The honest and skilled workman feels their effects. Compelled too
often to live where he can, in order to be near his work, he finds
himself perpetually in contact with a class utterly inferior to
himself, and his children exposed to contaminating influences from
which he would gladly remove them; but how can he? Next door to
him, even in the same house with him, may be enacted scenes of
brutality or villainy which I will not speak of here. He may shut
his own eyes and ears to them; but he cannot shut his children's.
He may vex his righteous soul daily, like Lot of old, with the
foul conversation of the wicked; but, like Lot of old, he cannot
keep his children from mixing with the inhabitants of the wicked
city, learning their works, and at last being involved in their
doom. Oh, ladies and gentlemen, if there be one class for whom
above all others I will plead, in season and out of season; if
there be one social evil which I will din into the ears of my
countrymen whenever God gives me a chance, it is this: The honest
and the virtuous workman, and his unnatural contact with the
dishonest and the foul. I know well the nobleness which exists in
the average of that class, in men and in wives--their stern
uncomplaining, valorous self-denial; and nothing more stirs my
pity than to see them struggling to bring up a family in a moral
and physical atmosphere where right education is impossible. We
lavish sympathy enough upon the criminal; for God's sake let us
keep a little of it for the honest man. We spend thousands in
carrying out the separation of classes in prison; for God's sake
let us try to separate them a little before they go to prison. We
are afraid of the dangerous classes; for God's sake let us bestir
ourselves to stop that reckless confusion and neglect which reign
in the alleys and courts of our great towns, and which recruit
those very dangerous classes from the class which ought to be, and