other parts feeling in some
degree the shock and sharing the loss or suffering. What is true of the
great man of the nation is true of our smaller communities, our States
and cities and towns. Each is an aggregate man, and the health and
well-being of this man depend on the individual men and the groups
and societies of men by which it is constituted. There cannot be an
unhealthy organ in the human system without a communication of disease
to the whole body. A diseased liver or heart or lung, a useless hand
or foot, an ulcer or local obstruction, cannot exist without injury and
impediment to the whole. In the case of a malignant ulcer, how soon the
blood gets poisoned!

"Now, here is a malignant ulcer in the body politic of our city. Is it
possible, do you think, for it to exist, and in the virulent condition
we find it, and not poison the blood of our whole community? Moral and
spiritual laws are as unvarying in their action, out of natural sight
though they be, as physical laws. Evil and good are as positive entities
as fire, and destroy or consume as surely. As certainly as an ulcer
poisons with its malignant ichor this blood that visits every part of
the body, so surely is this ulcer poisoning every part of our community.
Any one who reflects for a moment will see that it cannot be otherwise.
From this moral ulcer there flows out daily and nightly an ichor as
destructive as that from a cancer. Here theft and robbery and murder
have birth, nurture and growth until full formed and organized, and then
go forth to plunder and destroy. The life and property of no citizen is
safe so long as this community exists. It has its schools of instruction
for thieves and housebreakers, where even little children are educated
to the business of stealing and robbery. Out from it go daily hundreds
of men and women, boys and girls, on their business of beggary, theft
and the enticement of the weak and unwary into crime. In it congregate
human vultures and harpies who absorb most of the plunder that is gained
outside, and render more brutal and desperate the wretches they rob in
comparative safety.

"Let me show you how this is done. A man or a woman thirsting for liquor
will steal anything to get money for whisky. The article stolen may be
a coat, a pair of boots or a dress--something worth from five to twenty
dollars. It is taken to one of these harpies, and sold for fifty cents
or a dollar--anything to get enough for a drunken spr