Yet he had been five years the child of the State, and in that college for the poor! Who would employ such a youth; with such a reputation; with the smell of the jail in his very breath? Not your shrewd men of business, they know the risk; not your respectable men, members of churches and all that; not they! Why it would hurt a man's reputation for piety to do good in that way. Besides, the risk is great, and it argues a great deal more Christianity than it is popular to have, for a respectable man to employ such a youth. He is forced back into crime again. I say, forced, for honest men will not employ him when the State shoves him out of the jail. Soon you will have him in the court again, to be punished more severely. Then he goes to the State Prison, and then again, and again, till death mercifully ends his career! Who is to blame for all that? I will ask the best man among the best of you, what he would have become, if thus abandoned, turned out in childhood, and with no culture, into the streets, to herd with the wickedest of men! Somebody says, there are "organic sins" in society which nobody is to blame for. But by this sin organized in society, these vagrant children are training up to become thieves, pirates and murderers. I cannot blame them. But there is a terrible blame somewhere, for it is not the will of God that one of these little ones should perish. Who is it that organizes the sin of society? * * * * * Let us next look at the parents of these vagrants, at the adult poor. It is not easy or needed for this purpose, to define very nicely the limits of a class, and tell where the rich end, and the poor begin. However, men may, in reference to this matter, be divided into three classes. The first acts on society mainly by their capital; the second mainly by their skill, mental and manual, by educated labor; and the third by their muscles, by brute force with little or no skill, uneducated labor. The poor, I take it, come mainly from this latter class. Education of head or hand, a profession or a trade, is wealth in possibility; yes, wealth in prospect, wealth in its process of accumulation, for wealth itself is only accumulated labor, as learning is accumulated thought. Most of our rich men have come out of this class which acts by its skill, and their children in a few years will return to it. I am not now to speak of men transiently poor, who mend their condition as the hours go by, who may gain enough, and perhaps become rich; but of men permanently poor, whom one year finds wanting, and the next leaves no better off; men that live, as we say, from hand to mouth, but whose hand and mouth are often empty. Even here in Boston, there is little of the justice that removes causes of poverty, though so much of the charity which alleviates its effects. Those men live, if you can call it life, crowded together more densely, I am told, than in Naples or Paris, in London or Liverpool.