amity _in_ a calamity--if I may use such an expression--the most
deplorable thing in any of the great evils of life, occurs when the
selfish instinct within us is aroused, by want or terror, to such a
degree that it overwhelms all social limitations, absorbs every
sympathy, and leaves nothing but an intense individualism. This is the
result in a sudden shock of danger, when the alarmed instinct is the
first that starts to the summons. Sometimes, in protracted peril, it
grows into an actual delirium of selfishness, and drowns even the sense
of fear--as men amidst the horrors of a shipwreck will commit the most
brutal excesses, and even rob the dying. And thus, in the desolation of
Jerusalem as described by Jeremiah, the very yearnings of maternity were
swallowed up by this fierce instinct.

"The hands of tender-hearted women cooked their own children;
They were their food, in the destruction of the daughter of my people."

And results as bad as this appear in the conditions of poverty,
suffering, and social degradation. Every fine chord of human nature is
seared, sodden, torn from its sockets, in the darkness of the moral
faculties and by the pressure of animal wants. The poor man is conscious
of nothing but privation and suffering. He gazes at the power and
discipline and pomp of society all about him, not as an ally but as a
captive, or as a savage foe. The whole wears the aspect of a besieging
army, and the Ishmaelitish feeling predominates. In the midst of the
City he becomes an Arab of the desert, a robber of the rock. Now, it
makes little difference whether the circle is wider or narrower, whether
the siege is a moral or a literal one, whether the agent is the sword or
the condition of society. The essential results will be the same. The
civilization of New York may and does hem in a desolation as fearful in
kind as that of Jerusalem, and involves sufferings as keen, and wakes
up instincts as fiercely selfish. And one whose sympathies with the wide
humanity are as fresh and clear as the Prophet's were with the woes of
his people, might draw closer within these various circles of prosperity
and refinement and activity, that lend such attractiveness to the great
city--this magnificent girdle of commerce, embossed with the symbols of
all nations--these arteries of traffic, filled with circulating wealth
and power--these groups of fashion and of beauty, whose cheapest jewels
would open the kingdom of heaven to