poor, you neglect yourself; if you
degrade the poor, you degrade yourself. His poverty, his
carelessness, his immorality, his dirt, his ill-health, will punish
_you_; for you and he are members of the same body, knit together
inextricably for weal or woe, by the eternal laws according to which
the Lord Jesus Christ has constituted human society; and if you
break those laws, they will avenge themselves.'--My friends, do we
not see them avenge themselves daily? The slave-holder refuses to
acknowledge that his slave is a member of the same body as himself;
but he does not go unpunished: the degradation to which he has
brought his slave degrades him, by throwing open to him. the
downward path of lust, laziness, ungoverned and tyrannous tempers,
and the other sins which have in all ages, slowly but surely, worked
the just ruin of slave-holding states. The sinner is his own
tempter, and the sinner is his own executioner: he lies in wait for
his own life (says Solomon) when he lies in wait for his brother's.
Do you see the same law working in our own free country? If you
leave the poor careless and filthy, you can obtain no good servants:
if you leave them profligate, they make your sons profligate also:
if you leave them tempted by want, your property is unsafe: if you
leave them uneducated, reckless, improvident, you cannot get your
work properly done, and have to waste time and money in watching
your workmen instead of trusting them. Why, what are all poor-rates
and county-rates, if you will consider, but God's plain proof to us,
that the poor are members of the same body as ourselves; and that if
we will not help them of our own free will, we shall find it
necessary to help them against our will: that if we will not pay a
little to prevent them becoming pauperized or criminal, we must pay
a great deal to keep them when they have become so? We may draw a
lesson--and a most instructive one it is--from the city of
Liverpool, in which it was lately proved that crime--and especially
the crime of uneducated boys and girls--had cost, in the last few
years, the city many times more than it would cost to educate,
civilize, and depauperize the whole rising generation of that city,
and had been a tax upon the capital and industry of Liverpool, so
enormous that they would have submitted to it from no Government on
earth; and yet they had been blindly inflicting it upon themselves
for years, simply because they chose to forge