a purse—all villanies of less than twenty
or thirty dollars’ damage to the community; but
for that gambler, who last night took that young man’s
thousand dollars—nothing! For that
man who broke in upon the purity of a Christian household,
and by a perfidy and adroitness that beat the strategy
of hell, flung that girl into the chasm of earthly
despair, from which her lost soul goes shrieking to
the bottomless pit—nothing! For those
who “fleeced” a young man, and induced
him to filch from his employers vast sums of money,
until, in his agony, he came to an officer of the
church, and frantically asked what he should do—nothing!
Verily, small crimes ought to be punished; but it
were more just if our authorities would turn out from
our jails and penitentiaries the small villains, the
petty criminals, the infantile offenders, the ten-dollar
desperadoes, and fill their places with some of these
monsters of abomination, who drive their roan span
through our fine streets until honest men have to
fly to escape being run over; and if they would turn
out from their incarceration the poor girls of the
town, and put in some of the magnificent ladies who
cover up the sidewalk with their unpaid-for fineries,
and with scornful look, in the church-aisle, pass
the daughters of poverty, who with their faded dress
and plain hat dare to come to worship God in
the same sanctuary.
But all these wrongs shall be righted. Our streets
shall hear the tramp of a regenerated multitude.
Three hundred and sixty bells were rung in Moscow
when the prince was married; but when righteousness
and peace shall “kiss each other” in all
the earth, ten thousand bells will strike the jubilee.
Poverty enriched. Hunger fed. Disease cured.
Crime purified. The cities saved.
