Connecticut western news., 1894-04-12

tween 2 and 12 clock at night. between the Battery and Central Park, is an Aus terlitz, a Gettysburg, Waterloo, where kingdoms are lost or won and three worlds mingle in the strife.
 IIFE's DARK SIDE.
 I meet another coming down of the hotel steps, and say, Where are you scoing?" You say: II am going with aorchant of New York who has prom ised to show me the underground life of the city. 1 am his customer, and he is going to oblige me very much" Stopl A business house that tries to get or keep your custom through such process as that is not worthy of you. There are business establishments in our cities which have for years been sending to destruction hundreds and thousands of merchants They have 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 I mention the names of some of these great commercial establishments? I have them on my lips. Shall I? Per haps had better leave it to the young men who in that process have been de- stroyed themselves while they have been destroying others. I care not how high sounding the name of a commercial es- tablishment if it proposes to get custom CTS or to keep them by such process as that. Drop their acquaintance. They will cheat you before you get through. They will send you style of goods diff ferent from that which you bought by sample. They will give you under weight. There will be in the package half a dozen less pairs of suspenders than you paid for. They will rob you Oh, you feel in your pockets and say, ''Ismy money gone?" They have robbed you of something for which dollars and cents can never give you compensation.
 When one of these western merchants has been dragged by one of those com mercial 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 pollution. l 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 a smallpox hospital for the purpose of ex- ploration. You do not go there because you are afraid of contagion. And yet you go into the presence of a moral 1ep- rosy that is as much more dangerous to you as the death of the soul is worse than the death of the body. will un- dertake to say that nine-tenths of the men who have been ruined in our cities have been ruined by simply going to ob serve without any idea of participating. The fact is that underground city life is a filthy, fuming, reeking, pestiferons depth which blasts the eye that looks at it. In the reign of terror in 1792 in Paris people escaping from the officers of the law got into the sewers of the city and crawled and walked through miles of that awful labyrinth, stuffed with the atmosphere and almost dead, some of them, when they came out to the river Seine, where they washed themselves and again breathed the fresh air. But have to tell you that a great many of the men who go on the work of exploration through the underground gutters of New York 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 and show you the sights of the town and underground New York, say to him, Please, sir, what part do you propose to show meY'
 EXPLORING THE sEUMs.
 About l6 years ago as minister of religion felt had divine commission to explore the iniquities of our cities. did not ask counsel of my session or my presbytery or of the newspapers, but asking the companionship of three prominent police officials and two of the elders of my church unrolled my com mission, and it said: "Son of man, dig into the wall And when I had digged into the wall behold door, and he said go in and sec the wicked abominations that are done here And went in and saw and beholdr' Brought up in the country and surrounded by much pa rental care, had not until that time seen the haunts of iniquity. By the grace of God defended, had never sowed my "wild oats "
 l had somehow been able to tell from various sources something about the in- iquities of the great cities and to preach against them, but I saw in the destruc- tion of a great multitude of the people that there must be an infatuation and a temptation that had never been spoken about, and I said, ''I will explore. '' I saw thousands of men going down, and if there had been spiritual percussion answering to the physical percussion the whole air would have been full of the rumble and roar and crack and thun- der of the demolition, and this moment, if we should pause in our service, we should hear the crash, crashi Just as in the sickly season you sometimes hear the bell at the gate of the cemetery ringing almost necessarily, so found that the bell at the gate of the cemetery where ruined souls are buried was toll ing by day and tolling by night said, "I will explore
 went as physician goes into fever lazareto to see what practical and useful information might get. That would be foolish doctor who would stand outside the door of an invalid writing Latin prescription. When the lecturer in 8 medical college is done with his lecture, he takes the students into the dissecting room, and he shows them the reality. I went and saw and came forth to my pull pit to report a plague and to tell how sin dissects the body and dissects the mind and dissects the soul. "Oh," say you, "are you not afraid that in conse- quence of such exploration of the iniqui- ties of the city other persons might make exploration and do themselves damage?'' I reply: If in company with the com missioner of police, and the captain of police, and the inspector of police, and the company of two Christian gentle men, and not with the spirit of curiosity, but that you may see sin in order the better to combat 1t, then, in the name of the eternal God, go? But, if not, then stay away"
 Wellington, standing in the battle of Waterloo when the bullets were buzzing