Peninsula enterprise. [volume] (Accomac, Va.) 1881-1965, 1894-04-14

/ Who is that Christian man going
I:along with vial of anodyne to the dy-
ling pauper on Elm street? Who is that
debated man on the way to prayer
Injecting? Who is that city missionary
going to take box in which to bury a
child? Who are all these clusters Of
bright and beautiful faces? They are 60
ling to some interesting place of amuse-
IIment
& Who is that man going into the drug
Ilstore? That is the man who yesterday
Host all his fortune on Wall street. He is
H:going in for dose Of belladonna, and
-I;beforo morning it will make no differ
lsence to him whether stocks are up or
down. 1 tell you that Broadway, be-
|itween 7 and 12 o'clock at night, between
iHhe Battery and Central Park, is an Aus
terlitz, Gettysburg, a Waterloo, where
tadngdoms are lost or won and three
sworlds mingle in the strife.
Is LIES DARK SIDE.
r 1 meet another coming down off the
Ehotel steps, and I say, Where are you
fgoing?" You say: IT am going with q
Ianerchant Of New York who has prom
Used to show me the underground life of
1.-THE city. 1 am his customer, and he is
going to oblige me very much" Stopl
IA business house that tries to get or keep
your custom through such process as
fthat is not worthy of you. There are
1susiness establishments in our cities
(which have for years been sending to
obstruction hundreds and thousands of
Merchants. They have secret drawer
Sn the counter where money is kept, and
1.-THE clerk goes and gets it when he wants
Epstake these visitors to the city through
She low slums of the place.
~ Shall 1 mention the names of some OF
these great commercial establishments?
IsIshave them on my lips. Shall 1? Per-
lsilaps I had better leave it to the young
lsEaen who in that process have been de-
;atroyed themselves while they have been
destroying others. care not how high
Rounding the name Of a commercial es-
1 Sabhshmens if it proposes to get custom
/ l.ers orsto keep: them by such o 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 dozen less pairs of suspenders than
you paid for. They will rob you Oh,
you feel in your pockets and say, us my
money gomez" They have robbed you of
something for which dollars and cents
can never give you compensation.
8 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 60 home. The mere
memory of what he has seen will be
moral pollution. / 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 ex-
liberation. You do not go there because
won are tfsss.s:5 Of contagion. And yet
zion 70 into the presence Of moral lep-
rosy that is as much more dangerous to
you as the death Of the soul is worse
than the death of the body. I will IN
dertake 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, Tuning, reelSing, pestiferous
depth which blasts the eye that looks at
it. In the reign Of terror in 1892 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, stifled
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 great
many of the men who go on the work OF
exploration through the underground
cutters 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 tewn and underground New York.
say to him, please, sir, what part do
you propose to show me?"
EXPLORING THE sLUMs.
About 16 years ago as minister OF
religion felt had divine commission
to explore the iniquities of our cities l
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 had digged
into the wall behold a door, and he said
go in and see the wicked denominations
that are done here. And l went in and
saw and behold" Brought up in the
country and surrounded by much pa
rental care, I had not until that time seen
the haunts of iniquity. By the grace of
God defended, I had never sowed my
wild OATS
had somehow been able to tell from
various sources something about the in
Equities of the great cities and to preach
against them, but I saw in the deatruc-
ton of great multitude of the people
that there must be an infatuation and a
temptation that had never been spoken
about, and said, 81 will explore. " l
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 nom mt,
if we should pause in our service, we
should hear the crash, crash! Just as in
the sickly season you sometimes hear
the bell at the gate of the cemetery
ringing almost necessarily, so I found