The Banner-Democrat. [volume] (Lake Providence, East Carroll Parish, La.) 1892-current, 1894-06-02

is going to get dose of belladonna,
and before morning 1t will. make no
difference to him whether stocks are
up or down. tell you that broadway,
between seven and twelve o'clock at
night, between the Battery and Gem
trail park, is an Austerlitz, Gettys-
burg, a Waterloo. where Kingdoms
are lost or won, and three worlds min-
gle in the strife.
meet another coming down off the
hotel steps, and say: Where are
you going?" You say: II am going
with a merchant Of New York, who
has promised to show me the under
ground life of the city. am his Gus
toner. and he is going to oblige me
very much" Stop. A business house
that tries to get or keep your custom
through such a process as that is not
worthy of you. There are business es-
Establishments in our cities which have
for years been sending 10 destruction
hundreds and thousands of merchants
They have "a secret drawer in
the counter where money is
kept. and the clerk goes and
gets it when he wants to take these
visitors to the city through the low
slums of the place. Shall | mention
the names of some of these great COM
mercial .esta blishments? ] have them
on my lips? Shall 1? Perhaps ] had
better leave it to the young men who,
in that process, have been destroyed
themselves while they have been de-
stroying others. / care not how high
sounding the name of commercial
establishment If it proposes to get Gus
toners or to keep them by such pro-
cess as that; drop their acquaintance.
They will cheat you before you
get through. They will send you
a style of goods different from
that which you bought by
sample. They will give you under
weight. There will be in the package
half dozen less pairs of suspenders
than You paid for. They will rob you.
Oh, you feel in your pockets and say:
rs my money gomez They have
robbed you of something for which
dollars and cents can never give you
compensation. When one of these west
ern merchants has been dragged by
one of those commercial agents
through the slums of the city he is not
fit to go home. The mere memory of
what he has seen will be moral polu-
ton. / think you had better let the
city missionary and the police at
tend to the exploration of New
York and underground life. You
do not go to smallpox hospital for the
purpose of exploration. You do not
go there because you are afraid of the
contagion. And yet, you go into the
presence of a moral leprosy that is as
much more dangerous to you as She
death of the soul is worse than the
| death of the body. / will undertake
to say that nine-tenths of the men who
have been ruined in our cities have
been ruined by simply going to OBJ
serve without any idea of participating
The fact is, that underground city life
is filthy, fuming. reeking, pestifer.
GUS depth which blasts the eye that
| looks at it. In the reig n of terror, in
1892. in Paris, people, escaping from
the officers of the law. got into the sew
ers Of the city and crawled and walked
through miles of that awful laby
rinth, stified with the atmosphere and
almost dead, some of them, when they
came out the river Seine, where they
washed themselves and again breathe6
the fresh air. But have to tell yor
that great many of the men who gt
on the work of exploration through
the underground cutters of New Yorl
life never come out at any Seine river
where they can wash off the pollution
of the moral sewage. Stranger. if one
of the representatives of a commercial
establishment proposes to take you ant
show you the sights" of the town ant
underground New York, say to him
please, sir, what do you propose t.
show me?"
About sixteen years ago, as minis
ter of religion. felt l had Divin,
commission to explore the iniquities o
our cities. | did not ask counsel of my
session, or my presbytery, or of thu
newspapers, but asking the companion
ship of thrae prominent police officials
and two of the elders of my church,
unrolled my commission. and it said
"Son of man, dig into the wall; ant
when digged into the wall, behold ;
door; and he said, GO in and see thu
wicked denominations that are dom
here; and went in. and saw, and be
hold.' Brought up in the country
and surrounded by much parenta
care, / had not until that tim
seen the haunts of iniquity
BY the grace of God defended
/ had never sowed my wild oats"
} had somehow been able to tell iron
various sources something about tn
! iniquities of the great cities, and t.
preach against them; but saw, in tn
destruction of great multitude of tn
) people, that there must be an infatua
: ton and temptation that had neve
been spoken about, and said: ~ viii
!, explore" ! saw thousands of men &c
} ing down, and if there had bee
/ a spiritual percussion answering to til
physical percussion, the whole al
, would have been full of the rumble
and roar, and crack, and thur
| Ger of the demolition, and thi
+ moment, if we would paus
! in our service, we should hea
| the crash, crash! Just as in the siclxl
season you sometimes hear the bell a
: the gate of the cemetery ringing a
: most necessarily, so | found that tn
a 4 L