A Dark Picture | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 9, 1871

A Dark Picture.

REV. H. W. BELLOWS of New York, in a speech on Thursday evening at Cooper Institute, drew the following gloomy picture:—

Speaking about the difficulties of the government of the city, he said, “There are 517,000, out of a population of 900,000 persons, living in tenement houses. There are about 30,000 professional thieves in the city of New York. We have more than 20,000 lewd women and harlots here; we have about three thousand grog-shops and two thousand gambling establishments. We have an immense number of foreign people here (and they are none the worse for that), foreign people of different nations, not brought up in our ways of thought—but remember that we have, of two nations alone, 350,000, or perhaps 400,000 persons, of whom at least 170,000 are bound by their connection with a particular creed into a particular box of iron, which is moved by politicians from one side of the ship to the other, and which essentially governs the politics of the city. Remember, too, that when the majority vote in this city, by an almost fatal necessity it is always against those very principles that lie at the bottom of American freedom and of American institutions.”

The speaker then called upon the upper and educated classes to take a hand in this reform movement.

What are the capitalists doing to defend our rights? Why, when I see a set of rich men proposed as a committee to open streets, I say to myself, “I don’t want to trust rich men to open our streets;” for when a man may own two hundred or one thousand houses in a locality, he dare not bring down on his head the possible injustice of the men in power, who, if he dared to thwart them, could trample his property in the dust.

Well, then, what is the pulpit doing? Here is a minister looking down his broad aisles and seeing one man here, and another there, and another in another place, all mixed up with these iniquities—men who are paying the largest part of his salary—and he says to himself: “I must hush up; politics don’t belong to the pulpit; I dare not speak out, for my wife and children would suffer. I dare not speak the whole truth fearlessly, and with a fearless application to those chief sinners that I see before me.” What are the doctors doing? They are, some of them, attending upon these men who have been engaged in the vilest stock jobbing operations, until their hearts are as hard as their brains are soft, and all their ailments are going into forms of nervous disease, and they are ready to pay the biggest fees to the skilful physician, provided he is not one of the babbling sort, not too open-mouthed in regard to the political abuses of this community. I say, with inertness at the bottom and inertness and cowardice at the top, we are ground between the upper and the nether millstone; and until this people pluck up courage, and no longer hesitate at speaking the truth for fear their house will be burned down, or they will be stabbed in the back, or knocked down with a club, we need not expect any reform. These are the things that must be brought home to the intelligent classes; they must be told not to shrink from their duty in a cowardly manner—not to shrink from doing what they know to be just. My fears are not so much from the tenement-houses, or from the meagerly instructed class; we will stick by Mr. Beecher’s principle and instruct them. We have to maintain here the great principles of free government, which we have begun with. It will be better to fail in such a noble enterprise than to succeed in any other. What I fear is the cowardice and imbecility of the rich and intelligent classes—their unwillingness to sign papers, to show their names in opposition to all these outrageous frauds that are going on. I fear those who are in the top places, and who fail in their duty to this community. That is my point, and that is all I have to say.—Sel.