 would be as dry as a Canada thistle in a drouth, 
 and as mean as the thistle after lying in the 
 scorching sun for that thirty days. Heaven 
 wants every man to have the most joy of earth — 
 but that is only secured along right lines. 
 " God made man upright, but he hath sought 
 out many inventions," and it is these inventions 
 which make the crackling thorns under the pot. 
 
 Disparage no innocent amusements; rather 
 rejoice in their existence and their blessing. I 
 would not even make a wholesale denunciation 
 of modern theaters, but whatever destroys life, 
 instead of saving it, carries its own condemnation 
 in its heart. That which lowers life, instead of 
 elevating it, cannot pass the courts of conscience 
 and reason without indictment. For the pur- 
 
96 MID XI GUT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 pose of investigation I have been in the lowest 
 theaters in the world, and went from them to the 
 very highest. And much that can be said about 
 the one ought to be said, in justice and in the 
 interests of humanity and civilization, about the 
 other. Principles of righteousness which have 
 been murdered in the Bowery playhouses have 
 received their deathblow also in the theaters of 
 Fifth Avenue. In every constitution is the love 
 for the dramatic, and it is cruel to forbid its 
 satisfaction, but the modern places of amuse- 
 ment are guilty of that crime. They say to the 
 pure heart, "Stand back! stand back! If you 
 see us, you cannot see God!" Most of these 
 places are now the very haunts of iniquity in 
 our great cities. One of the greatest needs of 
 this hour is to urge upon young manhood and 
 womanhood that they, for their own sake and the 
 sake of earth and heaven, use a righteous dis- 
 crimination. This is one of the most vital sub- 
 jects touching the morality of the city. 
 
 The theater is the first power that enters 
 young life in the great city, eitner of life born 
 there or of new blood flowing into the city from 
 the country. The city has created the theater. 
 The loneliness and gloom of its life make an 
 
THE SHADOWS FROM THE FOOTLIGHTS. 97 
 
 inevitable reaction. There is a tremendous need 
 of relaxation, for the work and burden of toil. 
 The theater is created by this increased demand 
 in the great civic centers. It is the first to 
 touch character. It sweeps with unhindered 
 power the young men and women upon its 
 swift-flowing current. Charles Lamb once 
 wrote a play for the stage and went to see 
 it enacted. The loudest hissing came from the 
 gallery where Lamb sat; the author was hiss- 
 ing his own production, he was his own 
 severest critic. So every man in the throne 
 room of his own conscience is the severest 
 critic of the places he frequents. The best 
 that can be said to-day must be the advice to 
 discriminate wisely and conscientiously. 
 
 I have seen with my own eyes, and I carry the 
 statements of some of the greatest managers, 
 critics, and actors in the world. The conviction 
 of my own heart and the sentiments of their lips 
 are in perfect harmony. Eyes ought to be wide 
 open and consciences very tender in view of the 
 undisputed facts. There may be exceptions, 
 and discrimination may keep from sin, but most 
 of the footlights cause the blackest shadows to- 
 day — the shadow of wasted money; the giving 
 
9§ MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 of the last farthing, with no return, only evil. 
 I have seen men, women, boys, and girls, in a 
 line more than one hundred feet in length, wait- 
 ing to pass before the ticket window and pur- 
 chase tickets to enter one of the vilest shows that 
 was ever advertised on the boards. As I stood 
 and watched those men, women, and children, I 
 saw hunger in some of their faces, and faded 
 shawls upon their backs, and no overcoats 
 around their shivering bodies, on that bitter win- 
 ter's day. They came out of the tenements and 
 out of the poorest homes in the city, taking the 
 last farthing to go into a place which was to in- 
 jure them instead of help them. I have seen in 
 the places of the exhibitions of impurity hundreds 
 and almost thousands of men, and only one stray 
 woman. I wondered how she strayed in there. 
 In the vast number of men and boys, most 
 of them boys, scarcely an overcoat could be 
 seen. They were evidently spending their last 
 cent to witness that which would make the very 
 devils themselves blush, if they came up from the 
 lower world. Nothing else was to be seen for 
 the length of three hours, nothing but the 
 demonstration of impurity before lustful eyes; 
 
THE SHADOWS FROM THE FOOTLIGHTS. 99 
 
 nothing but immodesty and the loss of the deli- 
 cacy of womanhood. Their last money had 
 been paid for that which was the poorest invest- 
 ment a mortal could make in this world. How 
 many million dollars annually pass out of the 
 hands of the people, mostly out of the hands of 
 the working people, into the hands of all the 
 theaters in this land of ours? How many do 
 you suppose? Almost uncounted millions. 
 
 There is constantly going out from the 
 pockets of the people a stream of their earnings, 
 into the low playhouse, which ought to go for 
 bread for the hungry children and clothes for 
 their thinly and poorly clad forms. It ought to 
 go out in a far different direction — but goes into 
 the treasury of some of the lowest theaters in 
 the city. From the hands of the rich also is 
 passing every day and night a vast amount of 
 money for their own destruction, and is making 
 for them an investment from which they shall 
 hear before the Judgment Throne of God — con- 
 demnation instead of praise. They are spend- 
 ing money that ought to come from willing 
 hands for the relief of the shivering and starving. 
 I say, then, that one of the thorns crackling 
 
ioo MIDNIGHT IA r A GREAT CITY. 
 
 under the pot which create the fool's laughter 
 is the thorn of the poorest investment — damn- 
 ing instead of saving. 
 
 Dramatic performances are not in them- 
 selves harmful. They have been given by 
 transcendent genius. There are possibilities of 
 high things in the theater; so much more hor- 
 rible is the utter prostitution of all its wonder- 
 ful capacities. Most of them to-day are of the 
 devil; they exist only because men will always 
 ruin their fellow-man for money. They are bad, 
 bad, and only bad, and the result of all this evil 
 at work is startling and beyond comprehension. 
 Even the blood-and-thunder plays of which there 
 are so many, and for which the demand is in- 
 creasing, are like a fiery intoxicant which 
 inflames and frenzies. Audiences are ravished 
 and shocked and overwhelmed by the doing of 
 the stage carpenter more than the actors. It is 
 for this midnight strain on the nervous system 
 that men and women pay their last money. 
 
 Another shadow from the footlights is the 
 murder of virtue. The modern theater may be 
 many other things. It may claim art, oratory, 
 and grace, but whatever else its claims, it is not 
 a school of virtue. You need not go; I need 
 
THE SHADOWS FROM THE FOOTLIGHTS. ioi 
 
 not have gone. Just walk along any one of 
 the streets and witness the pictures on the 
 boards. What are they? Unless they are pic- 
 tures of semi-nude women the theaters fail. No 
 manager would dare announce that his plays 
 are in the interests of righteousness. One of 
 the greatest actors said he would reform the 
 New York city theaters, and have one pure 
 theater in that great city. What was the result? 
 He failed absolutely, and his theater did not 
 bring five cents on the dollar. London's great 
 actor tried the same thing, and said he would 
 purify the theater. But he too signally failed, 
 and the manager had to put impurity before the 
 footlights in order to regain the loss he had sus- 
 tained. The greatest actors themselves testify 
 that it is almost impossible to point the finger to 
 any young woman who goes on the stage for a 
 life occupation, who remains pure. I do not say 
 all. It is possible to remain pure. It may be 
 possible to remain Christian. 
 
 Dumas, the French novelist, in answer to some 
 critic, said, " You are right not to take your 
 daughter to see my play, but you should not 
 take her to see the theater at all. The theater, 
 being a picture or satire of social manners, must 
 
102 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 ever be immoral, the social manners being them- 
 selves immoral." A theatrical manager was 
 accused of putting on the boards things which 
 young people should not see. He replied, " Cer- 
 tainly we play for men and women; we repre- 
 sent the world as it is; it is not fit for the young." 
 Rousseau said, " I observe in general that actors 
 are men of bad morals and given to low prac- 
 tices, and actresses lead a loose life." 
 
 Not long ago Mr. Clement Scott, a leading 
 theatrical critic of London, was asked to give to 
 the public his matured views of the stage as a 
 place for a pure-minded girl to seek a livelihood 
 and to pursue dramatic art. His answer was, " A 
 woman may take a header in a whirlpool, and 
 be miraculously saved — but then she may be 
 drowned. If a girl knows how to take care of 
 herself, she can go anywhere; but I should be 
 sorry to expose modesty to the shock of that 
 worst kind of temptation, a frivolous disregard 
 of womanly purity. One out of a hundred may 
 be safe; but then she may hear things that she 
 had better not listen to, and witness things she 
 had better not see. In every class of life women 
 are exposed to danger and temptations, but far 
 more in the theater than elsewhere. All honor 
 
THE SHADOWS FROM THE FOOTLIGHTS. 103 
 
 and praise to them when they brave them out." 
 Garrick boasted that he so entered into the vile 
 character he assumed, as to feel that it was he 
 himself. Dr. Johnson said, " If you really feel 
 such a monster, you ought to be hanged every 
 time you perform it." 
 
 Mrs. Siddons, who was a great actress, when 
 her sister married a respectable man though 
 poor, said, "Thank God, she is off the stage!" 
 
 Mary Anderson said, " She did not want her 
 friends or children or anybody to patronize the 
 stage." Of one of the highest class the Press 
 critic says, " The prevailing affection of the 
 heroine of the play is ' her fleshly love — a 
 fleshliness that Mme. Bernhardt in some ineffa- 
 ble way exalts.' What a help to a pure-minded 
 young girl it must be to have gross ' fleshly 
 love ' exalted in some ineffable way before her 
 observant eyes." The manner in which Mme. 
 Bernhardt's acting of Sardou's play impressed 
 itself for the evening upon different classes of 
 persons is indicated by the report of comments 
 heard at the close of the remarkable perform- 
 ance : " Zounds, but that is a devilish sort of a 
 play! It leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. She 
 is a wonder, though," he muttered as he strode 
 
104 MIDNIGHT IA r A GREAT CITY. 
 
 off to his club, to get something to restore his 
 equilibrium. " Oh, dear, wasn't it lovely! " said 
 a young bud, as she sank back into her carriage, 
 and the coachman cracked his whip. 
 
 Professor Morley says that almost all the plays 
 represented in London are translations from the 
 French, and that this ought not to be done is 
 very obvious. A critic in a secular paper says: 
 " The plays frequently offered are thoroughly 
 Parisian, with personages so objectionable and 
 incidents so gross, that it excites surprise that 
 they have escaped the censure of the Lord 
 Chamberlain. One scene for suggestiveness 
 was the worst I ever saw. The curtain falls, 
 leaving us to infer that the willful violation of 
 the Seventh Commandment is sufficent ground 
 for thorough-paced comedy." 
 
 Mr. Burnand, a great play-writer, in the 
 Fortnightly says: "It is simply impossible for 
 a girl to enter the theater and prepare to be 
 an actress without all her moral senses being 
 shocked at once, and if afterward she feels 
 more easy about it, it simply proves her 
 deterioration." 
 
 Palmer affirmed: "The chief themes of 
 
THE SHADOWS FROM THE FOOTLIGHTS. 105 
 
 the theater are now, as they have ever 
 been, the passions of men: ambition leading to 
 murder; jealousy leading to murder; lust lead- 
 ing to adultery and to death; anger leading to 
 madness." And in explanation of this fact, Mr. 
 Winter added : " Christian ethics on the stage 
 would be inappropriate as Mr. Owen's Solon 
 Shingle in the pulpit. The worst mistake ever 
 made by the stage, and the most offensive atti- 
 tude ever assumed by it, are seen when — as in 
 ' Camille,' and two or three similar plays — it tries 
 to deal with what is really the function of the 
 Church — the consequences of sin in the human 
 soul. It here makes a disastrous and mourn- 
 ful failure." 
 
 A distinguished dramatic critic said a few days 
 ago that, in his opinion, the average productions 
 of the last ten years have been baser than in any 
 ten previous years in the history of the American 
 stage. An American writer in the The Con- 
 temporary Review, speaking of the New York 
 theaters, says, "A friend of mine, who made a 
 tour of them all, was inclined to think that those 
 patronized by the roughs in the Bowery were 
 less immoral than those patronized by the resi- 
 
106 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 dents of Fifth Avenue. It is a matter of dispute 
 whether they honestly enjoy good musie as 
 much as they enjoy immoral plays." 
 
 W hat is necessary in order to make a star 
 actor to-day? Some scandal arises in a woman's 
 life, and then she immediately takes to the stage 
 and plays her part. As the chief attraction 
 notorious prize-fighters, whether triumphant or 
 defeated in their brutality, go on the stage. If 
 one keeps the lowest saloon on the Bowery, he 
 is by that kind of life adapted to appear on the 
 stage, and have the largest posters and the larg- 
 est crowd. Notoriously bad, he then becomes 
 a noted actor. The very theaters to-day which 
 are making the most money are equipped with 
 that kind of actors. The only preparation neces- 
 sary to-day is to be brute enough to fight, or im- 
 pure enough to lose all self-respect. What is 
 one of the principal attractions of the theater to- 
 day? Is it not women scantily dressed, or 
 dressed so as to represent nudity? Are not 
 women presented in men's attire, and men in 
 women's attire, and is not that calculated to 
 unsex the individual so acting? 
 
 In every one of the theaters, from the lowest 
 up to the highest, it is not a success to-day 
 
THE SHADOWS FROM THE FOOTLIGHTS. 107 
 
 unless there is the ballet; unless it is a serpentine 
 dance — and it is a serpent, the devil himself. 
 The dance is damning the play of the theaters; 
 in season and out of season, it is the chief attrac- 
 tion. The dance is only an excuse for the 
 exhibition of nudity. If the posters and adver- 
 tisements do not reveal this, the theater is empty. 
 That which is the accompaniment of the profes- 
 sion is enough to condemn it. 
 
 A young man on his knees in my room and 
 then at my home, praying that God would deliver 
 him from his sin, confessed to me that he had 
 come from a good home and gone upon the 
 stage; and every night after the performance 
 was over, he said he had to be with his com- 
 panions after the midnight hour, drinking and 
 playing cards and living in an atmosphere most 
 deadly with its poison. " Ruined, ruined," was 
 the sad cry, and it is the echo of nearly every life 
 of that kind. I know a mother who would give 
 her last drop of blood if her boy had never been 
 behind the scenes — ruined in young manhood, 
 basely ruined — and her heart is breaking for it. 
 Even little TomThumb could not get rid of the 
 disaster when he went out upon his tour before 
 the eyes of the world. Up to that time he did 
 
108 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 not drink, but then it began; and so bad and de- 
 praved did he become in so short a time that, 
 when in St. Louis, his manager had to lock him 
 in a room in the hotel whenever he left him. He 
 rang the bell and summoned the bell-boy, and 
 shoving a silver dollar under the door, he told 
 the boy to get a pint of whisky and a clay pipe. 
 When the boy returned with the pint of whisky 
 and the clay pipe, he told him to push the 
 stem of the pipe through the key-hole and pour 
 the whisky in the bowl of the pipe. He drank 
 the entire pint of whisky, and when the manager 
 came back he found poor Tom lying on the floor, 
 a little ball of humanity, completely saturated 
 with whisky. 
 
 The theater life is destructive of the mar- 
 riage relation and everything sweet and sacred 
 in family life. You hear of revolver shots at 
 the door of the theater; revolver shots behind 
 the scenes; revolver shots in actors' apartments. 
 You hear of the untruthfulness and unfaithful- 
 ness of husband to wife and wife to husband 
 in almost every paper you read. 
 
 " Some day," the new woman said, " let us 
 get together and abolish man." Well, it was a 
 hard thing to abolish man, but it was a harder 
 
THE SHADOWS FROM THE FOOTLIGHTS. 109 
 
 thing to get together. After they had gotten 
 together and abolished man, one of them said, 
 " I want to be an actress, but I must have a 
 divorce, and now I am so sorry that we abol- 
 ished man." But it was too late, and her life 
 occupation had been nipped in the bud because 
 she could not get a divorce. Necessary to get 
 a divorce in order to be a star on the stage! If 
 the modern theater works such awful ruin to the 
 actors and actresses, its supporters must have 
 some share in the condemnation. If the daugh- 
 ter of Herodias dances for Herod, he will bear 
 his part in the fearful result. One of the 
 nephews of a leader of the Four Hundred in 
 New York married one of the best known ballet 
 dancers in this country. Do you know what the 
 uncle did with his nephew; what the whole 
 family did with him? They discarded him at 
 once, and absolutely refused to have anything to 
 do with him until he should prove unfaithful to 
 his actress wife. And yet those very people were 
 paying for the support of that individual and of 
 thousands of others in their impurity. They sup- 
 ported that which they themselves condemned. 
 Theater attendants to-day witness the unsexing 
 of womanhood by her wearing man's clothes and, 
 
no 
 
 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 far worse than that, the destroying of all purity 
 of womanhood by wearing scarcely any clothes 
 at all. If she were their sister, they would have 
 turned their eyes away and held up their hands 
 in holy horror. But it was somebody's sister, it 
 was somebody's daughter, and they paid for her 
 support. This is injury to others, but how deep 
 it goes down in the heart when men behold that 
 which is impure, that which makes immodesty 
 and indelicacy, to receive the applause. 
 Browning says: 
 
 " Such outrage does the public — Phceba named 
 Such purpose to corrupt ingenuous youth, 
 Such insult cast on female character : 
 Why, when I saw that beastiality — 
 So beyond all brute beast imagining, 
 That when to point the moral at the close 
 Poor Salabaccho, just to show how fair 
 Was reconciliation, stripped her charms, 
 That exhibition simply bade us breathe, 
 Seeming something healthy and commendable. 
 After obscurity grotesqued so much 
 It slunk away revolted at itself. 
 Henceforth I had my answer when our sage 
 Pattern professing seniors pleaded grave 
 Your jail to fathom has the deep design : 
 All's acted in the interest of truth, 
 Religion, and these manners old and dear 
 Which make our city great." 
 
THE SHADOWS FROM THE FOOTLIGHTS. HI 
 
 Another shadow which the footlights cast is 
 the blasting of childhood. Whenever a child is 
 placed before your eyes on the stage, you can 
 pass this judgment without fear of contradiction, 
 that that child has begun a life which shall end 
 in absolute failure and perhaps the entire ruin of 
 character. So far has this gone in our world 
 that there are to-night men in state prison 
 in this country because they have taken 
 babies and tied their heads and their forms 
 into contorted positions, in order that in 
 six months' or a year's time they might make 
 money out of them in the museums and the 
 theaters. This which is most inhuman, this 
 most cruel barbarism, is still going on in this 
 world of ours to satisfy the base demands of the 
 theaters. 
 
 The great Lincoln, when on his way to the 
 State Capital in Illinois, stopped his horse and 
 climbed up into a tree in order to place back 
 in the nest two little birds which the wind had 
 blown from their home. In his humanity and 
 deep sympathy even for suffering birds, the great 
 man revealed his greatness. One of the sublim- 
 est efforts possible is to save these boys and 
 girls from that which is their inevitable ruin. 
 
112 
 
 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 They arc out of their nests in the winds and 
 storms of the world. 
 
 Some time ago one of these boys acting on the 
 stage, brought up from boyhood in that pro- 
 fession, was dying from overstrain, his nerves 
 completely shattered and his little form weak- 
 ened. He was one of the prodigies of the stage, 
 but was dying as a result of that early abuse, 
 when he could do no more to satisfy that craze 
 of humanity and the public's demand for seeing 
 tortured babies. When the skeleton hands of 
 Death were about to take him out of this world 
 into the other world he played the greatest act 
 of his life, tragedy indeed; when up into some 
 of the faces of those before whom he had posed 
 on earth he looked and said, " O God, is there 
 no room yonder for a little fellow? " There 
 was no room for his childhood on earth; no 
 room for his play; no room for his 
 education; no room for his happy little 
 heart. All these had been stolen by a selfish 
 humanity. 
 
 This shadow of blasted childhood falls also 
 upon the thousands of boys and girls every night 
 in the theaters. Boys without homes receive in 
 these galleries the larger part of their training. 
 
THE SHADOWS FROM THE FOOTLIGHTS. 113 
 
 This poison enters every drop of their blood and 
 goes to every part of their life. The newsboys 
 and other boys, by the thousand, spend their time 
 and their money to see that which a respectable 
 government should forever abolish. 
 
 I was in New York city in one of the low 
 theaters and witnessed the semi-nudity of 
 womanhood, and in this same place were hun- 
 dreds of men and boys, nearly all under twenty 
 years of age, breathing this impure air and then 
 passing out of the theaters into the midnight 
 hour and into the dance hall and dens of vice and 
 into the saloon near these places. Will you 
 answer me? Why does the best theater have 
 right next door, and as a part of the institution, 
 that low, mean saloon, and upstairs a billiard 
 hall, the very resort of cut-throats, thieves, 
 topers, pimps, and the very lowest specimens of 
 humanity. Why these accessories? These 
 accessories the theaters must have, and by their 
 fruits and their companions ye shall know them. 
 
 Some years ago when a distinguished man 
 undertook an investigation of the under-world 
 of New York city, he started out one evening at 
 ten o'clock. The detective officer who accom- 
 panied him said to him: " It is only ten o'clock, 
 
ii4 
 
 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 and it is too early to see the places that we wish 
 to see, for the theaters have not let out." The 
 gentleman said, " What do you mean by that? " 
 " Well," he said, " the places of iniquity are not 
 in full blast until after the people have time to 
 arrive from the theaters." In that single reply 
 of this police officer we are brought face to face 
 with the terrible fact that the sum total of the 
 influences of our theaters to-day is overwhelm- 
 ingly evil, and evil in its immediate result as well 
 as its ultimate tendencies. 
 
 A veteran officer, thirty years ago, amid a rain 
 of bullets and the bursting of shells, far up 
 among the rocks of Missionary Ridge, shouted 
 to his soldiers: "Come on! come on!" That 
 was the most desperate deed of the war. Grant, 
 who was present and looking on, said to Sheri- 
 dan: "Did you order that charge?" "No," 
 said Sheridan, " they are doing it themselves." 
 There are orders that go straight to the hearts 
 of men, unheard by mortal ears. They are the 
 sublimest orders that ever ear heard upon earth; 
 orders which come silently to your heart, telling 
 you to go on up a more blood-stained spot than 
 that of Missionary Ridge. They say, " Go on, 
 go on!" not to save the flag, but to save 
 
THE SHADOWS FROM THE FOOTLIGHTS. 
 
 thousands and hundreds of thousands of 
 our fellow-men. When those four million 
 slaves had the shackles fall from their hands 
 and their feet, they did not experience 
 more than many thousands of our fellow- 
 men ought to experience by our more courage- 
 ous efforts. If it means sacrifice, I say, in 
 the name of God and humanity, be willing to 
 sacrifice. 
 
 The footlights cast many another shadow, but 
 none more dark than the one of irreverence. 
 The wit which is flying across the stage is like an 
 arrow feathered from almost every obscene bird; 
 it is blasphemy. There is also mocking of that 
 which is most sacred. How many times are 
 witnessed, on the stage, hands clasped, eyes 
 heavenward and prayer uttered to Almighty 
 God, and the very lightning stroke of heaven's 
 justice, it seems, ought to have closed the lips 
 in eternal silence. Think of the nightly offense 
 to a merciful God in the theaters of the great 
 city. The most sacred things of earth are 
 dragged over the board. 
 
 In the presence of a great audience of men and 
 boys I saw a stage crowded with semi-nude 
 women, and all they appeared there for was 
 
Ii6 MID XI GUT W A GREAT CITY. 
 
 to display their forms and their daring im- 
 modesty and disgusting indelicacy. In their 
 shocking lack of apparel they moved about in 
 dances for hours and then sang: 
 
 " My country, 'tis of thee, 
 Sweet Land of Liberty." 
 
 Yes, " Land of liberty." License instead of 
 liberty; liberty to break the law, to increase 
 the impurity of earth, and to show that there 
 were some of humankind who claimed the name 
 of woman and who had lost the last spark of the 
 delicacy of womanhood. When they sang: 
 
 " Our father's God to Thee, 
 Author of liberty, 
 To Thee we sing," 
 
 I felt the chills creeping up my spinal column 
 until they seemed to paralyze my entire mortal 
 frame, and I wondered if God would allow any- 
 one to come out of that home of blasphemy 
 alive. That hymn which sixty millions of people 
 love — that best of national hymns, that praise of 
 Almighty God — was sung in such a place as that. 
 Blasphemy, extreme: blasphemy, born in hell; 
 blasphemy, taught by the devils; blasphemy 
 
THE SHADOWS FROM THE FOOTLIGHTS. 117 
 
 created to ruin and wreck immortal souls; blas- 
 phemy, the disgrace of civilization! 
 
 " The theater was, from the very first, 
 The favorite haunt of sin, though honest men — 
 Some very honest, wise, and worthy men — 
 Maintained that it might be turned to good account ; 
 And so it might, but never was. 
 From first to last it was an evil place, 
 And now such things are acted there as make 
 The devils blush, and from the neighborhood 
 Angels and holy men tremblingly retire." 
 
 The greatest tragedy ever enacted was when 
 the Son of God died upon the cross to save a 
 lost, sinful, theater-going world. We repeat the 
 awful scenes of that hour by crucifying Him 
 afresh in our rejection of His infinite love. The 
 earth is the theater. The sky is its dome. The 
 stars are its thousand-candled chandeliers. 
 The brooks and birds and all the voices of nature 
 are the orchestra. The flowers and trees are its 
 decorations. The grass is the emerald axmin- 
 ster and velvet. The clouds rich with color are 
 its drapery and curtains. The beauties and 
 splendor of a world are its scenery. You are the 
 actor. The tragedy of this hour is " The refusal 
 of Christ." 
 
 The immortal Lincoln, when he wrote the 
 
Ii8 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 Emancipation Proclamation and attempted to 
 sign his name to it, in the presence of Stanton 
 said: " I don't know what is the matter with me 
 to-day; my hand trembles so that I cannot 
 write. The excitement which I have gone 
 through during these days and weeks has been 
 too great for me, and it seems as if I cannot write. 
 I want it said, when this document goes down 
 to history, that I was not afraid. If the hand 
 trembles, they will say I was too cowardly 
 about it." He started again and then stopped 
 and walked across the floor, and then he went 
 back, sat down, and with a bold hand wrote, 
 " Abraham Lincoln." He said, " Stanton, that 
 will do. That is the best act my hand ever 
 did." 
 
 God has given you your emancipation procla- 
 mation to sign. Do not hesitate; do not hesi- 
 tate! Sit down before Heaven and earth and 
 write it down in bold letters — write your own 
 name. And then the Son of God will come 
 and retrace the lines with His own finger, and 
 your blackened ink will appear in the crimson 
 of His own blood. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE FOGS OF IGNORANCE. 
 
 It was a beautiful day in early summer, the 
 train was thundering on its way through the 
 country, the quiet stream glided merrily at 
 its side, the whole valley was made perfect by 
 the handiwork of the creator, Spring. I let the 
 book fall and turned my eyes to drink in the 
 beauty of that magnificent landscape and to 
 regret its passing so quickly from vision. The 
 fields were beginning to copy the sea in their 
 waves of golden grain. The meadows were 
 preparing for the music of the reaper's scythe. 
 The hillsides were all crowned with emerald 
 glory. The daisies and buttercups made the 
 world a veritable flower garden. The flocks and 
 herds dotted the field and rested beneath the 
 welcome shade. The sky above was one great 
 expanse of sapphire glory. Above the rumble 
 and roar of the old iron horse and his following 
 n 9 
 
120 
 
 MIDXIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 train, one could almost hear the delightful 
 harmony of bird song and brook warble and 
 the ten-thousand-voiced chorus of nature. The 
 whole scene was the perfection of earth's beauty 
 and a reflection of the upper world. In it could 
 be seen something of the gardens of God and the 
 silver river and the trees and flowers and music 
 of heaven. I became almost entranced, and for- 
 got the passing of moments into hours, when 
 suddenly, in the distance beneath the sheltering 
 hill, I saw a little red schoolhouse, with a small 
 American flag flying from its roof. I forgot all 
 else and fastened my gaze upon it alone as I 
 said, " That is the most beautiful feature in all 
 this landscape, and one of earth's greatest 
 glories." The eyes of men and angels alike rest 
 longer and more lovingly upon that sacred spot 
 than upon all its surroundings. Neither the 
 beauty of our country nor its wealth depends as 
 much upon waving grain or dancing stream or 
 richest meadow or silver-lined hills or golden 
 centered mountains, as they do on the little red 
 schoolhouse built by the hand of God, just as 
 certainly as the mountains at its side or the sky 
 above its flag. I never see it standing anywhere 
 on the soil of this free land but my heart beats 
 
THE FOGS OF IGNORANCE. 121 
 
 faster, and my brain grows clearer, and my pro- 
 phetical ability has reached perfection in the 
 declaration of the greater glory and the everlast- 
 ing triumph of our institutions. 
 
 In the fogs and darkness of the great city the 
 public school stands as the electric plant, and by 
 its light I can see my way out of unhindered 
 pessimism into the day-dawn of unclouded 
 optimism. These magnificent institutions are 
 the great levelers of American society, the great 
 makers of citizen kings, the great preservers of 
 the ballot scepter. Their sanctity must be 
 strongly emphasized in this day of supreme need 
 and supreme peril. There are enemies sur- 
 rounding them in the centers of population, and 
 there must be patriotic defenders to protect them 
 from every danger. We have heard of London 
 fogs and have seen them settle down with all 
 their thick darkness and dampness upon the 
 millions of humankind. But there is a fog 
 just as dense and more to be dreaded, settling 
 down upon the American city. I mean the 
 " fogs of ignorance." There are thousands and 
 hundreds of thousands of people in the very 
 metropolis of this land living in ignorance — 
 ignorance of our institutions; ignorance of our 
 
122 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 customs; ignorance of our history; ignorance 
 of the first elements of a common education; 
 ignorance even of our common schools. In this 
 very fact lies one of the strongest menaces to 
 our government. This undisputed fact in 
 city life is due to various causes. The popula- 
 tion has become so largely foreign. Immi- 
 grants once came to our shores from the Old 
 World from a different motive, and of a different 
 quality and in far smaller numbers. In the early 
 years of our history they were counted by the 
 hundreds, and then by the thousands, and now 
 by the hundreds of thousands and almost millions 
 yearly, and largely dwelling in the low districts 
 of the great cities. There is a veritable Babel 
 built in these centers. All languages of the 
 earth are spoken, and we are meeting the same 
 difficulty that the great statesman Nehemiah 
 met when the children of his kingdom spoke 
 half in the language of Ashdod, because of their 
 foreign relations. He was once as meek as 
 Moses, but now, in view of this startling condi- 
 tion, he placed no fetters upon his righteous 
 wrath. He proclaimed that indignation in bold- 
 est terms and inflicted severest penalties for such 
 a criminal offense. He was more wise and more 
 
THE FOGS OF IGNORANCE. 123 
 
 patriotic than most of our statesmen. The off- 
 spring of this foreign marriage was ignorance — 
 a result almost as disastrous as the calamity of 
 an English duke or an Italian count marrying 
 into American blood. 
 
 When education is hindered the most vital 
 part of national life is poisoned. The gates to 
 this continent should not be closed to any man, 
 woman, or child who comes from any part of the 
 earth and comes to be an intelligent, patriotic 
 American citizen. But when the thousands are 
 landed upon these shores to take up their abode 
 in the Italian quarter, and the Greek quarter, and 
 the German quarter, and the Chinese quarter of 
 the city, and to become Irish-Americans, and 
 German-Americans, and Italian-Americans, 
 there should be a wall of hindrance placed some- 
 where. Not America for Americans, but 
 America for all who will become Americans. 
 One flag, one country, and one school at its 
 gateway. 
 
 Some part of this fog is caused by the lack 
 of school accommodation. Rapidly increasing 
 numbers and thieving political hands have caused 
 this dire calamity. Thousands and tens of thou- 
 sands of children are turned away from the 
 
124 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 school doors every year for want of room. Five 
 thousand were thus dealt with this year in 
 Brooklyn on the opening day, and ten thousand 
 could be taught only half time. In New York 
 city the condition is far more appalling. Politi- 
 cians are carrying this blood money in their 
 pockets to-day. That which should have right- 
 fully been given for the building and enlarging 
 of public schools has been paid for fast horses 
 and elegant mansions. This is one answer to 
 the question, "Where did he get it?" And 
 where did many another member of the conniv- 
 ing and crimson-stained rings of the city get it? 
 They stole it from this most sacred fund, and now 
 we suffer and the children are robbed of their 
 rights to an education. Red hands have held this 
 budget and squeezed almost its entire value into 
 the pockets of public thieves. The city govern- 
 ment might appropriately rub " In God we 
 trust " from its money, and stamp into the silver 
 this more appropriate and more truthful state- 
 ment, " The fool and his money are soon 
 parted." 
 
 The administrators of these great cities are 
 employing just about as much wisdom in the 
 building of schools, as the county commissioners 
 
THE FOGS OF IGNORANCE. 1 25 
 
 did who resolved to build a new jail, They re- 
 solved: (1) to build a new jail; (2) to build it 
 out of the bricks used in the old one; (3) to keep 
 the prisoners in the old one while they built the 
 new one; (4) to build the new one on the site 
 where the old one now stands. That absurdity 
 is no more monstrous and that fool-logic is no 
 more climactic than that of our authorities 
 before the unparalleled need and unmeas- 
 ured peril in the lack of school accommoda- 
 tion. A father in this city recently brought 
 suit against the authorities for refusing his 
 eleven-year-old boy the privileges of the public 
 school. But the courts manipulated the case in 
 favor of a vile system and an un-American 
 policy, while the father was left, with ten 
 thousand others, to mourn his boy's de- 
 privation. If the city refuses to admit 
 the boy to its school for one year or three 
 years, it has deprived him of those years' privi- 
 lege forever. He can never retrace his steps. 
 The advantage has been turned into disadvant- 
 age, and ignorance has become his inheritance 
 in this free land. Education has been considered 
 of such vital importance that a compulsory law 
 stands upon our statue-books, but in many 
 
126 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 cities it has become a compulsory farce. What 
 folly there is in a compulsory law when there is 
 no place into which to compel the children to go ! 
 
 There is also a religious or rather irreligious 
 enemy, before the doors of these institutions 
 which are fundamental to the safety of our liber- 
 ties and the advance of our prosperity. The 
 effort on the part of Rome to batter down these 
 stones and bricks has not ceased. Both pub- 
 licly and privately that traitorous work is going 
 on, and will go on as long as the principles that 
 govern that Church remain about its throne. It 
 denounces these schools as secular and godless 
 and infidel, without one particle of foundation 
 for the use of such vile epithets. It is still 
 struggling with most intense and too often suc- 
 cessful efforts in these cities to turn the public 
 money appropriated for public schools into the 
 channel of support for parochial schools. It 
 attempts to manipulate the management of our 
 public schools and to mutilate the text-books. 
 In the secret assaults constantly made upon the 
 public schools their hold is weakened on the 
 hearts of the people. In the great Cathedral in 
 New York city, from the most important pulpit 
 in the Catholic Church in America, the public 
 
THE FOGS OF IGNORANCE. 127 
 
 school was recently denounced and deep-dyed 
 sin declared to be resting on the souls of 
 parents who dared to send their children to these 
 godless institutions, while, from another of 
 their highest stations, comes the bishop's decla- 
 ration that no one can be admitted to the sacra- 
 ments who sends his children to the public 
 school. Oh, what a mighty enemy is here found 
 to enlightenment and to the development of citi- 
 zen kings from these great cities, where such a 
 vast proportion of the population belongs to a 
 church which openly avows itself to be the 
 enemy of the schools ! Of this church, in regard 
 to its educational methods, Victor Hugo so 
 truthfully said, in one of his famous speeches, 
 " You claim the liberty of teaching. Stop; be 
 sincere; let us understand the liberty you claim. 
 You wish us to give you the people to instruct. 
 Very well, let us see your pupils. Let us see 
 those you have produced. What have you done 
 for Italy? What have you done for Spain? 
 For centuries you have kept in your hands, at 
 your discretion, in your schools these two great 
 nations, illustrious among the illustrious. What 
 have you done for them? I shall tell you. 
 Italy, which taught mankind to read, now knows 
 
MIDNIGHT aV A GREAT CITY. 
 
 not how to read. Yes; Italy is, of all the states 
 of Europe, that where the smallest numbers 
 know how to read. Spain, magnificently en- 
 dowed; Spain, which received from the Romans 
 her first civilization, from the Arab her second 
 civilization, from Providence, in spite of you, a 
 world — America; S >ain, thanks to you, rests 
 under a yoke of stupor v/hich is a yoke of degra- 
 dation and decay. Spain has lost the secret of 
 power it obtained from the Romans, the genius 
 of art it had from the Arabs, the world it had 
 from God; and in exchange for that you have 
 made it lose it has received from you the Inqui- 
 sition, which certain of your party tried to-day 
 to re-establish; which has burned on the funeral 
 pile millions of men; the Inquisition which dis- 
 interred the dead to burn them as heretics; which 
 declared the children of heretics infamous and 
 incapable of any public honors, excepting only 
 those who shall have denounced their fathers. 
 This is what you have done for two great nations. 
 What do you wish to do for France? Stop; 
 you have just come from Rome. I congratu- 
 late you; you have had fine success there; you 
 have come from gagging the Roman people and 
 
THE FOGS OF IGNORANCE. 1 29 
 
 now you wish to gag the French people. Take 
 care; France is a lion, and is alive." 
 
 May America echo that same sentiment until 
 it sounds through, every street of the city, and 
 into every hamlet, and re-echoes from mountain 
 top to mountain top and becomes a part of the 
 music which sounds across this great continent, 
 from Atlantic seaboard to Pacific slope. Before 
 this bold enemy we must stand unflinchingly 
 until the sword drops from his palsied hand. 
 We must learn his treachery, concealed or re- 
 vealed. It is always the same Trojan horse, and 
 within his unsuspected frame is concealed the 
 assassin of our free schools. Any voice which 
 speaks of them disparagingly is the voice of a 
 traitor and must be silenced, if security and pros- 
 perity are to be insured. The superstructure 
 of this republic rests upon these schools as its 
 foundation stones. If they are made to crumble, 
 the palace itself must be weakened and at last 
 be dust. 
 
 A large part of our glory has been in our uni- 
 versal intelligence. Let that intelligence dis- 
 appear and ignorance take its place in these 
 great masses of people, and more frightful 
 
130 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 results will follow than human mind can proph- 
 esy. But the pages of history can furnish us 
 with some idea of what it may be. The marvel 
 of other nations of the world has been that this 
 nation has been able to endure and prosper 
 under what they have called " a mob govern- 
 ment." But our fathers founded this govern- 
 ment upon free boys and free brains, and in that 
 is our future hope. Let the foreigners come and 
 let the city grow. If we can only gather their 
 children out of the " fogs of ignorance " into 
 the clear atmosphere of the public school, we 
 are safe. When Antipater demanded fifty chil- 
 dren as hostages from the Spartans, they offered 
 him instead one hundred men of distinction; 
 and in that act the Spartans revealed their wis- 
 dom. Our strength too is in the children — that 
 mighty on-coming host of citizen kings, edu- 
 cated to wield their scepters wisely and well. 
 
 I read of two sons of Erin's Isle, who had 
 naturalization papers in their pockets and the 
 sanctity of the ballot-box in their hands; when 
 they were walking down the tracks of the Balti- 
 more and Ohio Railroad they came to a mile- 
 post upon which was printed "108 miles to Balti- 
 more." One of them said, " You must tread 
 
THE FOGS OF IGNORANCE. 13 1 
 
 lightly here; a very old man is buried in this 
 American soil. His name is Miles; he is from 
 Baltimore, and he is 108 years old." The Ameri- 
 can citizen should know the difference between 
 a milepost and a tombstone, and the only factor 
 in our life to produce that right knowledge and 
 to preserve our government is the public school. 
 When I think of that critical hour when Sumter 
 was fired upon and Lincoln's appeal to the 
 people was heard, I invariably think of the 
 schoolhouses which dotted this land and which 
 made the strength of that people which pre- 
 served union and liberty. There they were 
 educated to make that glorious response: 
 
 " If you look across the hilltops that meet the northern sky, 
 Long lines of moving dust your vision may descry ; 
 And now the wind an instant tears the misty veil aside ; 
 Up floats our royal banner in glory and in pride. 
 And bayonets in the sunlight gleam, brave hands their 
 music pour, 
 
 We're coming, Father Abraham, six hundred thousand 
 more." 
 
 They are the schoolhouses on which to-day 
 the Stars and Stripes are seen and in which 
 patriotism is taught and American ideas and 
 principles are instilled in the young minds and 
 hearts; where manners and morality are learned 
 
13 2 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 as well as mathematics and geography; where 
 Anti-Cigarette Leagues are formed and tem- 
 perance instruction is furnished; where many 
 of the best minds and noblest hearts are the 
 teachers; where the rich and poor, the high and 
 low, the foreign and American-born reach the 
 same level, and receive the same benefits, and are 
 cemented into the one common bond of union. 
 From these God-planned and Heaven-blessed 
 institutions there is coming forth a vast army 
 to respond to any call of duty, and to meet any 
 enemy that sets foot upon this free soil, and to 
 plant our banners triumphantly upon every hill- 
 top, from North to South, from East to West. 
 What a stupendous obligation rests upon these 
 teachers, and what a magnificent opportunity is 
 dropped from the skies to fall at their feet; the 
 privilege and power to mold this plastic ma- 
 terial into the proper shape, so that the hand can 
 hold the scepter and the brow can hold the crown 
 of citizen kings. This demand for education 
 should not become a danger. Mind must be 
 kept in its proper relation to the rest of the boy. 
 It is first, Will himself; it is second, Will's 
 body; it is third, Will's mind. That must for- 
 ever be the order. Character first; health sec- 
 
THE FOGS OF IGNORANCE. 133 
 
 ond; intellect last, but intellect not neglected. 
 Finishing education in our schools means some- 
 times, alas! the finishing of the child. Work 
 should not be too hard, hours should not be 
 too many, rooms should not be too crowded, 
 brains should not be too racked. The saddest 
 sight on earth is the old-man boy and the 
 old-woman girl. School must not burn up the 
 exuberance of health, nor the force of char- 
 acter. This must be counted among dangers 
 and a part of the fog. May this or no other 
 stealthy enemy share in the destruction of the 
 school power! May men learn more deeply the 
 lesson that our public schools must be increased 
 and preserved at all hazards and that their every 
 enemy, secular or religious, must be routed! If 
 smoke must come in the place of fog, we will 
 have smoke. Bunker Hill and Gettysburg and 
 Antietam, and many more, were too dear a price 
 to pay for that which we possess to-day, to allow 
 it ever to be taken away by the hand of the 
 enemy. 
 
 To decide who was to hold and who was to 
 occupy Chattanooga, was fought the battle of 
 Chickamauga. General Thomas held the road 
 which was the pivotal point, and the Graycoats 
 
134 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 were coming upon him with unexampled fury. 
 The Blue line had been broken. In that fearful 
 hour of peril Rosecrans must have a message 
 reach Thomas. The only possible way was 
 through McFarland's Gap — a distance of eight 
 miles. He commanded General Garfield and 
 two or three orderlies to make that most danger- 
 ous journey. Without a moment's hesitation 
 Garfield mounted his noble horse and started, as 
 most of them thought, to his death. At any 
 turn in the dark pathless wood or the river valley, 
 they might come upon the enemy. At last the 
 road was scarcely more than a lane; on the one 
 side was a thick wood, and on the other side an 
 open cotton field. No troops were in sight and 
 they galloped at a rapid pace. Suddenly from 
 out of the wood a volley of rifle balls, as thick as 
 hail, fell among them. Horses were killed, and 
 two orderlies were stretched lifeless on the 
 ground. Garfield was mounted on a magnifi- 
 cent horse, which knew his master's hand. He 
 instantly turned to the left and leaped the fence 
 into the cotton field. The opposite side of the 
 lane was lined with Longstreet's skirmishers and 
 sharpshooters, and a single glance told him they 
 were loading for another volley. Pressing his 
 
THE FOGS OF IGNORANCE. 135 
 
 lips firmly together he said to himself, " Now is 
 your time. Be a man, James Garfield." He 
 touched the rein, the trained beast heeded that 
 touch, and with spurs in his side he took a zig- 
 zag course across the cotton field. It was his 
 only chance. A steady aim upon him meant 
 death. It was up an inclined plain of about four 
 hundred yards. If he could pass the crest he 
 would be safe. But the Gray soldiers could load 
 and fire twice in that time. Up the slope he 
 went, when another volley thundered its deadly 
 missiles all about him. His horse was struck, 
 but the noble animal only leaped forward the 
 faster. Another volley echoed along the hill 
 when he was only halfway over the crest. He 
 tore down the slope in triumph, when a small 
 body of Bluecoats galloped forward to meet 
 him. Colonel McCook shouted, " My God, 
 Garfield! I thought you were killed certain. 
 How you escaped is a miracle." He did not 
 hesitate. Four miles more must be passed 
 through plowed fields and tangled forests be- 
 fore he could reach Thomas. The wounded 
 horse plunged forward with the spirit of a lion. 
 At last Garfield came within sight of Thomas, 
 while over him was sweeping a storm of leaden 
 
136 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 fire. Shot and shell plowed up the ground, but, 
 as he saw Thomas, he halted in the midst of the 
 storm and with uplifted arm shouted, " There he 
 is. God bless the old hero! He has saved the 
 army." In a moment more the two men fell 
 into each other's arms, while the noble horse, 
 struck by another bullet, staggered a step or two 
 and fell dead at their feet. 
 
 The public schools by the roadsides are 
 pivotal points in the salvation of our great cities. 
 O God, give us all the soul of the heroic general, 
 and the martyred president and the enthroned 
 Garfield! 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE BLACKNESS OF IMPURITY. 
 
 When the pure white garments of a winter's 
 morning have been wrapped about our world by 
 the attendants of nature, one of the most beauti- 
 ful pictures is presented to the human vision, and 
 even angels must look out of the windows of the 
 upper world to see this copy of their white robes. 
 Were there ever such purity and sparkling beauty 
 on earth? When that little snowflake traveler 
 makes its long journey from the skies to coat or 
 fence or porch or street, it seems as if some of the 
 crystal glory must have been brushed from the 
 •walls of the eternal city. It sparkles with daz- 
 zling brightness under the rays of the morning 
 sun. It seems like one of ten thousand dia- 
 monds scattered in the pathway of the Queen of 
 night. It is a very milky way of stars for human 
 feet to tread. Every naked limb of tree even 
 is transformed into a jewel-studded scepter, and 
 crowns are placed upon many a lowly brow. 
 
 137 
 
13$ MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 I saw the impurity of the city's streets com- 
 pletely hidden beneath the glory of these count- 
 less messengers of purity from the heavenly 
 world. I paused at the midnight hour to be 
 enraptured by such a wondrous transformation. 
 I arose in the morning to find that amazing 
 whiteness stained and the flashing jewels dead- 
 ened. Already the smoke and dust and wind of 
 the great city had begun to do their blackening 
 deed. From cradle and country a vast amount 
 of purity enters the city life. Real snowflake 
 messengers from another world, but alas! alas! 
 how quickly the evil forces of the destroyer cover 
 them and mingle them with the foulness of im- 
 purity. The crystals of thought and word and 
 deed are crushed beneath its cruel hoof and the 
 wheels of its commerce. They are buried by its 
 black dust and destroyed by its heartless servants. 
 These hostile forces are the feet of the harpies 
 of darkness, the rush of business through the 
 streets, the scattered fragments of broken law, 
 the soot of heart and brain factories, the mud of 
 unjust discrimination. 
 
 This blackness of impurity in the great centers 
 of population is beyond all human comprehen- 
 sion, and is something astounding to those who 
 
THE BLACKNESS OF IMPURITY. 139 
 
 have investigated the extent of this large part of 
 the dominions of hell. An estimate of the num- 
 ber of the fortifications of this iniquity is impos- 
 sible. An attempt to estimate the number of 
 the so-called " abandoned " is folly. It is the 
 blackest of all sin and is hidden in its own dark- 
 ness, which is the darkness of perdition. In the 
 lightning flashes of that cloud and the rumbling 
 of its thunders some revelations are made. 
 Thousands of wrecks are along the shore, thou- 
 sands of victims are falling beneath its awful 
 wave, thousands of pathetic cries are heard, and 
 thousands of immortal souls are ruined. I have 
 seen in the highest and lowest places of the city 
 these harpies of darkness treading upon the 
 purity of the innocent boys and girls, not willing 
 to pause in their path of ruin until they had 
 crushed out the whiteness of other lives. I have 
 witnessed their diabolism with my own eyes, and 
 have seen them luring innocency into that down- 
 ward path and to the edge of that bottomless pit. 
 These unhallowed fires must have fuel, and some 
 of it is coming out of the best homes in city 
 and country. His Satanic majesty must have 
 the boys and girls, and how infinitely sad the 
 thought that they might be ours. I walked 
 
140 MIDXIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 along the Bowery at one o'clock in the morning 
 and saw scores and hundreds of these harpies 
 inveigling the boys into their dens and educating 
 the girls in their vice. Every method con- 
 ceivable was used, from astonishing boldness to 
 dove-like innocency. All the machinations of 
 demon genius were displayed for the purpose of 
 ruin. The spiders wove their webs in every 
 direction, and the flies thought they were parlors. 
 The streets were almost impassable because of 
 this crowded, infernal purpose. 
 
 I saw her who was created as pure as an 
 angel — made in the image and likeness of God — 
 the last and best of His handiwork — fall so low 
 as to be in the Chinese opium dens, to bury her 
 purity in that deepest grave. Mine eyes almost 
 refused to look upon our American girls in such 
 depths. And some of them had stood upon the 
 very heights of the social world before they fell 
 into the chasm. I discovered that there were 
 those who had come from the best of homes, and 
 had taught in Sunday-schools the story of the 
 Cross, and knew as well as I how to say " Blessed 
 are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." I 
 heard such sob and say, 
 
THE BLACKNESS OF IMPURITY. 141 
 
 " Once I was pure as the snow, but I fell — 
 Fell like a snowflake, from Heaven to Hell — 
 Fell, to be trampled as filth on the street — 
 Fell, to be scoffed at, spit on, and beat ; 
 Praying, cursing, wishing to die, 
 Selling my soul to whoever would buy. 
 Dealing in shame for a morsel of bread ; 
 Hating the living and fearing the dead." 
 
 The like is also true of many of the young 
 men who frequent the vilest haunts of the city 
 and whose associates at times are sickening. 
 He is a lecherous scoundrel now who once 
 folded his little hands at mother's knee and 
 learned sweetest lessons from her pure lips and 
 life. In the dance-hall or public hall is usually 
 found the primary department of this school of 
 vice. A Catholic priest has said that, " The 
 secrets of the confessional revealed that nearly 
 all the fallen women were victims of the dance." 
 The Chief of Police in New York city has said, 
 " Three-fourths of the abandoned girls of this 
 city were ruined by dancing." 
 
 I have seen some results from these places 
 which now make me the subject of old-fashioned 
 chills and fever: chills of horror first and fever 
 of indignation afterward. I am not writing 
 concerning the parlor dance or graceful motions 
 
I4 2 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 of the body to the sounds of music, but of the 
 dissolute dance of the hidden and public place. 
 They were planned in the lower world, and the 
 suggestion is working with tremendous effect on 
 this planet. It is a whirl which becomes swifter 
 and swifter until the victim is hurled over the 
 precipice into the dark, foul depths of impurity 
 from whence another Dante might get his illus- 
 trations for another " Inferno." These resorts 
 are the homes of moral lepers, and at their touch 
 the unsuspecting are made leprous. Vultures 
 of black wing and bloody beak fly through the 
 circles and squares. The associations are vile 
 and the motives to be condemned. In high and 
 low alike the most attractively dressed are the 
 most conspicuously undressed. In some in- 
 stances the skirts do not answer to the roll call of 
 garments, and in others the upper dress does 
 not respond. The first Baptist minister lost his 
 head through this kind of dancing, but neverthe- 
 less I do not hesitate to cry out against it, and I 
 declare first, last, and always that it is damnable 
 and the very doorway to the houses of blackness 
 of darkness. 
 
 Tennyson immortalized the charge of the 
 Light Brigade. Only a few of the six hun- 
 
THE BLACKNESS OF IMPURITY. 143 
 
 dred came back from those Muscovite guns, and 
 the fearful havoc was wrought in twenty-five 
 minutes. The field was covered with dead and 
 dying men and horses. That illustrates the 
 short fight of life and the tremendous heat of the 
 battle in the city, and how few come out un- 
 scarred. The increasing rush for gold, and the 
 barbarous selfishness which forces young 
 women to work in stores and factories for star- 
 vation wages, have much to do with the increase 
 of the number of the fallen. Scarcely enough 
 wages is paid to keep life in the body. How 
 shall she clothe herself respectably? That is 
 often the problem, and unsolved unless she has 
 the courage of the greatest hero who ever fought 
 on the blood-stained battlefields of earth. It is 
 the business world itself in our modern cities 
 which is responsible for the mingling of these 
 snow crystals with the mud of the streets. The 
 trucks of commerce are thundering their doom 
 as the heavy wheels roll along the pavements. 
 The beginning of ruin is often at the counter or 
 machine, and the employer is indirectly and 
 sometimes directly accountable. God pity the 
 despairing soul in its struggle to keep its physi- 
 cal home pure! The mad rush for money has 
 
144 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 destroyed many a father's opportunity in his 
 home to save his own children from this terrible 
 fate. The parental duty is forgotten. They neg- 
 lected to give the counsel and the companion- 
 ship and the care necessary to the safety of 
 every family. The business of the city must be 
 made to bow at the throne of character and 
 render obeisance to the scepter of purity. 
 
 This whiteness is soiled also by the soot from 
 heart and brain factories; heart and brain of 
 self and heart and brain of others. What we are 
 depends upon what we think, and what we 
 think depends upon what we see and hear and 
 read. The eyes that rest upon the impure pic- 
 tures of paper, or card, or theater posters are the 
 doorways to an evil heart. Many theaters, in 
 picture and reality, are in the city the destroyers 
 of all that is sweet and sacred in human hearts. 
 Many pictorial papers and periodicals are the 
 devil's arch-murderers of the pure. Many of 
 the stories and expressions carried on the waves 
 of earth's air, from some lips to other ears, are 
 most disastrous in their results. Many of the 
 newspapers, with their columns of scandal and 
 crime, are the evil agencies which reach the 
 greatest number and do the greatest harm. 
 
THE BLACKNESS OF IMPURITY. 145 
 
 These lengthened and embellished accounts of 
 the lowest and vilest happenings are scattered 
 by the million and at the lowest price. They lie 
 on the house table and in the office and hotel 
 and store and car, and " lie " everywhere. The 
 toiler has that for his daily diet and never reads 
 anything else. The idler feeds his hungry soul 
 at its table and fairly gormandizes its poison, 
 sweet to his taste. The popular literature 
 of the newsstands to-day is stamped with 
 the same characteristic of impurity and is a 
 mighty factor in the education of the young. 
 From all these brain and heart factories the soot 
 falls upon city life and discolors it. The scat- 
 tered fragments of broken law accomplish the 
 same purpose — the evil is hidden, but it is mov- 
 ing on in triumph. The officials scarcely do 
 anything toward its suppression, and many of 
 these sworn to enforce this law are in complicity 
 with its violators. When they say they are igno- 
 rant, they are guilty of the greatest negligence 
 or basest falsehood; presumably the latter. 
 
 I have seen buildings six stories high and one 
 hundred feet front, with a white card in every 
 window and upon every door, " To Let " — but 
 those cards had been there for five years and the 
 
146 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 great building was swarming with the harpies 
 of darkness and their consorts. The saloons 
 have additions and upper stories. These houses 
 stand on the streets by the score, known and un- 
 molested. There are hotels by name which are 
 the throne of the vile goddess. I believe in the 
 gospel for the saving of every Magdalene, but 
 the law is a part of the gospel. Tracts and mis- 
 sions can accomplish but little in this cleansing 
 of human society, unless the Christian part of 
 our world has power enough to insist upon the 
 enforcement of the law. You might as well go 
 in the jungle and pat a cobra on the neck as to 
 touch most of this monster iniquity with any- 
 thing else than the shotgun method. 
 
 Unrighteous discrimination comes in contact 
 with the crystals of purity. In the white light of 
 heaven's throne a man's sin appears precisely 
 the same as a woman's, and impurity is as black 
 upon Fifth Avenue as the Bowery. The world 
 has two codes of morals, feminine and mascu- 
 line, but that distinction is not recognized in the 
 other world. Gender has no right to destroy 
 justice. The vials of wrath are poured upon the 
 heads of unfortunate women while the most 
 royal welcome is given to the man who is notori- 
 
THE BLACKNESS OF IMPURITY. 1 47 
 
 ously unclean. That is the accursed creed of 
 this hour. Injustice, injustice, basest injustice! 
 Hiss at the woman — but kiss the man! The 
 poor woman who has been sent out to shame by 
 a single misstep is despised by modern society. 
 Her masculine companion may be a moral leper 
 beneath his broadcloth, and yet soft hands clasp 
 his and bright eyes look into his and rosy lips 
 welcome him into the best homes of the city. If 
 womankind errs from the path of purity, even 
 her own sex look upon her with the meanest 
 hatred. The verdict of this world is that 
 " The crudest thing on God's green earth is 
 one woman to another." Shame! shame! a 
 thousand times shame! this sad condition and 
 its unmeasured evil in society! To call her 
 "abandoned" is unchristian and criminally 
 unjust. Souls may be lost, but they may be 
 found. Whittier's " Cry of the Lost Soul " is 
 true. The traveler in the South American for- 
 est heard the cry, and was told by his guide, " It 
 is not a bird; it is the cry of a lost soul ": 
 
 " Dim burns the boat-lamp ; shadows deep and round, 
 From giant trees with snake-like creepers wound, 
 And the black water glides without a sound. 
 But in the traveler's heart a secret sense 
 
I4§ MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 Of nature plastic to benign intents, 
 
 And, an eternal good in Providence, 
 
 Lifts to the starry calm of Heaven his eyes ; 
 
 And lo ! rebuking all earth's ominous cries, 
 
 The Cross of pardon lights the tropic skies. 
 
 " Father of all," he urges his strong plea, 
 
 " Thou lovest all ; thy erring child may be 
 
 Lost to himself, but never lost to Thee. 
 
 All souls are Thine ; the wings of morning bear 
 
 None from that Presence which is everywhere, 
 
 Nor Hell itself can hide, for Thou art there." 
 
 Six members of the New York Legislature 
 were recently arrested one night in the same 
 house of ill-fame. The courts excused them, and 
 every reception room in the Empire State is open 
 to them — but what of their associates in sin? 
 They are convicted by the courts and forever 
 abandoned by society, and even neglected by the 
 Church of Christ who Himself lifted their sis- 
 ters from the depths into which they had fallen 
 ,and bade his followers to seek and save all the 
 lost, even those whom a heartless world and an 
 unjust society ostracize. 
 
 In the story of the " Scarlet Letter," Hester 
 Prynne wears the scarlet letter on her breast, 
 and all the village knew it, while Mr. Dimmes- 
 dale wears the scarlet letter hidden by his gar- 
 ments, but burned into his bosom, and bears his 
 
THE BLACKNESS OF IMPURITY. 
 
 149 
 
 shame in his own heart. And that story closes 
 at the last, coming not to its tragical, but to its 
 resplendent conclusion. He who has struggled 
 with the threatened public shame so long con- 
 quers himself and goes up into the very pillory 
 where once she stood alone in her disgrace, and, 
 standing by her side, holds the child of their vice 
 by the hand, and confesses his sin before all 
 those that had done him honor and reverenced 
 his very footprints. When the man takes his 
 stand in the pillory by the side of the woman 
 and the scarlet letter is on the breast of the one as 
 on the breast of the other, and both alike bear the 
 shame, we shall find the remedy. When those 
 human hounds dragged the sinner into Christ's 
 presence and wanted to tear her frail form into 
 shreds and hurl stones at her until death 
 should change her torment into the torture of 
 demons, the divine lips carried condemnation to 
 their own hearts when He said: " Dare not 
 throw a single stone at her until you yourselves 
 are perfectly clean." His loving eye turned 
 upon the unfortunate soul left alone in His 
 presence. " Neither do I condemn thee, go and 
 sin no more." Oh, infinite pity! oh, love of the 
 Cross! to hate sin but to love the sinner. The 
 
150 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 snowflake falls into the impurity of earth, but 
 the forces of the upper world draw it back again 
 into the clouds. So it may be with this white- 
 ness of the immortal soul. 
 
 u Rescue the perishing, care for the dying, 
 Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave ; 
 Weep o'er the erring one, lift up the fallen ; 
 Tell them of Jesus, the mighty to save. 
 
 " Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter, 
 Feelings lie buried that grace can restore ; 
 Touched by a loving heart, wakened by kindness, 
 Chords that were broken will vibrate once more." 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE SMOKE OF FACTORIES. 
 
 I stood on an elevation overlooking the city, 
 and beheld the great black clouds of smoke 
 which arose from ten thousand chimneys and 
 covered its seething life like the darkness of a 
 shroud. They settled down upon shining dome 
 and chiseled granite, and lofty steeple and beau- 
 tiful building, and majestic ship and arching 
 bridge, until they were almost hidden from vision 
 and all their splendor was forgotten in the 
 thought of that other cloud of smoke; just as 
 real, just as black, and far more destructive of 
 beauty and life than that which rose above the 
 factories and fell upon the city like a pall: the 
 smoke which issues from the imprisoned fires of 
 the human heart instead of the iron furnace. 
 The factory smoke above the city tells of the fire 
 beneath the brick and stone struggling to break 
 its shackles and burst through those prison bars 
 151 
 
I5 2 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 and destroy the entire city itself, in one vast con- 
 flagration. The other smoke tells the same 
 story of raging fires beneath, only hindered in 
 that work of ruin by strongest guards; the 
 cement and stone of law and custom hinder the 
 furious fires from shooting forth their hungry 
 tongues and licking up the last remnants of the 
 sacred and the beautiful. I stood above the 
 clouds and from that height I saw God's sky, 
 cloudless and resplendent with its sapphire glory. 
 The music of the upper world gave me the key- 
 note, and I sang with Robert Browning: 
 
 *' Meanwhile, if I stoop 
 Into a dark, tremendous sea of cloud, 
 It is but for a time ; I pressed God's lamp 
 Close to my breast — its splendor, soon or late, 
 Will pierce the gloom ; I shall emerge one day ! 
 You understand me ? I have said enough.*' 
 
 In this great laboratory of nature I analyzed 
 some of this factory smoke, and discovered one 
 of its elements to be a false impression of labor. 
 It works an immeasurable amount of evil among 
 the so-called workingmen to have them desig- 
 nated by that term. He is not only a working- 
 man who toils with his hands; he works just as 
 much, and most often with a greater strain, who 
 
THE SMOKE OF FACTORIES. 153 
 
 works with his brains or his heart. If the one 
 man does sweat outside, the other man sweats 
 inside. It is work to push a pen as well as a 
 plane ; to study the markets as well as swing the 
 hammer; to save men as well as to sew their 
 garments. One of the breezes which will clear 
 our air of some of this sooty smoke is every 
 man's respect for every other man's labor, re- 
 spect of the man who works with his hands for 
 the man who works with his brain; and the man 
 who works with his brain is never to look down 
 upon the calloused hand. He who stands by 
 the factory machine breathes the atmosphere of 
 discontent, because of envy of the man at his 
 desk, or in his study, whom he supposes to re- 
 ceive more than his share of bread, and that 
 without earning it. It is an utterly false and 
 hostile idea of labor. Brain & Co. do success- 
 ful business because they always toil more than 
 ten hours a day, and never strike ; if they do, they 
 fail. Work is work without regard to the tools 
 a man uses. That spring of truth with its sur- 
 rounding grass and flowers would be an oasis 
 in the desert of modern society. Its shade tree 
 would be the fact that work is man's best friend 
 instead of his greatest enemy. Labor walks by 
 
154 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 man's side day by day as his guardian angel; it 
 is the protector of his entire nature; body, mind, 
 and soul are only safe in its presence. It holds 
 a glistening sword between the man and his 
 tempter. The path to ruin is the path of idleness. 
 
 In this factory smoke I discovered the exist- 
 ence of murderous perils. There are fire-traps 
 of buildings, which ought to be torn down by 
 the hands of government, and the erection of 
 their like forever forbidden. They stand by the 
 side of our streets, waiting for the opportune mo- 
 ment in which to bring sudden and awful death 
 to their unsuspecting victims. Many of these 
 factory buildings were planned by the architects 
 of hell, and built by greedy and blood-stained 
 h 4 s of earth. The least that could be done 
 for the toiling thousands would be to throw 
 about them safety, while bearing the burdens of 
 those long hours. Rarely does the question of 
 good ventilation enter into the plans. The 
 foulest air most often is there breathed by men, 
 women, and children until this sure poison has 
 done its deadly work, and the death certificate 
 tells a cruel falsehood. The unseen murderer 
 is constantly pushing his way through the 
 crowded institutions into sweat-shops and tene- 
 
THE SMOKE OF FACTORIES. 15 5 
 
 ment houses, and furnishing a large part of the 
 work for undertakers and grave-diggers. If the 
 history of the Potter's Field could be written, 
 one of its first chapters would be, " The Factory 
 Victims." There are certain kinds of factory 
 work which of themselves are known to shorten 
 life. Particles of the material used furnish the 
 strychnine and the belladonna. Much of this 
 homicide might be, and ought to be, prevented 
 by expense and skill. The utmost effort in a 
 society which is called human is not too great to 
 be exercised in this humane work. 
 
 It is time that a compulsory education was 
 instituted for the teaching of employers and offi- 
 cials. The alphabet in that school should be 
 that a human body is of infinitely more value 
 than all the wood or stone of forest and moun- 
 tain; that human blood is worth more than a 
 building of diamonds or the most precious 
 materials from the miner's hand; that a creature 
 made in the image and likeness of God is more 
 precious than the palace of God itself. 
 
 The analysis found also an evil independence 
 in the smoke. Every man is dependent on the 
 other man. That is a truth as old as the lead 
 pencil in the Boston Museum which Noah used 
 
MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 to check off the animals with when they entered 
 the Ark. Independence is absolutely impossible, 
 much less the independence between employer 
 and employee. By ignoring this fundamental 
 truth in society, a large part of the difficulties 
 now existing in the factory world is caused. 
 
 A factory-owner in Brooklyn said, " I take no 
 interest in my men, because they do not take any 
 interest in me. There is not a man of them who 
 would not leave me in the lurch to-morrow, if he 
 could get five cents more a day from some other 
 man." The clock in his office had not ticked 
 away fifteen minutes of time, before one of his 
 men in the other room said, in the same ear, 
 " We do not care anything about his interests, 
 because he would let us all go to-morrow, if he 
 could get other men to work for five cents less 
 a day." The cloud settled down until it touched 
 the very roof of that institution and shut out 
 the larger part of heaven's light. The employer's 
 welfare is wrapped up in the welfare of his 
 employees; and the employees are dependent 
 upon the interest of the employer. When the 
 capitalist owned the laborer, that was slavery. 
 When the capitalist owned the land to which 
 the laborer was attached, that was feudalism. 
 
THE SMOKE OF FACTORIES. 157 
 
 When that system was abolished, the wages sys- 
 tem was substituted. One class of men owns the 
 tools, and another class of men works with the 
 tools. The relation between these two classes — 
 the one which owns the tools, and the one which 
 works with them — is the labor question. No 
 sharp line can be drawn between them, because 
 of the innumerable cross-lines which create a 
 blessed dependence. Nor is it true that a few 
 men own all the tools and the many do all the 
 work. 
 
 There are eighteen thousand employees on the 
 Pennsylvania Railroad and nineteen thousand 
 stockholders. The savings of the workman are 
 invested in the tools of industry. The workman 
 may be the owner of one tool while working 
 with that of another. This intermingling helps 
 to create this interdependence. The one class 
 is most vitally related to the other class. The 
 interests of one, in the last analysis, are the 
 interests of the other. The welfare of society 
 depends largely upon this just recognition. 
 The chain that binds humanity together cannot 
 thus be hammered and cut with impunity. He 
 is the enemy of society and his own greatest 
 enemy who recently said, in the spirit of his 
 
158 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 Satanic Majesty, " If you employed on a large 
 scale, you would soon find that you ceased to 
 look at your men as men. They are simply so 
 much producing power. I dori't propose to 
 abuse them, but I've no time even to remember 
 their faces, much less their names." That spirit 
 was born in perdition and is implanted in the 
 hearts of thousands, and is working out into one 
 of the greatest evils of the present day. This 
 evil independence and disregard of our fellow- 
 men causes some of the blackest smoke in our 
 sky. Side by side with it floats the darkness of 
 injustice. What is more needed in the social 
 world than justice? There is a tendency to sub- 
 stitute philanthropy for justice. 
 
 The debtor calls himself a saint because he 
 is so generous, but he has simply been paying 
 his debts. Let those debts be paid in the name 
 of honesty, rather than charity. Manhood does 
 not want charity, but it craves and deserves jus- 
 tice. It has more value in it than anything else 
 for the removal of destitution, distress, and 
 despair. Just treatment, just hours, just wages, 
 just surroundings, just everything, instead of un- 
 just almsgiving. It is the one simple remedy; 
 
THE SMOKE OF FACTORIES. 159 
 
 it is the only adequate medicine; it is a positive 
 preventive. 
 
 " All hail the dawn of a new day breaking, 
 
 When a strong armed nation shall take away 
 The weary burdens from backs that are aching 
 With maximum work and minimum pay. 
 
 " When no man is honored who hoards his millions ; 
 When no man feasts on another's toil ; 
 And God's poor, suffering, starving billions 
 Shall share His riches of sun and soil. 
 
 " There is gold for all in the world's broad bosom, 
 There is food for all in the world's great store ; 
 Enough is provided, if rightly divided ; 
 
 Let each man take what he needs — no more. 
 
 " Shame on the miser with unused riches, 
 Who robs the toiler to swell his hoard ; 
 Who beats down the wage of the digger of ditches, 
 And steals the bread from the poor man's board. 
 
 4t Shame on the owner of mines whose cruel 
 
 And selfish measures have brought him wealth ; 
 While the ragged wretches who dig his fuel 
 Are robbed of comfort, and hope, and health. 
 
 " Shame on the ruler who rides in his carriage, 
 Bought by the labor of half-paid men — 
 Men who are shut out of home and marriage, 
 And are herded like sheep in a hovel pen." 
 
 Carlyle says, " Justice, Justice: woe betides us 
 everywhere when, for this reason or for that, we 
 
160 MIDXIGIIT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 fail to do justice. No beneficence, benevolence, 
 or other virtuous contribution, will make good 
 the want, and in what a rate of terrible geo- 
 metrical progression, far beyond our poor com- 
 putation, any act of injustice, once done by us, 
 grows; rooting itself ever anew, spreading ever 
 anew, like a banyan tree — blasting all life under 
 it, for it is a poison tree. There is but one thing 
 needed for the world; but that one is indispen- 
 sable. Justice, Justice, in the name of Heaven, 
 give us Justice, and we live; give us only coun- 
 terfeits of it, or succedanea for it, and we die." 
 
 We repeat his prayer at the very foot of the 
 Cross, and after our Amen we say, " May the sun 
 of that day speedily rise in our sky when there 
 shall be a just sharing in the profits of toil by 
 the means of co-operation or some other Heaven- 
 dictated plan for the relief of the toiling millions, 
 now under the scepter of cruel-hearted injus- 
 tice." When one man gets immensely rich, and 
 the other man gets starvingly poor in the same 
 factory, something is criminally wrong. 
 
 In the recent great strike in the clothing fac- 
 tories and sweat-shops, basest injustice was re- 
 vealed. It was a strike for life. No, not for life, 
 but a mere existence. The daily paper said of 
 
THE SMOKE OF FACTORIES. 
 
 161 
 
 these oppressed people: "They are sordid. 
 What little money they get they take home to 
 their families. They seem never to realize that 
 the first instinct of a real freeman should be to 
 drown injustice and make himself as happy as 
 a plutocrat. They stand about with yellow faces 
 and rather suspicious looks. Nearly all have 
 gray hairs, even the younger men. Few live to 
 be white-headed. They are pale, thin, and 
 hollow-chested. A policeman of average size 
 can push five or six of them along quite com- 
 fortably. Please get into your mind the picture 
 of thousands of men, who are never well fed, 
 never well housed, never able to save anything, 
 never free from care, never treated with kind- 
 ness or even humanity. Remember that they 
 live on this island, have the right to vote as you 
 have, and may need to be taken into account 
 some fine day." 
 
 A pale-faced, intelligent workman said: "I 
 have sat for twenty-eight years at the machine, 
 working from ten to sixteen hours a day. It is 
 hard on the nerves. Few men stand it as I have 
 done. They die of consumption. I am forty- 
 six, and you see how gray I am. Of course, I am 
 very strong, as you see. You did not see one 
 
1 62 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 man as big as I am among the strikers." That 
 was true. The talking striker was as big as a big 
 policeman, with a chest that had been powerful 
 before the machine made it shrink, and a face 
 unusually strong. He was an exceptional striker, 
 chosen spokesman because he could talk best for 
 the others. " We shall win this strike," he said. 
 " Of course we must win. We have India- 
 rubber stomachs. Strikers with India-rubber 
 stomachs cannot be beaten. If we get nothing 
 to eat, our stomachs shrink a little more. Our 
 children's stomachs learn to do the same." He 
 did not talk in any tone of passion or of exag- 
 geration. There is among the strikers an unfor- 
 tunate Oriental tendency to exaggerate their 
 sorrows and thus w r eaken the sympathy of more 
 exact, cold-blooded Westerners. This man was 
 free from the tendency. " Our main trouble 
 lies in the fact that our work is learned too 
 easily. In our trade a man can be taught to be 
 useful as a presser in three days. This means 
 that you can get all the pressers you want 
 from immigrant ships. Other branches of the 
 work can be taught in three weeks. I am a 
 skilled mechanic. I earn the highest wages paid 
 
THE SMOKE OF FACTORIES. 163 
 
 in the union. All that I know can be learned as 
 well as I know it in six months. Work is so 
 plentiful that manufacturers no longer make up 
 great stocks in advance. What they want is 
 made on short notice, and we have nothing to do 
 outside of the busiest season. 
 
 " The middlemen, in our opinion, make our 
 lives miserable. They get whatever profit the 
 workmen might make from the great dealers 
 and they put in the capital. A big house wants 
 five thousand garments. The middleman says, 
 ' I will make them for a dollar and a half a piece/ 
 He does it, he hires us, and he must squeeze that 
 work out of us in addition to his profit. The 
 big dealers say they cannot be bothered dealing 
 with the individual workman, and they must have 
 a sweater on whom they can rely. I suppose 
 that is so. But if they would take the trouble 
 to hire us directly, we could live at the rate they 
 pay. There is not enough for us and the middle- 
 men to live on. Sometimes the middlemen have 
 almost as hard a time to make a living by sweat- 
 ing us as we do by working. Woman's work is 
 a bad thing, of course ; it adds to the over supply 
 of labor. About wages, our work is all divided. 
 
164 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 Each man docs a small part of the garment. 
 That is what makes it so easy to teach a man the 
 trade. No wide knowledge is required. 
 
 " The principal man is the operator. He sits 
 all day at the sewing machine. He sews up the 
 coats that are given to him basted and ready. 
 He gets, under the rule for which we are fight- 
 ing, $15.00 a week for working ten hours a day. 
 Counting the dull times, he may make $9.00 a 
 week through the year, if he is a good operator 
 and machine hand. The operators supply most 
 of the consumptives. They all get to spitting 
 blood, and a great many are crippled with rheu- 
 matism because of the constant working of the 
 hands and feet. The baster, who prepares the 
 coats for the operator, is paid $13.00 a week at 
 union rates. He can average $8.00, if a good 
 man. The presser is paid $10.00 a week and 
 averages $7.00. The man finisher gets $9.00 a 
 week and averages $6.00. He bastes edges and 
 armholes, and fixes up little things. The fell- 
 hand fells the coat; that is, she does the little 
 finishing touches that must be done by hand, 
 puts on buttons, and does a little sewing here and 
 there. She averages $3.00 a week and is paid 
 
THE SMOKE OF FACTORIES. 165 
 
 $5.00 under the union. Little boys and girls 
 pull bastings for $2.00 a week. The girls who 
 work as fell hands range from sixteen to twenty- 
 six years of age." He continued, " I do not 
 suppose that anyone thinks that the present 
 system will last. Machinery and the number 
 of unemployed grow together day by day. 
 The man unemployed becomes a drunkard, 
 a thief, a tramp. There are a million and 
 a half of tramps in America. There will be 
 millions more, if things go on. Something will 
 have to be done. The rich will realize this and 
 do it. I suppose that everything will be run by 
 the government as by a big corporation, and 
 that statistics will decide how much work each 
 man must do. Men will be cared for when they 
 are too old to work. There are enough bread 
 and clothing in the country for everybody. I do 
 not believe that anybody objects to having it dis- 
 tributed in return for labor, if he himself can 
 have as much as he ever did. But all that is a 
 long way off. Just now we want to win this 
 strike and get an average pay of $6.80 a week 
 six months in the year." 
 A consumptive, round-shouldered, grave-seek- 
 
1 66 MID XI GUT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 ing man, with despair on every feature, held up 
 before me in his skeleton fingers a man's coat, 
 which he had just finished. I asked how much 
 he had received for the making of that garment, 
 and he replied, " Sixteen cents." I looked at 
 him and at the miserable surroundings of that 
 infernal sweat-shop, and then raised my eyes 
 heavenward and cried, " Oh, my God, touch this 
 most cruel injustice of earth with Thy almighty 
 scepter, and command it in the name of civiliza- 
 tion and Christianity to forever depart." A 
 friend said to me, " Out of that coat a certain 
 rich manufacturer makes his immense wealth." 
 I replied, " Yes, but his carriages roll over and 
 his horses trample upon a pavement of human 
 flesh, and his palace is built out of human skele- 
 tons, and his wife's diamonds are condensed 
 human blood." In many of our factories the 
 sharpened needle and other implements are 
 piercing through human fingers into human 
 hearts and drawing the last drop of life's blood 
 from human veins. Oh, Justice, Justice! come 
 to the throne in thy own name, by thy own 
 right. 
 
 I discovered in this chemical analysis a white 
 slavery : 
 
THE SMOKE OF FACTORIES. 
 
 167 
 
 " Slavery aint o' nairy color, 
 
 'Taint the hide that makes it wus ; 
 All it keers fer in a feller 
 
 'S jest to make him fill its pus." 
 
 I have heard the snap of the crimson lash 
 above human backs in the factories of the North, 
 as distinctly and as cruelly as it was ever heard 
 above the back of the black on the plantations of 
 the South. The slave of the South never knew 
 at least some of the bitterness of the slave in the 
 North. In poverty-stricken quarters I saw a 
 mother and daughter, with pale faces and broken 
 hearts, without a relative upon earth, compelled 
 to earn their bread in that factory branch. They 
 were making men's pants, at the devil's price of 
 $1.50 per dozen pair. By furnishing their own 
 thread and their own heat for pressing, and their 
 own machine for sewing, they could make six or 
 eight pair in a day and a part of the night. The 
 winter's wind whistled through the shattered old 
 building and I heard its mournful sound, singing: 
 
 " With fingers weary and worn, 
 With eyelids heavy and red, 
 A woman sat in unwomanly rags, 
 Plying her needle and thread — 
 
MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 Stitch, stitch, stitch, 
 
 In poverty, hunger, and dirt ; 
 And still with a voice of dolorous pitch 
 
 She sang the ' Song of the Shirt.' 
 
 ' Work, work, work, 
 
 While the cock is crowing aloof, 
 And work, work, work, 
 
 Till the stars shine through the roof. 
 It's oh, to be a slave 
 
 Along with the barbarous Turk, 
 Where woman has never a soul to save, 
 
 If this is Christian work. 
 
 1 Work, work, work, 
 
 Till the brain begins to swim ; 
 Work, work, work, 
 
 Till the eyes are heavy and dim. 
 
 ' Stitch, stitch, stitch, 
 
 In poverty, hunger, and dirt, 
 Sewing at once with a double thread, 
 A shroud as well as a shirt. 
 
 ' But why do I talk of death, 
 That phantom of grisly bone? 
 
 I hardly fear his terrible shape, 
 It seems so like my own, 
 
 Because of the fast I keep ; 
 
 O God, that bread should be so dear, 
 
 And flesh and blood so cheap. 
 
 1 Work, work, work, 
 My labor never flags ; 
 
THE SMOKE OF FACTORIES. 169 
 
 And what are its wages ? A bed of straw, 
 
 A crust of bread — and rags, 
 That shattered roof — and this naked floor — 
 
 A table — a broken chair — 
 And a wall so blank my shadow I thank, 
 
 For sometimes falling there. 
 Work, work, work, 
 
 From weary chime to chime. 
 Work, work, work, 
 
 As prisoners work for crime." 
 
 One woman recently said : " I don't see how 
 anybody can much longer keep soul and body 
 together." " We don't," said one of the other 
 women, turning suddenly. " I got rid of my 
 soul long ago, such as it was. Who's got time 
 to think about souls, grinding away here four- 
 teen hours a day to turn out contract goods? 
 'Taint souls that count. It's bodies that can 
 be driven and half starved and driven still, 
 till they drop in their tracks. I would try the 
 river if I was not driving to pay a doctor's bill 
 for my three that went with the fever. Before 
 that I was driving to put food in their mouths. 
 I never owed a cent to no man. I have been 
 honest and paid as I went, and done a good turn 
 when I could. Had I chosen the other thing 
 while I had a pretty face of my own, I would 
 
170 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 have had ease and comfort and a quick death. 
 The river's the best place, I'm thinking, for them 
 that wants ease. Such a life as this is not liv- 
 ing." " She don't mean it," the first speaker 
 said apologetically; " she knows there is better 
 times ahead." " Yes, the kind you will find in 
 the next room. Take a look in there, man, and 
 then tell me what we are going to do." In the 
 next room was found a pantaloon maker, 
 huddled in an old shawl, finishing the last of a 
 dozen, which, when taken back, would give her 
 money for fire and food. She had been ill for 
 three days. The bed was an old mattress on a 
 drygoods box in the corner, and save for the 
 chair on which she sat, and the stove, the room 
 was empty. " Even that," she said, with a 
 glance at the miserable bed, " is more than I 
 had for a long while. I pawned everything be- 
 fore my husband died, except the machine." 
 
 Such slavery and its companion poverty are the 
 mother of despair, grim, sullen, and stupefying. 
 Such slavery mocks American liberty and calls 
 it a farce. Such slavery makes it not the land of 
 the free, but it is still the home of the brave. 
 There are also other shackles in the factories 
 
THE SMOKE OF FACTORIES. 17 1 
 
 which are placed upon human hands and feet, 
 and which destroy freedom. The leaders 
 among the workingmen are sometimes their 
 worst enemies, by being their most oppressive 
 masters. Where men are compelled to do that 
 which is against their will and in face of the star- 
 vation of family, it is no longer freedom. If a 
 man cannot work when he wills, he is a slave. If 
 a selfish, unwise leader can force hundreds of 
 men to drop their tools, and they in turn forbid 
 other men to pick up those tools, the sweet sound 
 of liberty is drowned in that clamor and noise of 
 oppression. There is a necessity for unions 
 which foster righteous effort in this struggle for 
 the alleviation of misery connected with our 
 present system. But alas! alas! the unions and 
 the leaders are often the fires beneath the sur- 
 face which make the black sooty cloud to rise. 
 
 May the blood of Bunker Hill and Gettysburg 
 not have been in vain! May liberty touch every 
 square inch of space in all our factories and 
 every grain of sand upon all this land, from the 
 Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific slope ! I saw in 
 the factory the Carpenter of Nazareth standing 
 at His bench and bearing the same burdens as 
 
I7 2 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 His toiling fellow-men; nerves aching and 
 muscles strained; and as He pushed the plane, I 
 heard Him say, " Come unto me, all ye that 
 labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you 
 rest." 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE GLOOM OF THE PRISON CELL. 
 
 The darkness of a prison cell is midnight 
 gloom. The feeble rays of light that steal 
 through iron bars are only a mockery. All the 
 brightness of life has taken its flight from the 
 captives' cell and the captives' soul. The sweet 
 sound of liberty is still echoing in the heart and 
 making the sound of clanking chains more un- 
 bearable. The saddest despair ever stamped 
 upon human countenance is written on the 
 face which hides itself from the eyes of others, 
 in the shadows of the cell. Within these great 
 gates and high walls is seen the wreckage of 
 saloon and brothel and gambling den. Here 
 you behold the lowest strata of society and the 
 downward possibilities of creatures made in the 
 image and likeness of God. You cannot but 
 wonder if that was written of them. The bottom 
 has been reached when out of the depths of sin 
 
 173 
 
174 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 and crime, out of the very gutters of the city, 
 men and women are dragged and dumped in the 
 city jail. Hundreds every day in these cities are 
 carried in the very arms of sin, and laid upon 
 stone floors and iron beds where there can be no 
 rest for souls born to freedom and righteousness 
 and heaven. The wreck of the good ship at 
 sea is sad, but the wrecks against the rocks of 
 Raymond Street jail and the Tombs are infinitely 
 more sad and incalculably more disastrous. 
 
 I have walked through the corridors of the 
 jails and penitentiary and into the dark cells, and 
 have shuddered and saddened at the sight of the 
 power of sin. I have seen that fiendish giant 
 with his one hand resting upon the shoulder of 
 the most highly educated person and with his 
 other hand resting upon the shoulder of the most 
 ignorant specimen of humanity. I have seen 
 him stalking through the corridors, across the 
 stone floors of the jails and penitentiaries, with 
 one hand clasped in the hand of royalty and the 
 other clasped in the hand of the lowest of the 
 slums. Here is seen the evidence of the power 
 which sin has over the life of the most highly 
 cultured; the power there is in sin to drag that 
 life down to the lowest depths. 
 
THE GLOOM OF THE PRISON CELL. i75 
 
 As I stood and preached the gospel of Jesus 
 Christ to eight hundred prisoners in the peni- 
 tentiary, I looked into the faces of twelve bank 
 presidents, and cashiers and bookkeepers 
 enough to fully equip six large banks. I stood 
 looking into the faces of a score of postmasters 
 and men from other official positions. I talked 
 to men who had come from the highest schools 
 of learning in this country and in the Old World. 
 The chaplain carried in his hand a package which 
 contained the New Testament in Greek for the 
 son of a German baron, and a Vergil in Latin for 
 the son of an English lord, and a primer for a 
 man thirty years of age. From the highest 
 rounds of the ladder down to the very lowest they 
 had come to companionship with those most 
 ignorant on earth. 
 
 I stood by the side of a man who was intro- 
 duced to me as coming from the State of Vir- 
 ginia. I marked him as a man of more than 
 ordinary intelligence, and a man whose life had 
 not long been stained with the dye of sin. I 
 had witnessed in his face already something 
 which told the tearful story. Forty years of age; 
 a little family down in Virginia; and when I men- 
 tioned the children his heart nearly broke. I 
 
i 7 6 
 
 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 said to those men, " Don't you remember how 
 the boys and girls used to come up to you 
 and place their little hands on your knees 
 and look into your face and tell the sweet 
 story of love?" nearly half the audience were 
 in tears. It melted them right down to 
 think of the old home down in Virginia, 
 and the old home in Texas, and the old 
 home in Brooklyn. I said to this man from 
 Virginia, " I understand you are a Baptist." 
 He said, " Yes." But he did not wish to 
 talk about it. He said, " Yes, I am a Baptist, a 
 Baptist deacon ; lived and worked for the Church ; 
 but oh, I made a fatal mistake." " Well," 
 I said, " the Lord Jesus Christ is at this 
 moment right at your side. If you ever loved 
 Him you know what it means, and you can go 
 back to His dear arms when you get beyond the 
 boundaries of this prison life; you can begin 
 your life-work for Christ over again." " Yes," 
 he said, with a deep sigh, but the poor prisoner 
 was conscious that his whole life was blasted and 
 all the future was simply a blank, and that he was 
 abandoned by society. 
 
 I said to the chaplain, " Who is that large, 
 portly, splendid-looking man in front?" He 
 
THE GLOOM OF THE PRISON CELL. 
 
 177 
 
 said he was once a member of the Methodist 
 church, he was a class-leader, lived for the 
 Church and gave his life for the Church. So, all 
 over that great body of men, the finger could be 
 pointed to those who were once high in life and 
 high in the service of God; but now chains 
 have been fastened to them and they tell the 
 story of crime and the tremendous power of sin. 
 
 I saw, coming into the jails, the very lowest 
 strata of humankind. To witness the power of 
 sin in human life, walk through the corridors 
 of the city jail where in a single morning 
 a hundred and fifty men and women made 
 in the image and likeness of God are 
 dumped. Some of their faces tell the story 
 that life had not always been thus; and some of 
 them reveal plainly that from the cradle to that 
 very moment life had been in the companionship 
 of demons. 
 
 I saw in the Tombs in a small hall fifty women 
 herded together. It is sad for a man to be in 
 jail, but it is unbearable to see womankind 
 brought to that level. There were all nationali- 
 ties and colors. With hands on the grating, with 
 eyes almost of a maniac, a young woman dressed 
 in queenly style looked out and told the story, in 
 
178 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 every expression of her face, that she had once 
 been in a good home, but step by step she had 
 made her way down to that level, where by her 
 side stood one of the lowest and most sin-stained 
 specimens of humankind. Undoubtedly, some 
 day some mother had looked over into the cra- 
 dle at her baby form and kissed her sweet little 
 cheek — the sweetest kiss of life — and said, 
 " That is the purest innocence this side of 
 Heaven." From that very cradle she had 
 walked step by step, down, down, down, until 
 she had reached the very bottom when she 
 struck the Tombs' floor. 
 
 Boys are carried from the streets for petty 
 crimes, or no crimes at all, and thrown into the 
 city jail, because there is not a place in the city 
 of Brooklyn ten feet square where a boy 
 under twelve years of age, found home- 
 less on the streets, can be placed to-night, 
 except in jail. There you find them. I 
 saw them there, innocent specimens, arrested 
 for running away from home — a drunkard's 
 home; brought in for stealing some coal 
 for the family fire, and for various small 
 offenses. Fifty boys I found in the Tombs 
 of New York city; some of them two or 
 
THE GLOOM OF THE PRISON CELL. 179 
 
 three in a single narrow cell; one of that three 
 deep-dyed in criminality, the others perhaps con- 
 fined there for the first offense, and yet there in 
 companionship with others to be educated for 
 greater crime, when once they have passed 
 through these iron doors to freedom again. 
 More ought to be done to rescue and redeem 
 the boys in the streets, and the boys committing 
 their first offense, and the boys without home or 
 friend. This is a part of the solution of the 
 great problem of criminality. 
 
 In the city of Chicago recently, a criminal, 
 just about to meet the result of his offense at the 
 gallows, said to the chaplain an hour before he 
 was to be hanged, " I want to tell you something, 
 but you must never tell my friends. This is not 
 my right name. I came from a good home, a 
 large home, and a Christian home. I have a 
 father living now; his gray head is bowed in 
 sorrow over me; he thinks I am in England. I 
 have one brother and one sister living, and they 
 don't know where I am. Mother is dead. I 
 plead with you now, as I tell you my right name, 
 never to let them know that their son and brother 
 died on the gallows. I am deep-dyed in crimi- 
 nality, and I meet this execution bravely, and 
 
I So MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 deserve it; but when I was a mere boy, eight 
 years of age, I went forward in a Methodist 
 church and asked for prayers, for in my deepest 
 soul I wanted to be a Christian. My father 
 dragged me out of the church and declared that 
 I was too young, and if I ever tried that again 
 until he said it was time for me to be a Christian, 
 he would thrash me. My father is largely re- 
 sponsible, after all, for my position. I might 
 have done much upon earth for others, instead of 
 doing that which dragged them down. I might 
 have been a saved man myself if I had only been 
 allowed to go, and had been kept by parental 
 power in the very presence of all that was good 
 instead of being thrust out to do that which was 
 bad." In a little time the gallows did its work. 
 The bloody execution was witnessed, and they 
 carried him out into the Potter's field of Chicago, 
 and his old father is now in Michigan, waiting for 
 his son to come home. 
 
 Oh, fathers and mothers and Christian people! 
 in the name of humanity and the name of God, 
 make your very best effort for the salvation of 
 the boys. At the source you can do most for 
 the purification of the stream. I have heard, in 
 our very courts of justice, the echo of injustice. 
 
THE GLOOM OF THE PRISON CELL. l8l 
 
 There is injustice done to some of the prisoners. 
 That which is making for lowering instead of 
 elevating is being done when men are dragged 
 out of the gutters, full of filth and vermin, and 
 thrust into jail, and compelled to be there thirty 
 days without changing a single thread of their 
 clothing, and with scarcely any, after all, to be 
 changed. Men are in jail for thirty days, and 
 never a drop of water rests upon their skin. The 
 county, for the sake of humanity and civili- 
 zation and Christianity, should spend some 
 money to afford and to compel a change of gar- 
 ments. It is this very education from which 
 men graduate into the deepest crime. If 
 a man is allowed to be thirty days in that con- 
 dition in Raymond Street jail, he will come out 
 a deeper-dyed criminal than when he entered. 
 The county ought to furnish a hose, and then 
 it ought to furnish a club, and compel 
 a man to wash himself at least once in thirty 
 days. 
 
 Then there is the injustice done by the bring- 
 ing of all criminals into contact, one with the 
 other. This is especially true of women prison- 
 ers. I saw a hundred women in the corridors, 
 all day together, and eight or ten at night in a 
 
1 82 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 room together. Some of them were not guilty; 
 some of them were just stained; some of them 
 deep-dyed, and some of them saturated with sin 
 and crime. A tear-stained penitent and the 
 most hardened life of impurity and drunkenness 
 are herded together. What contrasts in faces! 
 What histories are written upon them. One of 
 sorrow and despair; one of a demon smile. 
 There is injustice also along the line of delay of 
 trial. I have been astounded and righteously 
 indignant, that there should be women and men 
 brought into jail and allowed to stay there for 
 weeks and almost months without a trial, not 
 knowing whether they were guilty or not. If 
 there was ever injustice upon the face of the 
 earth, it is there. I saw myself one woman in 
 Raymond Street jail, who had been there for 
 weeks, absolutely innocent, awaiting trial, and 
 her home was in mourning for mother and 
 wife; the barbarous woman who had caused 
 her arrest was wearing her lost watch a week, 
 while the guiltless woman was behind prison bars 
 with the deepest-dyed criminals. If there ever 
 was injustice this side of hell, that is injustice. 
 " Change of politics," they said to me. I care 
 not if they change every throne on the face of 
 
THE GLOOM OF THE PRISON CELL. 183 
 
 the earth, that cruelty ought never to take place 
 in a civilized land. 
 
 The subject of criminality is not so foreign 
 to ourselves as we imagine. Old Dr. Johnson, 
 when he was paying his respects to Mrs. Porter, 
 came to her and told her he was not worthy of 
 her. He said, he hated to undertake such a 
 difficult task as to ask her to be his wife. 
 " Why," he said, " I haven't any beauty, and 
 that you can see; I haven't any money, and that 
 you know; I haven't any royalty, and that you 
 know, but to be plain with you, I have at least 
 one uncle who has disgraced the family by being 
 hanged." " Well," said Mrs. Porter, " I haven't 
 any good looks, and that you can see; I haven't 
 any money, and that you know; I haven't any 
 uncles that have been hanged, but I have a half 
 dozen that ought to be." The jail is not so dis- 
 tant, and injustice is of vital interest to every- 
 body. Can any man own a house or one square 
 foot of ground and not be interested to know how 
 many hundreds of thousands of dollars every 
 year the criminals of the city take from the 
 righteous citizens' pocket; not by breaking into 
 your house, perhaps, and taking your personal 
 property at the midnight hour, or by picking 
 
184 MIDXIGJ1T IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 your pocket, but by making you pay toward 
 the millions of taxes for trials, for judges, for 
 lawyers, for jails, for everything about crimi- 
 nal life. Every man and woman must be in- 
 tensely interested for that reason. It touches 
 the most sensitive spot. The heart is not the 
 most tender; it is the purse. Can there be ten 
 to fifteen millions of dollars gathered every 
 year in these two cities as taxes for criminals, 
 and a citizen not be affected by it? Can there 
 be one hundred and fifty men in this city and 
 hundreds in New York city dragged out of the 
 gutters and dens of vice and hurled into the jails, 
 and their fellow-men not be affected by it? Can 
 boys and girls live in the center of criminality 
 and not be touched by it? The jail and peni- 
 tentiary affect every man, woman, and child most 
 vitally; the thermometer of your civilization 
 and of your social conditions is the stone wall of 
 your jail. 
 
 T saw in these institutions hand shackled to 
 hand; three men manacled together, one in 
 the center and one on either side, and I said, 
 " That is an illustration of the most vital truth, in 
 many respects, connected with the subject of 
 criminality. They are brought here by virtue of 
 
THE GLOOM OF THE PRISON CELL. 185 
 
 being shackled to bad associations and evil com- 
 panions. And they are continuing in that 
 kind of life, and are destined to go out of here 
 and repeat precisely the same kind of acts. 
 Shackled, yes shackled to bad companions. 
 One man, with the deepest sorrow, and with 
 tears running down his cheeks, and memory 
 still echoing Tennyson's lines in his soul: 
 
 " The wild pulsations I felt before the strife, 
 When I had my days before me, and the tumult of my life : 
 Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years 
 would yield, 
 
 Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's 
 field, 
 
 said, " The circumstances of my life, which I now 
 reap, came from the seed which I sowed. They 
 have torn my flesh, and I bled, but I might have 
 known if I sowed such seed, I should reap 
 such a harvest. Out of the best home, the pur- 
 est of motherhood, the noblest of fatherhood, in 
 boyhood I started with the brightest of pros- 
 pects in life. I entered life with bad companions 
 and grew to manhood with bad companions; I 
 associated with those companions, until now 
 I am a convict behind the bars, a total wreck. I 
 will write my life for you with just one word, 
 
iS6 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY, 
 
 D-E-S-P-A-I-R. Can you understand," said 
 he, " what it means for a man to be a physical, 
 mental, and moral suicide? That is me. I have 
 passed through the best of my life, and in despair, 
 and with life crushed out of my body, I am 
 behind the bars!" It was the saddest sight, 
 sufficient even to make silence in the lower 
 world, and tears in heaven. 
 
 I saw in the corridors of the Tombs in New 
 York city a motto on the walls — I took out my 
 book and wrote it down. " Many kings have 
 been slain by intemperance." I said, " Yes, 
 they have told me that story; the keepers and 
 wardens have told me that story; the chaplains 
 have told me that story." The letters looked 
 crimson on the wall. A broken-hearted man 
 said, " I started wrong and allowed the appetite 
 of drink to rule this physical frame. I fought 
 like a hero to overcome it and I thought I had 
 gained the victory, but then again the appetite 
 overcame me. Whisky seemed to control me, 
 body and soul and spirit, and then I went down 
 into criminality. Step by step, step by step, I 
 have gone down, down, down, through the path- 
 way of drunkenness until my whole life now is 
 completely blasted. Now I am abandoned by 
 
THE GLOOM OF THE PRISON CELL. 187 
 
 society, abandoned by the world, abandoned by 
 Heaven, and only waiting for hell." What ruin! 
 Chains of ruin first, and then chains of crime. 
 
 Almost without exception women enter the 
 jails through drunkenness. Most men are 
 brought there through that same pathway. In- 
 temperance is responsible for seventy-five per 
 cent, of the crime, according to the statistics. 
 Three-quarters of the criminality is traceable to 
 the saloon. With hands on the bars of the cell, 
 and eyes of desperation staring almost out of 
 their sockets, stood one of the greatest criminals 
 ever committed to Raymond Street jail, waiting 
 for his trial for two offenses he had committed. 
 Many times he had been committed to this jail. 
 The first time he came to Raymond Street jail so 
 great were his audacity and his daring that he cut 
 a hole in the bottom of the wagon that was carry- 
 ing him there and escaped. The first time he 
 was incarcerated in Kings County Penitentiary, 
 with a keeper at one end of the corridor watch- 
 ing his cell and a keeper at the other end of the 
 corridor watching his cell, in the night time with 
 the iron bars in front of him, and at the fourth 
 corridor, he escaped, and they did not find him. 
 There he is again with a look of despair, his 
 
1 88 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 hands grasping the iron bars of the grating. He 
 told the same story. " I am all right until I get 
 the demon, Drink, in possession of my life, and 
 then I am a criminal from head to foot. If I 
 could only stop drinking, I would be all right. 
 Oh, if I could only get those shackles from my 
 wrists now," he said, "but every time I get out, 
 before I know it, the appetite has me, and 
 then I am drunk again and ready for any sort of 
 crime." 
 
 Whisky will inflame and excite a man and 
 make him insane, so that he will commit almost 
 any crime. And beer, according to one of the 
 highest medical journals in the world, has this 
 effect upon man and makes the most criminals; 
 it hardens, gradually hardens his entire life, 
 until he becomes! capable of committing any 
 offense in cold blood. That is the difference. 
 The saloons are directly responsible for seventy- 
 five per cent, of the criminals. The majority 
 of these lawbreakers are from twenty to thirty 
 years of age. They come up through the path- 
 way of evil companionship and intemperance, 
 until they get to be of age, and then they are 
 confirmed criminals. I have named the large 
 brass key that turns the locks in the heavy iron 
 
THE GLOOM OF THE PRISON CELL. 189 
 
 doors of the jail, " W-I-L-L." I know that you 
 are making excuses for criminals, under the plea 
 that they are in this condition by virtue of hered- 
 ity. I know you say that Margaret, chief of the 
 criminals, born up in one of the counties of this 
 country, for six generations by her impure family 
 life sent out into the world a vast number of 
 criminals. In six generations she had nine hun- 
 dred descendants, two hundred of these descend- 
 ants were imprisoned, and almost the entire 
 number remaining were either idiots or imbeciles 
 in lunatic asylums or drunkards in the alms- 
 houses. I know what one man said recently: 
 " Do you know why you or anybody else can- 
 not do anything with me?" He said, " You 
 other men had fathers and mothers who 
 brought you up under religious influence. I 
 had a drunken fiend for a mother." Yes, I know 
 it. But back of all the power of heredity, 
 back of all the power which is thrown 
 about a man's life by virtue of his surround- 
 ings, I still hold as the chief element in 
 manhood, and that which is always on the 
 throne of a man's life, is — Will. Next to 
 the omnipotence of God is the will of man. 
 Every young man or woman who walks 
 
190 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 to jail side by side with a policeman, and is 
 passed from there some day to the penitentiary, 
 goes there by virtue of his own will. 
 
 A little fellow under twelve years of age 
 talked to me from behind the bars. He was a 
 bright-looking boy and small for his age. It 
 made my heart ache. I could not help but 
 brush back at least one tear as I stood looking 
 at his tear-stained face. I said to him, " How 
 did you come here?" He said, "I ran away 
 from home." And then I found out that he had 
 run away from a drunkard's home. And then I 
 said, " Did you ever do that before? " He said, 
 " No, but one of the boys told me it would be a 
 good thing to do, and he said he would go with 
 me ; but after we went away he ran away and left 
 me, and then the officers found me on the 
 streets." I gave him the best sympathy I had, 
 and on turning round I saw the warden smiling, 
 who said to me, " He is educated young. 
 Every mother's son of them says the same thing 
 — the other fellow did it ; but it was not the other 
 fellow, because everyone can do as he pleases, 
 after all." And then I remembered the hard- 
 ened criminal who looked through the bars at 
 me and declared that whisky had done it all 
 
THE GLOOM OF THE PRISON CELL. 191 
 
 for him, and in the course of his remarks said, 
 showing his manhood, " I am not going to make 
 any excuse for my present position. It was 
 whisky that put me here, but it was my lips that 
 took the whisky." With all the power that 
 this world can throw about a man's life to drag 
 him down, with will as king, he is a can man. 
 
 Young men were given the privilege in the city 
 to live without work. They indulged in dress, 
 they squandered time, and paralyzed brain and 
 killed body and destroyed soul. In that idle life 
 they planted the seeds from which were reaped 
 the tares of a prison life. If a father's ideal is to 
 allow his boy to live in idleness, he ought to be 
 sent to jail himself. " The devil always finds 
 something for idle hands to do." Some time ago, 
 on Fifth Avenue in New York city a horse be- 
 came balky. There was a little snow on the 
 street, and a large crowd gathered around the 
 driver of that horse and strove as best they could 
 to make him move. But he simply stationed his 
 feet and was evidently determined to stand there 
 forever. The driver pounded him, coaxed him, 
 swore at him, and tried everything to make the 
 horse move, but he would not. A score of sug- 
 gestions came from the bystanders, but every- 
 
192 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 one of them was without any effect whatever; 
 until at last a green-looking Irishman pushed his 
 way through the crowd, and having picked up 
 from the street a handful of snow, he took the 
 horse by his foretop and rubbed his nose vigor- 
 ously with that snowball. They said to him, 
 "What did you do that for?" But instantly 
 the horse went like a shot down the street. 
 They said to him again, " What did you do 
 that for? " " Oh," he said, " the baste needs 
 to get some new ideas." A life determined on 
 standing still in idleness needs a new idea. 
 Take it away from the ideas of idleness and 
 sin, and of planning for evil, and give it an 
 idea of a noble life — a life which is willing 
 to move, and to move on toward a destiny which 
 shall be bright with glory. 
 
 I saw, in the Tombs of New York city, the 
 Bridge of Sighs. It is a pass from the jail over 
 into the court of justice. I said, " Why do they 
 call it the Bridge of Sighs?" He said, "Every 
 man who walks across there, when he comes 
 back gives an awful sigh." Who can look at 
 that Bridge of Sighs without the echo of that 
 sigh resounding in his own heart. A young 
 man arrested for forgery was brought into the 
 
THE GLOOM OF THE PRISON CELL. 193 
 
 city jail, recently. In the hall they stood and the 
 warden told me how the poor fellow plead with 
 him and said, " Warden, warden, if you take me 
 across that door-sill into the cell with those other 
 prisoners, I will die with a broken heart. I will 
 drop dead. Let me stay here until to-morrow 
 morning." " It was not right; but I could not 
 refuse him," said the warden; " his tears and his 
 pleading prevailed, so I took him up into a room 
 and gave him a newspaper to read, thinking that 
 he would be awake all night. I stayed with him 
 until eleven o'clock. The next morning I went 
 up to find the poor fellow dead on the bed, his 
 cheeks stained with tears. He had turned on 
 the gas and laid down and died." He was the 
 son of a clergyman, one of the best known men 
 in Brooklyn; at one time a preacher of national 
 fame and head of the Methodist Publishing 
 House. What awful possibilities, even in the 
 home of that man of God! From the preach- 
 er's fireside to Raymond Street jail. Saddest 
 picture on earth. The cold world says, " Oh, 
 base villain, fall over in your prison cell and rot, 
 that is where you belong." But Almighty God 
 says something vastly different from that. He 
 whispers in ev^ry prisoner's ear the sweet words, 
 
194 
 
 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 " Mercy, Hope, and Pardon." In the peniten- 
 tiary I asked eight hundred men if any of them 
 wished to be saved and to be prayed for, and to 
 pledge themselves that they would pray for them- 
 selves. At that moment, knowing that the eye 
 of God rested upon them and that every one of 
 their comrades and keepers would laugh at them, 
 with tears streaming down their cheeks, three 
 hundred boldly raised their hands and asked 
 to be prayed for. The Lord Jesus walked 
 down through those aisles just as well as he 
 walks through the aisles of a church, and waited 
 at every one of the seats, that the chained prison- 
 er's hand might touch the hem of His garment 
 and be free. I wanted to shout through every 
 prison corridor that which sounded through the 
 Philippian jail, " Believe on the Lord Jesus 
 Christ, and thou, thou, even thou, shalt be 
 saved." 
 
 I came from the gloom, the awful gloom of 
 the Tombs, and within a few moments witnessed 
 from the heights of the Brooklyn Bridge a beau- 
 tiful sunset with all its glory falling upon the 
 harbor and lighting the torch of Liberty's statue. 
 The whole sky was resplendent with its 
 effulgence borrowed from the heavenly world. 
 
THE GLOOM OF THE PRISON CELL. 195 
 
 The white clouds were waiting in their dressing 
 rooms, while messengers sent out from the 
 King's palace were drawing about their delicate 
 forms robes of richest coloring. And then 
 they moved out upon the stage of the world's 
 great theater and gracefully played their part. 
 A single star pulled aside the curtains and lov- 
 ingly said, " Good-night," to the king of day, 
 as he lay in his western couch, and then threw a 
 kiss to him across the sky. The whole vaulted 
 sky changed from beauty to beauty and from 
 glory to glory, without a single possibility of ex- 
 hausting the tints in the studio of the Great 
 Artist. The boats of every description moved 
 across the harbor in every direction, to every 
 point of the compass. A little tug was just 
 screeching its throat hoarse, simply to attract 
 attention. The sail-boat had its white sails 
 spread out like the wings of a bird gracefully 
 playing with the breezes, and was made more 
 beautiful as the sun's rays shot upon it, trans- 
 forming it into a thing of exquisite beauty. 
 Away out in the distance a great steamer lay 
 anchored and asleep, weary with its battle with 
 wind and wave. The ferries were running 
 across each other's track on their errands of 
 
196 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 mercy for the weary toilers. The great bridge 
 on which I stood, and which held me between the 
 earth and sky, never seemed to me so majestic 
 and wonderful. The twin cities were a fitting 
 gateway to this great continent, and as the beau- 
 tiful sun with its last rays darted against the 
 domes and spires and buildings, I stood almost 
 entranced and said, " Sunset glory, island 
 beauty, sailing craft, arching bridge, Liberty's 
 torch — all the glory of this heavenly scene 
 is made possible by obedience to God's law. 
 And in the entire world in which we live, all 
 freedom and glory came to be, because of 
 obedience. And the gloom of the prison tomb 
 is the direct result of disobedience." In that 
 short distance between the Tombs and the 
 Brooklyn Bridge a great gulf of sin was fixed. 
 And I saw another bridge; one end of it 
 stood upon the Tombs of New York city, and 
 the other end of it stood upon the Raymond 
 Street jail, and the keystone of the mighty 
 arch was the threshold of heaven, and the 
 entire framework of the wondrous structure was 
 composed of nine letters, W-H-O-S-O-E-V-E-R. 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 
 THE PIECE OF LAVA FROM THE VOLCANO. 
 
 The traveler stands on Mount Vesuvius, and 
 the small pieces of lava, red-hot from that seeth- 
 ing furnace, burn at his feet. He must wait for 
 the clock to tick away its moments before the 
 relic can be touched and carried away from the 
 doorway of its home. He does not see the great 
 boiling mass beneath the surface; that little mes- 
 senger has told him emphatically of his peril and 
 the mighty forces of destruction beneath his feet. 
 That wild madness and murderous spirit is just 
 waiting in its dark cage, to break through the 
 prison bars and work out its purpose of death. 
 
 Beneath the modern city is a Vesuvius. The 
 surface may blossom with flowers and be car- 
 peted with emerald axminster; trees may even 
 bear luscious fruit and homes stand apparently 
 unshaken; but the rain-drops of lava tell of the 
 awful flood and the probability of a Pompeian 
 197 
 
198 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 disaster. Underneath all the beauty and appar- 
 ent prosperity of the great city, the surface 
 adorned by magnificent churches and public 
 buildings, splendid commercial establishments, 
 palace homes, and most costly and beautiful 
 parks; beneath all these are the seething, death- 
 bringing operations of the thousands of gam- 
 blers and their companions in vice and crime. 
 This is one of the greatest evils, and one that is 
 largely concealed from public knowledge. But 
 enough is seen and known to make human hearts 
 shudder and human hopes vanish. In this part 
 of his kingdom, " King Law " swings his scepter 
 with a palsied hand. This subject carries on his 
 nefarious business so largely in the dark, or 
 under a false name, that his crime is unmeasured 
 and unpunished. 
 
 These dens of vice are counted by the hundred 
 in these great cities. They are not counted on 
 earth, but are seen in the white light of the 
 judgment throne. We stepped aboard the ferry 
 at Forty-second Street, which was supposed to 
 go to the West Shore Railroad, but it was the 
 gamblers' boat and was bound in another direc- 
 tion. It was crowded with hundreds of men, 
 from the wearer of the diamond-studded front to 
 
PIECE OF LAVA FROM THE VOLCANO. 199 
 
 that of the flannel of the laborer. Old and 
 young, white and black, had but one look in the 
 eye and one purpose in the heart. The smoke 
 and filth arose like the sulphurous fumes from 
 the pit. Blasphemy and impurity mingled with 
 it like most familiar companions. The boat 
 moved straight across the stream as if to land in 
 the regular ferry-slip, and the mercy of the Hud- 
 son kept it from going to the bottom with its 
 heavy load. When it neared the other shore 
 it suddenly turned up the river and moved along 
 for about one mile, and then glided into a 
 secluded cove and an old ferry-slip. That great 
 crowd anxiously poured from the gangplank 
 and hastened toward a flat building under the 
 hill. It covered a large area and had no win- 
 dows or opening toward the river, except a small 
 door which led into a barroom. Through that 
 miserable vestibule of hell the stream poured out 
 of a back door and along under the overhanging 
 rocks for about one hundred feet, and then into 
 another narrow door, which opened out into a 
 large space which was the home of New York 
 and Brooklyn gamblers. It was the resort of 
 many young men and boys from good homes; 
 and the abiding place of cut-throats and thieves. 
 
200 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 In that vile institution, in the presence of those 
 six or eight hundred men, I stood at that after- 
 noon hour with such feelings as never before 
 crept into my heart — feelings of deepest sadness; 
 feelings of startling amazement; feelings like 
 those of the Christ when they gambled at the 
 foot of the Cross. I never believed that the gov- 
 ernments of earth were so bad as to allow the 
 governments of hell to place such an institution 
 upon our free soil and, unmolested, to damn our 
 boys and work their awful ruin in our homes and 
 society. 
 
 I saw there all the apparatus which evil genius 
 could invent with which to steal and to destroy. 
 The telegraph clicked off the St. Louis and New 
 Orleans races, and the money poured into the 
 pool from hundreds of hands. The fiends at the 
 tables and at the wheels shouted themselves 
 hoarse, and the silver rang without end upon 
 the red spots and black spots, red with blood 
 and black with perdition. The dice rattled and 
 the chips rolled, and the cards shuffled and the 
 wheels turned and stopped at the will of the 
 crimson hand that twisted them. In this dread- 
 ful sound, mingled with blasphemy and impurity 
 and anger, I heard the cry of hundreds of 
 
PIECE OF LAVA FROM THE VOLCANO. 20 1 
 
 mothers, the sigh of hundreds of hearts, and the 
 eternal wail of hundreds of souls. That infernal 
 den might just as well be in City Hall Park as 
 far as the result is concerned to these cities. 
 Shame on a government which makes it 
 possible! Shame on a telegraph company 
 which makes its money out of such a dia- 
 bolical business! Shame on a railroad company 
 which turns its business over into the hands of 
 the devil for a few stained dollars! Shame on a 
 nation which makes its money with " In God we 
 trust," and then allows it to roll along that foul 
 path of lawlessness across the gamblers' table 
 and into the gamblers' till! The cities are full 
 of gamblers and gambling places. I have been 
 in them, even in the Chinese and Greek dens. 
 They gamble in every saloon; they gamble in 
 the clubs; they gamble behind barred doors. I 
 have seen as many as one hundred boys in a 
 single pool room. The policy shops are run- 
 ning everywhere, and men, women, and children 
 are running to them with their last nickels. 
 
 This is one of the greatest destroyers, because 
 it is a Mormon and married to many wives. All 
 forms of vice are its companions. It is the mur- 
 derer of body, mind, and soul. It tramples on 
 
202 MIDNIGHT IN A GREA T CITY. 
 
 everything healthful and sacred. You will 
 scarcely see a gambler above forty years of age. 
 They die young and go to a gamblers' hell. 
 They live in perdition on earth. Love is burned 
 out of their hearts and home is always destroyed. 
 Their life is not an evolution, it is a devolution. 
 The vice has nothing redeeming or palliating 
 or excusing about it. It is blasting to character 
 and fixes destiny. It is in full growth a monster 
 with bloody appetite. It is useless to talk about 
 the suicides and devastation of Monte Carlo, 
 when right at our very doors the same deadly 
 work is in progress. Our trees hang with the 
 victims and the sound of their revolvers rings 
 in our ears. It is death! death! death! It is 
 death to home. Its sulphurous breath blows the 
 light out; its hand throws water on the hearth; 
 its skeleton form moves through every room 
 and banishes the last sound of laughter and joy. 
 The gambler has leased his once happy home to 
 the tenants " sorrow and despair." In the rattle 
 of the dice, and shuffle of the cards, and the click 
 of the wheel, and the sound of the balls, and the 
 noise of the chips, and the ring of the silver and 
 the shout of demons on earth, I heard the piti- 
 ful, pathetic, heartrending cry of a mother. In 
 
PIECE OF LA VA FROM THE VOLCANO. 203 
 
 that maelstrom of iniquity was the young man 
 who was once the pride of his home. Paternal 
 care and maternal love watched him. Arms of 
 tenderest affection had encircled him. Brightest 
 hopes had hovered above his cradle and his early 
 life. But now there are hearts aching and break- 
 ing, and waiting with sleepless eyes for his re- 
 turn. Why not sleep? How can they? They 
 have done and suffered too much for him to rest 
 when he is in the dissipation and sin of the great 
 city. The light is in the window and mother's 
 eyes are at the pane, and the clock strikes twelve 
 to deaden the sounds of her sobs. He had scarlet 
 fever when a boy, and she nursed him night and 
 day until it seemed as if she were born not to 
 need sleep. Oh, how anxious she was then as 
 she placed her hand of love on his little fever- 
 burned brow; how she watched every move and 
 how she prayed that God would save him! But 
 now she looks out of the window and listens for 
 his coming, and on the pathway of one of her 
 sighs she carries the heavy cry: "Oh, I would 
 rather have him in his crib with the scarlet 
 fever!" 
 
 I looked into the demoniacal eyes of a hus- 
 band and father as he shook the dice and counted 
 
204 MIDXIGHT IX A GREAT CITY. 
 
 the chips at the table, and thought of the domes- 
 tic happiness he had destroyed. He had set fire 
 to his own home and burned up the last rem- 
 nants of love. The children once waited for his 
 coming and threw kisses from the window and 
 jumped in their glee while his key was unfasten- 
 ing the door. Kisses the sweetest fell like a 
 shower, but now they are all forgotten and the 
 face is calloused by sin. A wife's heart once 
 beat in harmony with his, but now the gambler's 
 heart has become as hard as the granite and 
 never feels the touch of love. His wife's gar- 
 ments are faded; his daughters are disgraced; 
 his sons are started on the short cut to ruin. 
 The arrow of love glances from his iron soul and 
 home has no attraction. The fires of his passion 
 and excitement of his life have done their work 
 of destruction. From the thousands of homes 
 in city and country comes the same sad cry to 
 mingle with the awful sounds of the gambler's 
 world. 
 
 A Christian father in one of the Eastern 
 States had a reckless son, who disgraced himself 
 and brought shame upon his family by his mis- 
 conduct. From home the prodigal went to 
 California, to become even more reckless. For 
 
PIECE OF LAVA FROM THE VOLCANO. 205 
 
 years the father heard nothing of him. A chance 
 offering, he sent this message to him: ' Your 
 father still loves you." The bearer sought him 
 long in vain. At last he visited a low den of 
 infamy in his search, and there recognized the 
 erring son. He called him out, and at the hour 
 of midnight delivered his message. The gam- 
 bler's heart was touched. The thought of father 
 that loved him still, and wanted to forgive him, 
 broke the spell of Satan. He abandoned the 
 game, his companions, and his cups, to return to 
 his father. Oh, prodigal, come home; come 
 home! 
 
 This volcano is also causing death to honesty, 
 industry, and all business and social relations. 
 Gambling is the art of securing the property of 
 another without giving him anything in return. 
 If a man takes anything from another by force, 
 or in an inartistic way, he is called a thief. If he 
 does precisely the same thing in another manner, 
 he is called a gambler. But he is one and the 
 same. He who does the one for any length of 
 time will do the other. The principle and result 
 do not differ, and names ought not to deceive. 
 No one would employ a gambler in a trusted po- 
 sition. No one would have him for his partner in 
 
206 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 business. The first principle of business is self- 
 preservation, and gambling is destruction. The 
 effect of business is continually to destroy uncer- 
 tainty, but gambling increases it. Chance is 
 there only to catch the victim and enrich the pro- 
 fessional. It is the old story of " spider and fly." 
 The faro box is built with springs; the races are 
 decided before they are run; the wheels are 
 stopped at the will of the fiend behind the table; 
 the dice are loaded and the cards are marked; 
 cuffs are mirrors and sleeves are stacked with 
 aces. 
 
 In a book published not long since an expert 
 tells us that in London alone he found and noted 
 one hundred and fifty sorts of cards, all of which 
 were marked so that a professional could read 
 the faces from the backs as well as if aces, kings, 
 and jacks were in full view. " I have acted as 
 judge at horse races," said a man, "off and on 
 for twenty years; but if I have ever seen an 
 honest trial of speed I am ignorant when it 
 occurred." 
 
 Across all the tables and all the tracks and 
 through all the pool rooms and into the dens I 
 shout, " Foul, foul, infinitely foul — foul as the 
 schemes of hell! " I even shout it across some of 
 
PIECE OF LA VA FROM THE VOLCANO. 207 
 
 the social games which cultivate childhood in 
 evil ways, and prepare the soil for the lower 
 forms of gambling. A boy who " played 
 marbles for keeps " was sternly rebuked by his 
 mother and ordered early to bed as a punish- 
 ment. He begged to see the friends who were 
 coming in that evening for a progressive euchre 
 party. The mother so far relented as to allow 
 him to see the prizes before his banishment. 
 Next morning he ran to the parlor to see the 
 beautiful things again, and was dismayed to find 
 that they were gone. Appealing to his pious 
 mother, he was told that " The people who won 
 them had carried them away." After a mo- 
 ment's thought, with the moral perception and a 
 logical acuteness which his mother lacked, the 
 boy said, " Mamma, was not that playing for 
 keeps?" So far as his mother's influence could 
 go, that boy was in training for a superb gam- 
 bler. Foul, foul, is the whole evil operation. 
 
 All the gambling machinery is manufactured 
 for the one purpose of being pickpockets with- 
 out getting the name. It is highway robbery in 
 a building. It affects all business directly or 
 indirectly. Hundreds of thousands of dollars 
 leak out every year from the merchant's till into 
 
2o8 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 the gambling hells. Xo wonder that detectives 
 are commonly employed by large merchants to 
 go around among the pool rooms and see if their 
 employees frequent them. If there is one found 
 the employer knows at once he cannot be 
 trusted; his interest in his work is relaxing and 
 there is no telling when he will begin to steal in 
 order to provide himself with money for the 
 satisfying of his passion. But, alas! alas! what 
 an example many of these clerks find in the 
 employers themselves, many of whom in these 
 cities carry from twenty to forty thousand dol- 
 lars to invest on the races and think nothing of 
 venturing as much as ten thousand dollars on a 
 single race. It is the most demoralizing agency 
 in our modern business world. Its white ashes 
 are scattered over the fairest products of our 
 commercial transactions. The wealth of the 
 world is crystallized brain and muscle, and no 
 man has the right to a farthing of it without giv- 
 ing an equivalent. If he takes it by any other 
 method than the return method he is a thief and 
 the greatest enemy to business and society. 
 
 This Volcano also belches forth death to the 
 gambler himself. A man in London, keeping 
 one of these gambling houses, boasted that he 
 
PIECE OF LA VA FROM THE VOLCANO. 209 
 
 had ruined a nobleman a day. The manager of 
 another one of these established institutions 
 recently said to a reporter, who asked him the 
 heaviest amount of money ever won at his table 
 at one sitting: " Sixteen thousand dollars. This 
 amount was won by a young doctor who used to 
 play here frequently. The doctor played one 
 hundred dollars on the colors, and a continuous 
 run of luck put him sixteen thousand dollars 
 ahead of the game in an evening's play." 
 " Did he keep it? " asked the reporter. " No. 
 Few people who play on the outside ever keep 
 their winnings. A few months after this win- 
 ning I won twenty thousand dollars from the 
 doctor in one night's play. He continued los- 
 ing, and six months later," said the gambler, 
 " we picked up the newspaper one morning and 
 found that he had committed suicide after rob- 
 bing his sister's estate of a large sum." 
 
 This is the testimony of the Superintendent 
 of Police of New York city : " More young men 
 have stood here at this desk, confessing their 
 first offense against law and ascribing their 
 downfall to their infatuation for pool-room 
 gambling than I would care to attempt to esti- 
 mat. Actual experience has satisfied me that no 
 
210 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 form of gambling offers greater temptations to 
 young men to take what is not theirs. As horse- 
 racing is conducted now, it would be well for the 
 community to stop racing altogether. We are 
 sending men to prison right along on account 
 of the race-gambling craze. Homes are being 
 destroyed, and the lives of young men blighted 
 every day in this city, for the same reason." 
 
 One of the greatest business men of New 
 York city said: " A considerable proportion of 
 failures in business, and ninety per cent, of the 
 defalcations and thefts and ruin of youth among 
 people who are employed in places of trust, are 
 due directly to gambling. I have seen in my 
 employment so much misery from the head of 
 the family neglecting its support and squander- 
 ing his earnings in the lottery or the policy shop, 
 and promising young men led astray in a small 
 way and finally becoming fugitives or landing in 
 the criminal dock, that I have come to believe 
 that the community which licenses and tolerates 
 public gambling cannot have prosperity in busi- 
 ness, religion in its churches, or morality among 
 its people." 
 
 The fact is evident from the report of a guar- 
 antee company, which says that in nineteen years 
 
PIECE OF LAVA FROM THE VOLCANO. 211 
 
 it had insured the honesty of about one hundred 
 and forty thousand officials, of whom over two 
 thousand had defaulted. Considering the fact 
 that the company is noted for its conservatism in 
 taking risks, this shows a sad condition of affairs. 
 The report of the company places the blame on 
 the prevalence of gambling in its many forms. 
 
 A recent defalcation of a trusted clerk re- 
 vealed the fact that he had stolen one hundred 
 and twenty-five thousand dollars and lost it all 
 in the policy shops of New York city. In these 
 shops workingmen spend their hard earnings and 
 leave their families to starve. Boys, catching the 
 spirit that breathes through them, can be seen 
 carrying their pennies to these same infernal 
 institutions. 
 
 A traveler says : " I visited the great gambling 
 resort, Monte Carlo, the only legalized gambling 
 house in the world, and from which the little 
 principality, Monaco, derives its revenue for the 
 support of its government. As I entered the 
 grand casino, rich in decoration and fascinating 
 in surroundings, I saw the gambling tables, the 
 faro tables, the roulette tables, surrounded by the 
 old, middle-aged, and the young. Piles of gold 
 were distributed all about. There at the table 
 
2 12 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 was the ' Old Traveler,' cool and collected, but 
 with mind intent on the game. There were 
 women, old women, who apparently had ex- 
 hausted the pleasures and excitements of the 
 world and society, with faces hard, severe, and 
 haggard, utterly absorbed in the game. There 
 were young girls with the blush of maidenhood 
 on their fair cheeks, with faces flushed and eyes 
 distended, fiercely watching the game as the fatal 
 card was turned. What a revolting scene! 
 With what a feeling of disgust does the average 
 American turn from it." Yet we have precisely 
 the same work going on, with results almost as 
 appalling. The victims hang from the trees in 
 our woods, and they commit suicide without 
 number in the cities. Untold ruin is wrought in 
 a thousand directions, because this vice is vitally 
 related to all other vices. Gambling is the total 
 debaucher of the whole man; body as well as 
 soul. There are few old gamblers. Go into any 
 gambling hell to-night or to-morrow night, and 
 you will scarcely see a man above forty years of 
 age. Only the young men gamble? V/hy? 
 Because gamblers do not grow old. They die 
 young. No serpent ever charmed its victim with 
 greater power. It is poison to every drop of 
 
PIECE OF LAVA FROM THE VOLCANO. 213 
 
 blood in his veins. It is the rock upon which 
 character is wrecked and no life-line reaches the 
 broken mast. The most difficult man to reach 
 on earth with saving power is the gambler. He 
 is out in such a deep sea and he is such a total 
 wreck. Above the portals of every gambling 
 place should be written: " He who enters here is 
 dead to all hope." 
 
 Walpole tells of a certain Lord Stavordale, 
 who, when under twenty-one years of age, lost 
 fifty-five thousand dollars in one night, but re- 
 covered it by a single great stake, whereupon he 
 swore a great oath, adding, " Now if I had been 
 playing deep, I might have won millions." It is 
 said that two men were found by the police in 
 Hampstead Road in 1812, one on a wall and the 
 other hanging by his neck from a lamp post, just 
 " shoved off." They had tossed all day, first for 
 money, then for their clothes, and lastly to decide 
 which of the two should hang the other. It was 
 a logical conclusion to the day's work. It is the 
 inevitable conclusion to the gambler's day on 
 earth. In Philadelphia a young man went into 
 a gambling saloon, lost all his property, then 
 blew his brains out, and before the blood was 
 washed from the floor by the maid, the comrades 
 
214 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 were shuffling cards again. A man in Denver 
 arose from the gambling table one night and 
 wrote, with a pencil, on a slip of paper, these 
 words: " I have now lost the last of forty thou- 
 sand dollars; all gone in one month." He then 
 took his motherless girl, staked her, and lost 
 again. 
 
 Forgery, murder, and suicide are in its train. 
 William Cobbett says, " I never in my whole life 
 knew a man addicted to this habit who was not, 
 in some way or other, a person unworthy of con- 
 fidence." How it grips the soul like a demon and 
 blunts every feeling of humanity is illustrated 
 by the anecdote that Walpole tells, of a man who 
 at a gambling table fell down in a fit of apoplexy, 
 whereon his companions instantly began to bet 
 upon the chances of his recovery; and when the 
 physician came in, they positively would not 
 allow him to minister to the sufferer, on the 
 ground that it would affect the bet. Some of 
 you may recollect that when, a good many 
 years ago, the Prince of Wales was lying dan- 
 gerously ill at Sandringham, his life was hanging 
 in the balance and heavy stakes were laid upon 
 the issue. When the late excellent President 
 Garfield was almost given up by his doctors a 
 
PIECE OF LAVA FROM THE VOLCANO. 215 
 
 similar thing occurred, men betting large sums, 
 and even selling pools in Chicago. In a recent 
 notorious criminal case, when all the country 
 was waiting with bated breath to know whether 
 an unhappy woman was to go to the gallows or 
 to be reprieved, I saw it stated that, among a 
 certain class of the population in Liverpool and 
 elsewhere, large sums were staked upon the 
 issue. 
 
 Alfred Tennyson, the poet laureate of the 
 English world, was buried in Westminster 
 Abbey. Tennyson was the matchless singer 
 who paid that wonderful tribute to Albert the 
 Good, the father of the present Prince of Wales. 
 Thus he sang of Albert: 
 
 " Who reverenced his conscience as his king ; 
 Whose glory was redressing human wrong ; 
 Who spoke no slander — no, nor listened to it ; 
 Who loved one only, and who clave to her. 
 
 " Not swaying to this faction or'to that ; 
 Not making his high place the lawless perch 
 Of winged ambitions, nor a vantage ground 
 For pleasure, but through all this tract of years, 
 Wearing the white flower of a blameless life, 
 Before a thousand peering littlenesses, 
 In that fierce light which beats upon a throne 
 And blackens every blot." 
 
216 MIDXIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 And yet while they were burying the great 
 poet and while the whole world stood with un- 
 covered head, even outside of England, the 
 Prince of Wales, instead of going to the burial, 
 preferred to spend the day at the race track! 
 
 The fruits upon this tree in highest life and 
 lowest alike are dishonesty, selfishness, perjury, 
 political corruption, suicide, murder, and death. 
 The whole business, from stock gambling to 
 policy shop, bears the mark of Cain. Nothing 
 scorches the soul like this, nothing leaves such 
 an open crater of ruin as this. Nothing carries 
 such uncompounded wickedness as this. Noth- 
 ing smites the growing and promising tree of 
 young life with such lightning strokes as this. 
 Not any thing in all the catalogue of evil forces 
 seems to have greater power to blast character 
 and fix destiny than this. Keep flowers from 
 the gambler's grave, and Scripture from his 
 tombstone. They would be mockery; they 
 would be blasphemy. Oh, young man! in the 
 name of all that is good and true on earth ; in the 
 name of your immortal soul; in the name of a 
 mother's love and a father's counsel, in the name 
 of the Christ for whose garment they cast lots on 
 Calvary, keep thy hands clean. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE AMERICAN " JOSS " HOUSE. 
 
 The darkness of heathenism does not all rest 
 upon Central Africa or inland China; some of 
 those somber robes have fallen upon the shoul- 
 ders of this great continent. The Chinese 
 " Joss " house has been erected in our cities, but 
 there is an American " Joss," which more hearts 
 are serving and to which more knees are bend- 
 ing in all reality of idol worship. 
 
 I was recently in the Chinese " Joss " house in 
 New York city, and saw the false god and his 
 worshipers. They were falling down prostrate 
 before his hideous picture. They burned the 
 candle, and made the smoke to rise before him 
 while he caused their number to fall from the 
 shaken box to reveal their future. The gam- 
 bler who had lost his money burned a paper at 
 the altar, and over the ashes of this symbol of 
 his loss he prayed for forgiveness and for better 
 217 
 
2i8 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 luck next time. The whole house and its fur- 
 nishings, and its worship and its priest, were 
 supremely ridiculous. The doors of my heart 
 were pushed open and a peculiar sadness en- 
 tered. The doors of my thought turned out- 
 ward and admitted the question: What is the 
 difference between a false god of wood or stone 
 and the false god of gold? Before this " Gold 
 god " a large part of our population are lying 
 with their faces in the dust. This is the idol at 
 whose crimson altar thousands of lives are con- 
 stantly sacrificed in these cities. 
 
 " Deeds are done, the foulest, 
 Murders yet untold, 
 Wrongs the worst, the basest, 
 For the sake of gold. 
 
 " Love, and truth, and justice 
 Eagerly are sold, 
 Sacrificed most foully 
 At the shrine of gold. 
 
 " Many a corpse now lying 
 Naked, stiff, and cold, 
 Never would have lain there 
 But for tempting gold. 
 
 " Health, and life, and honor, 
 Both by young and old, 
 Readily are bartered 
 For the sake of gold. 
 
THE AMERICAN "JOSS" HOUSE. 
 
 219 
 
 " And the past is hidden, 
 
 Buried 'neath Time's mold, 
 If its grave be covered 
 With a tomb of gold. " 
 
 The passion for gold has entered most of our 
 American blood and has made money-getting 
 the only success. It is not genius or skill or art 
 or sacrifice, but the power to get and to hold 
 wealth. Its cruelty has been the means of de- 
 grading labor and destroying the worker. This 
 Golden Calf must be ground to powder between 
 the millstones of the wrath of Almighty God be- 
 fore much relief can come to the sufferings of 
 society. Even the boys and girls now consider 
 work, or a trade, or a simple living, a fence about 
 them to be broken down. The one ambition is 
 for money and more money, and a consequent 
 life of ease. In this mad rush virtue and 
 honesty are trampled under foot. A fortune 
 must be made, and sharpness and unscrupulous- 
 ness are the agents to secure this coveted object. 
 Labor is a curse and money is the only blessing. 
 This is the plague-spot in our civilization. The 
 great crowds surge through the streets and the 
 stores. Men fisdit on the exchange and in the 
 market; they quarrel in the factories and push 
 
220 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 each other on cars and bridge; all bent on the 
 same errand and all worshiping at the throne 
 of the same false god. There is no more power- 
 ful agent on earth for the destruction of that 
 which is noblest and divinest in humankind. 
 
 One of the greatest Americans said: "The 
 healthiest form of human society is where the 
 many are equally independent in the manage- 
 ment of their affairs; where professions and 
 trades are represented by individual thinking 
 minds; and where those engaged in any one 
 branch of industry stand on a level with one 
 another. This condition of things promotes 
 invention, activity, interest, manliness, and good 
 citizenship. Now the gold-hunt system is 
 directly antagonistic to all this. It seeks to 
 destroy the many independent tradesmen, and to 
 make them servants in a gigantic monopoly. 
 The happy homes of freemen become the pinched 
 quarters of serfs. The lords of trade have their 
 hundreds and thousands of humble subordinates 
 over whom they rule, often with a rod of iron. 
 They may be turned away from work and wages 
 at any moment, by any whim of the selfish 
 employer. Hence, through fear of this, they 
 lose their manhood, and dare not assert even a 
 
THE AMERICAN "JOSS" HOUSE. 221 
 
 decision of their conscience. There is no more 
 melancholy sight to my eyes than that which I 
 often see nowadays — the former happy possessor 
 of a shop or store, who has lived comfortably 
 and with the true nobility of a citizen, and whose 
 family have felt the dignity of the home, now 
 made a clerk and drudge in a huge establishment 
 that, by its relentless use of millions, has under- 
 mined and overthrown all the independent stores 
 of a large district, while his family are thrust 
 into the unsavory communism of a tenement 
 house, and lose all the delicate refinement of a 
 quiet home. It is easy to say that this is but the 
 natural law of trade. So to devour men is the 
 natural law of tigers. But this truth will not 
 reconcile us to the process. If we are to stop 
 men from stealing directly, we can stop them 
 from stealing indirectly. If natural law works 
 evil to the community, we are to make statute 
 law, which will act as supernatural law and con- 
 trol the offensive principle. Unless we wish our 
 social equality destroyed, and a system of prac- 
 tical serfdom to take its place, we must put a 
 limit to the acts of greed, and so preserve the 
 independence of our citizens." 
 
 By this false god the rich are cursed and the 
 
2 22 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 poor are crushed. This foot of oppression rests 
 upon the necks of men, women, and children by 
 the million. He is the cause of most of the 
 wrongs of society and the quarrels of men. The 
 bloody struggle between Capital and Labor will 
 reach no amicable solution at his throne. There 
 is a white slavery, and he is the cruel master 
 with lash in hand. He snaps it above the 
 sweat-shop and the counter, and the machine 
 and the store, and the street and the tenement 
 house, and everywhere. 
 
 This " Joss " is the ruin of those who possess 
 him, and is the oppression of the poor. Many 
 men in these great cities are spending their 
 whole lives and shortening their lives in the 
 relentless grasp of this craze for gold, only to dis- 
 cover too late their murderous folly. They are 
 the victims of a fatal mirage. A man recently 
 set out from Juarez, Mexico, to go to Palomas in 
 New Mexico, and nearly lost his life from a 
 mirage delusion. He was driving his wagon 
 when he saw a short distance off in the desert a 
 beautiful lake shadowed by trees. Both he and 
 his team were thirsty, so he turned out of his 
 course to get the water. After traveling some 
 miles the lake seemed as far off as at first, but it 
 
THE AMERICAN "JOSS" HOUSE. 223 
 
 was there, clear, distinct, before him. He con- 
 tinued in the direction of the lake and fancied 
 that he could feel on his face the fresh breeze 
 from the water, but as the distance did not 
 diminish, at last the idea of his delusion dawned 
 on him, and he turned back toward the road. 
 But the night overcame him. He lost his way. 
 On the morrow he could not recognize any indi- 
 cation of his course. All his efforts to find the 
 road were unavailing. At last, after a terrible 
 struggle of four days, wrestling with heat and 
 hunger, and with thirst, he succeeded in reach- 
 ing the road more dead than alive. Life's 
 struggle to reach the shining and glitter of gold 
 has resulted in like delusion. 
 
 The following incident from a recent pen tells 
 the sad story: " A man who started in life deter- 
 mined to get rich, by fair means or foul, had 
 accumulated a fortune estimated at forty million 
 dollars. He was shut up in his chamber in a 
 hotel, suffering from an incurable disease. He 
 had been divorced from his wife. He had quar- 
 reled with his children. He had no home — no 
 one to minister to him but hired servants. He 
 knew that he could live only a few months 
 and that when he died, those between whom 
 
224 MIDXIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 and himself there had been no sympathy or 
 reciprocity of affection would inherit, quarrel 
 over, and squander his wealth. One would 
 think that a man so situated would feel like try- 
 ing to make friends with his money. One 
 would think that he would say to himself, ' I 
 have been envied and hated because I was self- 
 ish and grasping. But I will use some of my 
 millions so that somebody will bless me in my 
 days of sickness and pain and cherish my mem- 
 ory when I am gone.' He could not do this, 
 however. The ruling passion was too strong. 
 On the contrary he did what was so inhuman 
 that I do not hesitate to call it satanic. Read 
 on and see. 
 
 " He put several millions into the hands of 
 trusted agents, who were to share the profits 
 with him. They were to get up a panic, and 
 when the farmers were badly scared and other 
 buyers were out of the market because he and 
 his confederates had locked up all the money, 
 they bought some four or five million bushels of 
 wheat and stored it. They hoped to ' bull ' the 
 market in selling, as they had ' beared ' it in 
 buying. Their plan was to rob the producers 
 by getting their produce at less than it was 
 
THE AMERICAN "JOSS" HOUSE. 225 
 
 worth, and then to rob the consumers by making 
 them pay more than it was worth. Yes, this 
 multi-millionaire meant to squeeze a million out 
 of the sellers and then another million out of the 
 buyers, because he was rich enough to control 
 the market. He knew that, if he were success- 
 ful, thousands would curse him as he lay in his 
 coffin. But what did he care, if he could add 
 two millions to his forty while on his dying- 
 bed? Oh, the folly, the madness of this insati- 
 able greed! Truly they who will be rich fall 
 into temptation and a snare. They think that 
 they own their millions, but will wake up here- 
 after, if not in this world, to realize that their 
 millions owned them. A golden chain may be 
 as heavy and galling as one of iron. The hun- 
 ger for riches is worse than the hunger for bread, 
 for it gnaws the soul." 
 
 Self-sacrifice is at the foundation of noble char- 
 acter, and this greed had made those granite 
 blocks to crumble and the superstructure to 
 totter and at last to fall. Home is neglected, and 
 church is neglected, and country is neglected. 
 Every second runs through the same yellow 
 channel from early morning until late at night, 
 and sometimes seven days in the week, until 
 
226 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 many a father in our modern city life is a 
 stranger in his own home and will forever be a 
 stranger in heaven. The principle of true living 
 and his right relation to his fellow-man are all 
 sacrificed to his determination to rise above 
 others by stepping upon their prostrate forms. 
 This is the tendency of our present system of 
 competition. The smaller merchants are gradu- 
 ally succumbing to the inevitable and giving up 
 their own business, to suffer in poverty or to be- 
 come clerks for the monopolists. In the centers 
 where millions live and toil a few large stores do 
 practically all the business to-day and those 
 establishments are a veritable mint. In the 
 present system it ems unavoidable, but that 
 makes it none the less condemnable. The poor 
 are growing poorer and more in number and the 
 rich are growing richer and fewer in number in 
 the city, while the " Golden Joss " laughs on his 
 apparently hie throne. But there is justice 
 beneath this free soil, and the rumblings of an 
 earthquake are destined to be heard above the 
 sound of that cruel laugh and to shatter that 
 heathenish form. 
 
 Clerks are made to stand behind the counters 
 from morning until night for pay which is some- 
 
THE AMERICAN "JOSS" HOUSE. 227 
 
 times amazing for its meanness, in order that one 
 man's purse may burst with fatness. I know 
 of at least one store which coined thousands and 
 tens of thousands of dollars at the holiday sea- 
 son and which forced its great army of clerks to 
 work from eight o'clock in the morning until 
 eleven o'clock at night, with opportunity for one 
 eating time and with not one farthing of extra 
 pay for two weeks of that kind of barbarous 
 slavery. I know of young women in this city, 
 working now in one of the largest stores in 
 America, for the astonishing pay of two and a 
 half dollars per week! Is it any wonder that 
 purity vanishes? How can they live? Alas! 
 alas! it too often means starvation or stain. 
 For the sake of this " Gold God " young men 
 and young women are forced to sacrifice their 
 honesty and veracity at his altar. It is the same 
 inhuman sword which the Turkish hand swings 
 above the head of the oppressed and suffering 
 Armenian. They must lie or lose their position; 
 they must forget that " Lying lips are an abomi- 
 nation to the Lord," while they render worship 
 to " Gold." Their goods must be sold at all 
 hazards, and if a lie is necessary the lie must be 
 told and be considered as a part of business. If 
 
228 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 all the lies could be gathered out of the stores in 
 a single city at the close of a single day — what a 
 spectacle for men and angels. A mercantile lie 
 is as black as any other member of that colored 
 family, whether it is told before or behind the 
 counter; it will be heard again before the judg- 
 ment bar of God, and poor " Gold Joss " will 
 not be able to furnish any relief. 
 
 The " bargain counter " in these stores is 
 also a part of his altar, and I have seen blood- 
 marks upon it. From whence do " bargains " 
 come? Do they drop from the skies to the 
 counter? Ah, no! They come from the homes 
 and the hands and the hearts of the poor. There 
 was a time when the price was but one factor in 
 a sale. It is now almost everything. This 
 spirit of getting something for less than cost has 
 permeated all commerce. " Bargains " are the 
 loadstone of attraction. If there is gain here to 
 one, there is loss somewhere else to another. 
 The starvation of sewing women is the comple- 
 ment of the " bargain " counter. There is noth- 
 ing on earth so cheap as flesh and blood, because 
 it never touches the limit of cost. There must 
 be dishonesty in material or wages must be cut, 
 if the stream of " bargains " continues to flow. 
 
THE AMERICAN "JOSS" HOUSE. 229 
 
 Cheap goods and cheap men live together. 
 Whoever buys much for little can see, if he looks 
 intently, the stain of human blood upon it, and 
 if he listens intently might hear the pathetic 
 sound : 
 
 " And oh, full oft, quite spent and weary, 
 Her hand will pause, her head decline ; 
 That labor seems so hard and dreary 
 On which no ray of hope may shine." 
 
 We have read somewhere that in one of the 
 old cities of Italy the king caused a bell to be 
 hung in a tower and called it the " bell of jus- 
 tice." He likewise ordered that anyone who 
 had been wronged should ring that bell, and the 
 magistrate should come to his relief. In the 
 course of time the lower part of the rope rotted 
 away, and a wild vine was tied to lengthen it. 
 A starving horse that had been turned out to 
 die in old age, seeing the vine, gnawed it, and in 
 doing so rang the bell. Straightway came the 
 magistrate, and having ascertained in whose 
 service the animal's life 1 ad been spent, he said: 
 
 The dumb brute has rung the bell of justice, 
 and justice he shall have; the owner shall care 
 for him the rest of his days." Humane magis- 
 trate! 
 
230 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 This part of suffering humanity is ringing the 
 " bell of justice." Let the city hear its solemn 
 tone! From garret of tenement and hovel and 
 factory it rings above the mad rush for gold. It 
 tells the sad story of thousands and tens of thou- 
 sands, and now, almost hundreds of thousands 
 in a single city in hunger and cold, working their 
 life out at the machine, or losing their blood by 
 the piercings of the needle, in order that the few 
 may have more gold. Heart-breaking despair 
 have I seen again and again in these lives and 
 homes. 
 
 How well their grief was voiced by that 
 despairing woman who stood by her invalid 
 husband and invalid child, and said to the city 
 missionary: "I am downhearted, everything's 
 against us; and then there are other things." 
 "What other things?" said the city missionary. 
 <4 Oh," she repeated, " my sin." " What do you 
 mean by that?" " Well," she said, "I never 
 hear or see anything good. It's work from 
 Monday morning till Saturday night, and then 
 when Sunday comes I can't go out, and I walk 
 the floor, and it makes me tremble to think that 
 I have got to meet God. Oh, sir! it's so hard 
 for us. We have to work so, and we have so 
 
THE AMERICAN "JOSS" HOUSE. 231 
 
 much trouble, and then we are getting along so 
 poorly; and see this wee little thing growing 
 weaker and weaker; and then to think we are 
 not getting nearer to God but floating away from 
 Him. Oh, sir! I do wish I was ready to die." 
 
 All the shot and shell of earth have not made 
 such havoc as is seen on this battlefield for life 
 in the great city in order that goods may be 
 sold cheap. There are manufacturing establish- 
 ments in these cities which secure almost all their 
 labor by false pretense. They advertise for help 
 and then promise them good pay when they 
 have learned the trade. The sewing goes on for 
 days and weeks and months, with a constant 
 repetition of the promise which is never fulfilled. 
 Was there ever a more satanic method of steal- 
 ing invented? Those goods are on the counters 
 of the best stores. 
 
 "What can we do?" said one manufacturer 
 lately, when asked how he thought the thing 
 would end. " If there were any power quicker 
 than steam, or any way of managing so that 
 women could feed five or six machines, that 
 would have to come next, else every one of us 
 would go to the wall together, the pressure is so 
 tremendous. Of course there's no chance for 
 
232 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 the women, but then you must remember there's 
 precious little chance for the employer either. 
 This competition is a sort of insanity. It gluts 
 the market with cheap goods and gives a sense 
 of prosperity, but it is the death of all legitimate, 
 reasonable business. It won't surprise me if 
 this whole trade of manufacturing underwear 
 becomes a monopoly, and one man — like 
 O'H., for instance — swallows up the whole 
 thing. Lord help the women then! for there'll 
 be no help in man." " Suppose co-operation 
 were tried? what would be the effect?" "No 
 effect, because there isn't confidence anywhere 
 to make men dare a co-operative scheme. Even 
 the workers would distrust it, and a sharp busi- 
 ness man laughs in your face if you mention the 
 word. It doesn't suit American notions. It 
 might be a good thing if there were any old- 
 fashioned business men left, — men content with 
 slow profits and honest dealing, — as my father 
 was, for instance. But he wouldn't have a ghost 
 of a chance to-day. The whole system of busi- 
 ness is rotten and there will have to be a recon- 
 struction clean from the bottom, though it is the 
 men that need it first. We're the maddest 
 nation for money on the face of the earth, and 
 
THE AMERICAN "JOSS" HOUSE. 233 
 
 the race is a more killing one every year. I am 
 half inclined to think sometimes that mankind 
 will soon be pretty much a superfluity, the ma- 
 chines are getting so intelligent; and it may be 
 these conditions that seem to upset you so are 
 simply means of killing off those that are not 
 wanted and giving place to a less sensitive order 
 of beings. Lord help them! I say again, for 
 there's no help in man." 
 
 The Angel of Life, so runs the legend, was sent 
 out to find where Happiness dwelt. He went 
 first to a palace, but he found the owner wearing 
 a crown whose sharp and jagged edges pierced 
 his brow. Then he flew to a hovel, but as he 
 heard the cries for bread, he hastened away. 
 Then the angel was told to measure the distance 
 between the palace and the hovel, and in the 
 center plant a tree called Justice. This he did. 
 The rich man was then told to walk toward the 
 hovel and the poor man toward the palace. 
 They met at the tree, and when it had grown to 
 a goodly size they dwelt under its shade in peace 
 and happiness for evermore. That is the only 
 solution. As long as their " Gold God " con- 
 tinues to be worshiped, the scorching days of 
 summer and the marrow-piercing days of winter 
 
234 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 will hear the cry of white-faced children starving 
 for bread and shivering for rags; the winds will 
 carry the moan of women who toil on, some- 
 times sixteen hours a day, and the sighs of men 
 out of employment by the quicker work of 
 machinery and the demand for bargains. 
 
 A baker died in New York city and left the 
 provision in his will that a half loaf of stale 
 bread should be given to every man who came 
 for it at twelve o'clock at night. Every night 
 for years past hundreds of hungry men have 
 formed in line at that bakery at the midnight 
 hour. Sometimes that line has reached more 
 than two blocks. When I saw these, my 
 brothers, on a bitter winter's night shivering in 
 the cruel winds as they waited for the bread and 
 a tin cup of coffee, my heart was crowded with 
 unwelcome visitors. Only one did I see in all 
 that great number with an overcoat to shield 
 him from the cold blasts. Scarcely a man of 
 them bore the marks of dissipation, but all were 
 starving for the want of work, and willing to 
 walk miles and shovel snow for a half hour, as I 
 saw them do, in order to receive a half loaf of old 
 bread. That line of sadness reached almost 
 around one of the largest churches in the city, 
 
THE AMERICAN "JOSS" HOUSE. 235 
 
 which stood on the corner and which held mil- 
 lions of dollars in the hands of its worshipers. 
 I looked at it, that never to be forgotten night, 
 and then at that awful sight of suffering, starv- 
 ing humanity, and had many serious thoughts 
 about the " Gold God." I looked out of my 
 window while writing these words and saw the 
 hands of men, women, and children thrust into 
 every ash barrel along the street for cinders or 
 for something to eat or to wear, while the car- 
 riages, with prancing steeds and gold-covered 
 harness, rolled by on their way to the Temple of 
 the " Gold God." 
 
 It was an evil day when the head of the house 
 lost his job. For four months he looked for 
 work. Save for an occasional odd chore he 
 could find nothing to do. Then the frail wife 
 and mother came forward in the role of bread- 
 winner. She was not strong enough to do 
 much, but she found an office to take care of, 
 which, with a small family washing that she 
 took home to do, netted her just $3.25 per week. 
 Gradually their household belongings were 
 transferred to the pawnbroker's, and their 
 pinched faces stared poverty in the face. One 
 morning, two months ago, the husband kissed 
 
236 MIDNIGHT IN A GREA T CITY. 
 
 the children with more than wonted affection 
 and left home ostensibly to look for work. He 
 did not return. No trace of him has been seen 
 since. The wife thinks he was unable to bear 
 the unequal struggle for existence, and so took 
 his own life. From bad to worse matters 
 quickly went. The rent of the two tiny rooms 
 at 573 West 43d Street was long overdue and 
 the children were starving, so she tearfully asked 
 if she could put little Johnnie — whose appetite 
 is the most appalling — away for a time. She 
 was asked how she could feed the other five. 
 After a little talk she came to the conclusion that 
 she could support three much more easily. 
 Magistrate Deuel, with tears in his eyes, com- 
 mitted the youngsters. The parting between 
 the mother and her babies would have melted 
 the hardest heart that ever steeled itself against 
 the poverty and misery that exist on every side. 
 But the worshipers at the shrine of which I 
 write never paused in their idolatry. 
 
 One Edward Herringe, an aged brass and 
 wood worker, hanged himself in his tenement 
 the other day. Why? A Mrs. Uhl, one of the 
 tenants of the building, tells us why. " He 
 died," said she, seeking to express herself in 
 
THE AMERICAN "JOSS" HOUSE. 237 
 
 English, " that his wife and little ones might 
 have life. He had one thousand dollars life 
 insurance, which money, you see, now they will 
 get. They could not have it while he was alive. 
 And that poor man tried so hard to get bread 
 for his family; he was old and could not talk 
 English, and nobody would believe he was a 
 good workman. For most two years he had 
 nothing to do, and he walk the streets, hungry 
 and weak, looking for any odd job he might get 
 to do. He often came to me, and I gave him a 
 little money, and he always paid it back so soon 
 as he had work. A little while ago he came to 
 me and said, ' For God's sake, Mrs. Uhl, let me 
 have a dollar to save my life insurance. God 
 will pay you/ I said, ' Yes, you shall have the 
 dollar/ and I did give him my last dollar I had in 
 the house, for my husband he work by the day, 
 and we have not much. He went away, and I 
 know what he meant when he said, ' God will 
 pay you.' He knew," and the motherly eyes 
 rilled with tears, " he knew what he must do to 
 keep them alive a couple of years anyway, and 
 he knew he never would pay me. Oh, you do 
 not know how glad I am that I gave that good 
 man my last dollar." That took place in a 
 
238 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 Christian city. Millions of dollars were on the 
 next street, but every farthing of it was under 
 the scepter of the " American Joss." Cruel, in- 
 human, bloodthirsty idol; the cause of untold 
 suffering and unblushing crime; the murderer 
 of bodies; the shatterer of brains; the breaker 
 of hearts; the destroyer of souls! 
 
 " ' With gates of silver, and bars of gold, 
 
 Ye have fenced my sheep from their father's fold. 
 I have heard the dropping of their tears 
 In heaven these eighteen hundred years.' 
 
 " 4 O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt, 
 We build but as our fathers built : 
 Behold Thine images, how they stand, 
 Sovereign and sole, through all the land.' 
 
 " Then Christ sought out an artisan, 
 
 A low-browed, stunted, haggard man ; 
 And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin 
 Pushed from her faintly want and sin. 
 
 " These sat He in the midst of them, 
 
 And as they drew back their garment-hem ; 
 For fear of defilement, ' Lo, here,' said He, 
 ' The IMAGES ye have made of ME ! ' " 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE MORNING BREAKETH. 
 
 Every night has had its morning. The mid- 
 night darkness must flee before the forces of 
 light when they climb the eastern sky, and place 
 their lines along the entire horizon, and their 
 banners upon every mountain-top and every hill- 
 side. One of the most beautiful and most in- 
 spiring scenes ever presented to human vision 
 is the break of day, and the gilding of 
 cloud and sky. The artists from the studio of 
 nature do at that time some of the most rapid 
 and most wonderful work ever placed on the 
 palace walls of our world. The transformation 
 from a night into a day by such master strokes, 
 and in that exquisite color, surpasses human 
 appreciation or description. 
 
 The king of day swings his scepter above 
 his head, and the flash of his jewels is first seen. 
 Speedily he mounts the golden stairway to his 
 239 
 
240 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 throne, and all enemies take their flight, and all 
 friends bow at his feet. Darkness has been ban- 
 ished and the kingdom of light once more 
 established in our world. I have seen the rays 
 of light rise above the eastern hills like a mighty 
 army with drawn swords and flashing bayonets, 
 and no power was able to withstand their 
 triumphant march across world and sky. Let 
 the night be never so dark, the morning break- 
 eth, when robes of mourning are hung away and 
 garments of brightest color are made to take 
 their places; when the silence is broken by the 
 music of many voices and the harmony of bird 
 chorus; when the flower is no longer found to 
 blush unseen, but rests beneath the admiring 
 eyes of every passer-by, and throws fresh fra- 
 grance lavishly into an atmosphere almost intoxi- 
 cating; when grass and tree, and garden, and 
 meadow are all the guests of this reception to the 
 king of the morning. Glorious morning, wel- 
 come! Thrice welcome, after the darkest night! 
 However black may be the moral midnight of 
 city life, the eye should ever be turned toward the 
 eastern sky, and faith should watch for the mes- 
 sengers to tell of His coming, and to prepare the 
 way for the Sun of Righteousness to move 
 
THE MORNING BREAKETH. 241 
 
 across His palace floor and to sit upon His 
 zenith throne. He is coming! He is coming! 
 And the last remnant of darkness shall forever 
 disappear, and the clouds shall be changed into 
 chariots for His glory. 
 
 When the black ink has all fallen from the 
 writer's pen, he must finish his story by dipping 
 into the crimson bottle. The truth must be told 
 and the black ink must be used, but there is a 
 brighter, more appropriate color for the last 
 chapter. The Church of Christ must face tre- 
 mendous forces of evil in the great city, but the 
 Church is a tremendous force itself and the 
 battle, though hard and long, is sure to be won, 
 and the Standard of the Cross to move in an 
 unhindered march. 
 
 What are the conditions that the Church must 
 face to-day? In Chicago it must face a com- 
 bination of 7000 barrooms, 28,000 barkeepers, 
 60,000 saloon and den habitues, 40,000 harlots, 
 30,000 professional barroom politicians, 12,000 
 gamblers, and 10,000 thieves. These are the 
 figures given out by the Civic Federation. In 
 New York the Church must face a veritable city 
 of barrooms. If gathered together in rows there 
 w T ould be barrooms enough to line Broadway 
 
242 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 its entire length; cross the city from river to 
 river at Fourteenth Street; cross it again at 
 Twenty-third Street, and line both sides of all 
 three streets at that. They would form an un- 
 broken line of grog shops, allowing to each one 
 twenty-five feet front, forty-five miles long. It 
 must face an annual consumption of beer that if 
 barreled and placed end to end, it would take the 
 Empire State Express, running at the rate of 
 fifty miles an hour, from six o'clock Monday 
 morning until seven o'clock Tuesday night, a 
 continuous run of thirty-seven hours, to reach 
 the end of the line. But the forces of righteous- 
 ness need not tremble before such an enemy as 
 that. They can conquer if they will, and I verily 
 believe the lines of intemperance are weakening, 
 and if now bravery is seen on this other Gettys- 
 burg, America and the world and all heaven 
 will have cause for rejoicing. 
 
 A section of the city of New York, containing 
 thirty-six blocks, has a population of 28,266 
 souls, 179 licensed saloons, and just 3 churches; 
 1 saloon to every 150 people over against 1 
 church to every 9422 people. In forty-two city 
 blocks, with a population of 49>359> tnere are 2 37 
 saloons and 5 churches; 1 church to 9872 people. 
 
THE MORNING BREAKETH. 243 
 
 Take still larger district of ninety-nine city 
 blocks, containing 95,000 persons, with 1 saloon 
 to every 170 people, and 1 church to every 13,- 
 571. More still, take all that part of New York 
 west of Tenth Avenue, between Twenty-fourth 
 and Fifty-ninth streets, and there is 1 church to 
 every 32,000 people. There is a whole district 
 in the city as large as Detroit (205,000) that is 
 practically without a single Protestant church, 
 and with the exception of three Roman Catholic 
 churches and a few missions, is churchless. 
 The section below Fourteenth Street houses 
 above 700,000 of the city's wage-workers 
 and poor — where forty-one per cent, of the 
 people live in a single room — where the condi- 
 tions of life are almost more appalling than any 
 like district known to civilization. While 200,000 
 souls moved in, 17 Protestant churches moved 
 out. The people came, the saloons increased, 
 the churches departed. 
 
 That is as true as it is startling, and similar 
 changes can be duplicated in most of the cities 
 of any size in this land. But that midnight is 
 destined to be scattered, and already the forces 
 of light are at work — forces of knowledge and 
 co-operation, and determination and consecra- 
 
244 MIDXIGH T IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 tion, until in this hardest of all places the great- 
 est of triumphs are yet to be won. At this 
 present hour there can be seen in this city some 
 of the most sublime sacrifices ever seen on the 
 planet, and it is destined to tell for God's glory. 
 This is one of the most encouraging features of 
 the evangelization problem. Preachers are sac- 
 rificing, and missionaries are sacrificing, and 
 Christians are sacrificing, and Almighty God is 
 bound to honor it. There are powerful agencies 
 for good at work in the darkest centers. 
 
 In a hidden bay on the St. Lawrence, in the 
 center of water-grass and stagnancy and im- 
 purity, I saw hundreds of water lilies push their 
 white faces to the surface and seemingly de- 
 light in shedding their fragrance and beauty 
 upon those lowly and exceedingly unattractive 
 surroundings. They were unseen except by the 
 eyes that looked for them. Their snowy white- 
 ness must have fallen from heaven, that place of 
 purity, and their golden crowns must have been 
 the gift of the king of day. I attempted to 
 take them from their place of deepest humility 
 and apparent waste, and to place them in the 
 center of the beautiful parlor and upon the gar- 
 ments of appreciation. They all seemed to draw 
 
THE MORNING BREAKETH. 245 
 
 back as the boat drew near. And when I asked 
 them to come they seemed to say, emphatically, 
 " No, no ! " A few were forced to leave their 
 swampy home, but they shed tears of regret and 
 speedily wilted in their sorrow. That waxen 
 beauty and heavenly fragrance delighted in giv- 
 ing its life to enhance and beautify the lowest. 
 It must have been transplanted from the Gardens 
 of God. The flower of Christian love is what I 
 have seen in the slums of the city, and its fra- 
 grance destroys malaria and reveals the beauty 
 of the " Lily of the Valley." 
 
 There is evil, but side by side with it is Calvary 
 Christianity. I do not forget that the larger part 
 of city population is outside of the Church; that 
 in New York and Brooklyn, and other great 
 centers, hundreds of thousands (and now almost 
 reaching the millions) do not cross the threshold 
 of the Church of Christ. It is as astounding as 
 it is true. The reports reveal that seventy-five 
 per cent, of the young men never attend church, 
 and only fifteen per cent, are regular in attend- 
 ance. 
 
 Out of 22,000 young men of Cincinnati, less 
 than 2000 have their names on the church roll; 
 less than ten per cent, in Brooklyn, and out of 
 
246 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 91,000 young men in Boston there are over 
 80,000 who do not attend the house of God at all. 
 New York and Chicago statistics are even more 
 startling. 
 
 The workingmen are estranged from the 
 Church. Some of our city churches have not a 
 single man with calloused hands among their 
 hundreds. Most of the churches have very few. 
 I know of at least one church, and that down 
 town, which has been for thirty years without 
 any. The Carpenter of Nazareth himself has 
 been shut out. There is in other so-called 
 Christian churches a heathenish formality, with 
 no marks of the Cross upon it except on the 
 steeple and altar. I have seen a Chinese joss 
 house on one side of the street and a Christian 
 church on the other side of the street and wit- 
 nessed the worship in both, and there was no dis- 
 tinction whatever — image and incense, and altar 
 and ceremony precisely the same, and yet right 
 by the side of these two heathen temples stood a 
 Christian mission into which the poorest and 
 the most sinful were flocking and being redeemed 
 by the touch of the loving hand of Christ. I 
 would not be blind to the facts. Through all 
 this midnight gloom, I would not hold my hands 
 
THE MORNING BREAKETH. 247 
 
 over my eyes and refuse to see the rays of morn- 
 ing light. 
 
 There are difficulties: there is materialism do- 
 ing its poisoning work in Church and society; 
 there is a realism in one line of the popular litera- 
 ture, and impurity in the next line, and serpen- 
 tine marks of unbelief between the lines; there is 
 a tendency to degrade much of the amusement of 
 the world to the level of the pit of the abyss ; there 
 is unbounded poverty and even starvation in the 
 very center of plenty; there is the herding of 
 humankind like animals in fever-ridden and 
 death-ruled quarters; there is anarchy seen in a 
 thousand forms of lawlessness; there is selfish- 
 ness supreme; there are crime and suffering 
 unbounded; there are well-grounded charges 
 against the Church of Jesus Christ. " The 
 growth of wealth and of luxury, wicked, waste- 
 ful, and wanton, as before God I declare that 
 luxury to be, has been matched step by step by 
 a deepening and deadening poverty, which has 
 left whole neighborhoods of people practically 
 without hope and without aspiration. At such 
 a time, for the Church of God to sit still and be 
 content with theories of its duty outlawed by 
 time, and long ago demonstrated to be gro- 
 
248 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 tesquely inadequate to the demands of a living 
 situation, this is to deserve the scorn of men and 
 the curse of God. Take my word for it, men and 
 brethren, unless you and I and all those who 
 have any gift or stewardship of talents, or means, 
 of whatever sort, are willing to get up out of 
 our sloth and ease and selfish dilettanteism of 
 service, and get down among the people who are 
 battling amid their poverty and ignorance — 
 young girls for their chastity, young men for 
 their better ideal of righteousness, old and young 
 alike for one clear ray of the immortal courage 
 and the immortal hope — then verily the Church 
 in its stately splendor, its apostolic orders, its 
 venerable ritual, its decorous and dignified con- 
 vention, is revealed as simply a monstrous and 
 insolent impertinence." 
 
 Yet notwithstanding all that has been said, 
 that blood-bought Church is destined to triumph 
 in these very centers of iniquity. The standard 
 of the Cross shall never fall from the fortifica- 
 tions of Calvary. The spirit of God is upon the 
 earth and he is not neglecting the city. His 
 mighty power can answer the prayer of the 
 faithful, " Thy kingdom come." The human 
 would fail, miserably fail; the Divine cannot fail. 
 
THE MORNING BREAK ETH. 249 
 
 If Christ is on Golgotha, He will be alive in 
 Joseph's garden. "He is risen!" sounds 
 through the slums and the sin of the great city. 
 I reveal all the enemies and in plain view of theii 
 astonishing number and mighty power I shout, 
 "Hallelujah! hallelujah! the Lord God omnip- 
 otent reigneth." And then I shout to the 
 Christian hosts, " Come on, come on; bring up 
 the crimson banner!" 
 
 The irreligion of the city is not to conquer; 
 the vices of the city will reach their limit, and I 
 verily believe they are now reaching it. The 
 social evils are many, but the counteracting 
 forces are coming in. The selfishness and in- 
 humanity of the commercial world are receiving 
 death-dealing blows from pulpit and press and 
 periodical. The unchristian and unjust princi- 
 ples in the world of capital and labor do not re- 
 ceive the applause they once did. The " Gold 
 God " is worshiped, but the worshipers are not 
 being worshiped in these last days as formerly. 
 The stupendous evils and almost overwhelming 
 abominations of the city are claiming the at- 
 tention of Christian and patriot alike. But jus- 
 tice and humanity and Christianity — these three, 
 but the greatest of these is Christianity — are 
 
250 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 demanding the attention now of every lover of 
 his fellow-man. 
 
 That was a sublime thing said by Henry Clay, 
 while crossing the Allegheny mountains. He 
 was waiting for the stage-horses to get rested, 
 as he stood on a rock, with arms folded, looking 
 off into the valley. Someone said to him, " Mr. 
 Clay, what are you thinking about?" He re- 
 plied, " I am listening to the on-coming tramp of 
 the future generation of America." 
 
 I stand now w r ith eyes toward the eastern sky, 
 and from the mountain-tops of faith I listen for 
 the on-coming tramp of the future Church of 
 Christ. As hard as the fight may seem to be 
 in these cities, it is sure to conquer. The arch- 
 angel and all the hosts of heaven are its 
 Bliicher. The re-enforcements are coming. 
 The glistening of their bayonets is flashing along 
 the hills, and this Waterloo of the Church of God 
 is won. " The morning breaketh," and the white 
 horse and his Rider are waiting to lead on the 
 triumphal march down the skies. I stood on the 
 shores of Silver Lake and watched the storm 
 forces drawing up in battle array along the 
 western horizon. The artillery of heaven was 
 rapidly stationed on the batteries of the hills. 
 
THE MORNING BREAKETH. 251 
 
 The entire couch of the sun was covered with a 
 drapery of midnight blackness, and the giant 
 cloud form grumbled beneath his burdens of 
 thunder and became wrathful with his thou- 
 sand tongues of lightning. Every tree was 
 bowing its head in fear, and the flowers 
 and grass were falling into each other's arms 
 for shelter. The winds sent out their mes- 
 senger breezes to tell of the coming cyclone, 
 and the rain sent out its messenger drops to 
 tell of the breaking up of the fountains of 
 heaven. Man and beast watched the robing of 
 the brightest day in the black garments of the 
 night. The watching leaped into anxiety and 
 the anxiety bounded into fear as the feet of the 
 cloud army touched the shore of the quiet lake, 
 and their huge arms lashed the ripples into 
 waves, and the waves into billows, and the billows 
 into a raging sea of foaming madness. At last 
 the enemy had completely surrounded the lake 
 and captured its prisoner, and we saw it no more. 
 In the merciful shelter we listened tremblingly to 
 the tremendous roar of the furious thunder and 
 hid our eyes from the lurid flashes of the light- 
 ning, until all the electric currents seemed to 
 concentrate at one point in a most destructive, 
 
252 MIDNIGHT IN A GREAT CITY. 
 
 shocking crash. How could there ever be quiet 
 again? How could flowers ever live in such a 
 storm? How could the birds cling to their tree- 
 nests in such a moment? How could man ever 
 feel safe again in such a world? But the larger 
 hand had scarcely moved around the dial when 
 angel hands flung out the banners of sapphire 
 glory in the sky, and the birds sang in their glee, 
 and the flowers delighted to throw out hand- 
 fuls of fresh fragrance to every passer-by; the 
 lake lay in the arms of the hills as peaceful as a 
 babe on its mother's bosom; the single boat 
 moved as two across its mirrowed smoothness; 
 and at the shore of earth's Silver Lake we 
 thought we sat in the Gardens of God at the shore 
 of the Silver River. When the storms of sin and 
 wrong have done their worst, at the close of day, 
 earth will be changed into heaven, and that sun- 
 set will be the dawning of an Eternal Morning. 
 
 THE END.