wretchedness, the temptation, and the outrage of municipal crime will
put its hand on your door-knob, and dash its awful surge against the
marble of your door-steps, as the stormy sea drives on a rocky beach.

That condition of morals is now being formed, amid which our children
must walk. Do you tell me it is none of my business what street
profanity shall curse my boy's ear, on his way to school? Think you it
is no concern of yours what infamous advertisements, placarded on
the walls, or in the public newspaper, shall smite the vision of your
innocent little ones? Shall I be nervous about a stagnant pool of
water, lest it breed malaria, and be careless when there are in the
very heart of our city thousands of houses, devoted to various forms
of dissipation, which day and night steam with miasma, and pour out
the fiery lava of pollution, and darken the air with their horrors,
and fill the skies with the smoke of their torment, that ascendeth up
forever and ever? If a slaughter-house be opened in the midst of the
town, we hasten down to the Mayor to have the nuisance abated. But
now I make complaint, not to the Mayor or Common Council, but to the
masses of the people, who have the power to lift men up to office, and
to cast them down, against a hundred thousand slaughter-houses in
our American cities. In the name of our happy homes, of our refined
circles, of our schools, of our churches,--in the name of all that is
dear and beautiful and valuable and holy,--I enter the complaint. If
you now sit unconcerned, and leave to professed philanthropists
the work, and care not who are in authority or what laws remain
unexecuted, you may live to see the time when you will curse the day
in which your children were born.

My belief is that such an exposition of public immoralities will
do good, by exciting pity for the victims and wholesale indignation