The Abominations of Modern Society by T. De Witt Talmage

The Abominations of Modern Society by T. De Witt Talmage 1832-1902


PREFACE.


This is a buoy swung over the rocks. If it shall keep ship, bark,
fore-and-aft schooner, or hermaphrodite brig from driving on a lee
shore, "all's well."

The book is not more for young men than old. The Calabria was wrecked
"the last day out."

Nor is the book more for men than women. The best being that God ever
made is a good woman, and the worst that the devil ever made is a bad
one. If anything herein shall be a warning either to man or woman, I
will be glad that the manuscript was caught up between the sharp teeth
of the type.

T.D.W.T.

BROOKLYN, January 1st, 1872.




CONTENTS.


The Curtain Lifted

Winter Nights

The Power of Clothes

After Midnight

The Indiscriminate Dance

The Massacre by Needle and Sewing-Machine

Pictures in the Stock Gallery

Leprous Newspapers

The Fatal Ten-Strike

Some of the Club-Houses

Flask, Bottle, and Demijohn

House of Blackness of Darkness

The Gun that Kicks over the Man who Shoots it off

Lies: White and Black

The Good Time Coming




THE ABOMINATIONS.


* * * * *




THE CURTAIN LIFTED.


Pride of city is natural to men, in all times, if they live or have
lived in a metropolis noted for dignity or prowess. Caesar boasted of
his native Rome; Lycurgus of Sparta; Virgil of Andes; Demosthenes of
Athens; Archimedes of Syracuse; and Paul of Tarsus. I should suspect
a man of base-heartedness who carried about with him no feeling of
complacency in regard to the place of his residence; who gloried not
in its arts, or arms, or behavior; who looked with no exultation upon
its evidences of prosperity, its artistic embellishments, and its
scientific attainments.

I have noticed that men never like a place where they have not behaved
well. Swarthout did not like New York; nor Dr. Webster, Boston. Men
who have free rides in prison-vans never like the city that furnishes
the vehicle.

When I see in history Argos, Rhodes, Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, and
several other cities claiming Homer, I conclude that Homer behaved
well.

Let us not war against this pride of city, nor expect to build up
ourselves by pulling others down. Let Boston have its _Common_,
its _Faneuil Hall_, its _Coliseum_, and its _Atlantic Monthly_. Let
Philadelphia talk about its _Mint_, and _Independence Hall_, and
_Girard College_. When I find a man living in either of those places,
who has nothing to say in favor of them, I feel like asking him, "What
mean thing did you do, that you do not like your native city?"

New York is a goodly city. It is one city on both sides of the river.
The East River is only the main artery of its great throbbing life.
After a while four or five bridges will span the water, and we shall
be still more emphatically one than now. When, therefore, I say "New
York city," I mean more than a million of people, including everything
between Spuyten Duyvil Creek and Gowanus. That which tends to elevate
a part, elevates all. That which blasts part, blasts all. Sin is a
giant; and he comes to the Hudson or Connecticut River, and passes it,
as easily as we step across a figure in the carpet. The blessing of
God is an angel; and when it stretches out its two wings, one of them
hovers over that, and the other over this.

In infancy, the great metropolis was laid down by the banks of the
Hudson. Its infancy was as feeble as that of Moses, sleeping in the
bulrushes by the Nile; and like Miriam, there our fathers stood and
watched it. The royal spirit of American commerce came down to the
water to bathe; and there she found it. She took it in her arms,
and the child grew and waxed strong; and the ships of foreign lands
brought gold and spices to its feet; and, stretching itself up into
the proportions of a metropolis, it has looked up to the mountains,
and off upon the sea,--one of the mightiest of the energies of
American civilization.

The character of the founder of a city will be seen for many years in
its inhabitants. Romulus impressed his life upon Rome. The Pilgrims
relax not their hold upon the cities of New England. William Penn has
left Philadelphia an inheritance of integrity and fair dealing; and
on any day in that city you may see in the manners, customs, and
principles of its people, his tastes, his coat, his hat, his wife's
bonnet, and his plain meeting-house. The Hollanders still wield an
influence over New York.

Grand Old New York! What southern thoroughfare was ever smitten by
pestilence, when our physicians did not throw themselves upon the
sacrifice! What distant land has cried out in the agony of famine, and
our ships have not put out with bread-stuffs! What street of Damascus,
or Beyrout, or Madras that has not heard the step of our missionaries!
What struggle for national life, in which our citizens have not poured
their blood into the trenches! What gallery of exquisite art, in
which our painters have not hung their pictures! What department of
literature or science to which our scholars have not contributed!
I need not speak of our public schools, where the children of the
cordwainer, and milkman, and glass-blower stand by the side of the
flattered sons of millionnaires and merchant princes; or of the
insane asylums on all these islands, where they who came out cutting
themselves, among the tombs, now sit, clothed and in their right mind;
or of the Magdalen asylums, where the lost one of the street comes to
bathe the Saviour's feet with her tears, and wipe them with the hairs
of her head,--confiding in the pardon of Him who said--"Let him who
is without sin cast the first stone at her." I need not speak of the
institutions for the blind, the lame, the deaf and the dumb, for the
incurables, for the widow, the orphan, and the outcast; or of the
thousand-armed machinery that sends streaming down from the reservoir
the clear, bright, sparkling, God-given water that rushes through
our aqueducts, and dashes out of the hydrants, and tosses up in
our fountains, and hisses in our steam-engines, and showers out the
conflagration, and sprinkles from the baptismal font of our churches;
and with silver note, and golden sparkle, and crystalline chime, says
to hundreds of thousands of our population, in the authentic words of
Him who made it--"I WILL: BE THOU CLEAN!"

They who live in any of the American cities have a goodly heritage;
and it is in no depreciation of our advantages that I speak, but
because, in the very contrast with our opportunities and mission, THE
ABOMINATIONS are tenfold more abominable.

The sources from which I will bring the array of facts will be police,
detective, and alms-house reports; city missionaries' explorations,
and the testimony of the abandoned and sin-blasted, who, about to take
the final plunge, have staggered back just for a moment, to utter the
wild shriek of their warning, and the agonizing wail of their despair.

I shall call upon you to consider the drunkenness, the stock-***,
the rampant dishonesties, the club-houses so far as they are
nefarious, the excess of fashion, the horrors of unchastity, the
bad books and unclean newspapers, and the whole range of sinful
amusements; and with the plough-share of truth turn up the whole
field.

If we could call up the victims themselves, they would give the most
impressive story. People knew not how Turner, the painter, got such
vivid conceptions of a storm at sea, until they heard the story that
oftentimes he had been lashed to the deck in the midst of the tempest,
in order that he might study the wrath of the sea.

Those who have themselves been tossed on the wave of infamous
transgressions could give us the most vivid picture of what it is
to sin and to die. With hand tremulous with exhausting disease, and
hardly able to get the accursed bowl to his lips--put into such a hand
the pencil, and it can sketch, as can no one else, the darkness, the
fire, the wild terror, the headlong pitch, and the hell of those who
have surrendered themselves to iniquity. While we dare only come near
the edge, and, balancing ourselves a while, look off, and our head
swims, and our breath catches,--those can tell the story best who have
fallen to the depths with wilder dash than glacier from the top of a
Swiss cliff, and stand, in their agony, looking up for a relief
that comes not, and straining their eyes for a hope that never
dawns--crying, "O God!" "O God!"


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