The Monitor-register., 1896-03-06

State that the liquor traffic and the
sweating system that has grown to such
Immense proportions in the city OF
Brotherly Love, far moro Important is it
that these two great evils be wiped from
her annals than that the religious garb
bill or the Law providing for parental
support shonld become enforced laws.
Take away the liquor traffic and you
leave loving, dutiful sons. Take it away
and you leave the aged father and moth er
comfortable, happy homo. Take it
away and every howell becomes cottage,
every criminal law-abiding citizen.
Take it away and your prisons become
churches and school-houses. Take it
away and vice becomes virtue, ignorance
becomes knowledge. and poverty becomes
wealth.
There are issues of more vital import
ance to each and every one here, than any
bill that has passed your State Legisla-
ture in the last decades, and these are
issues to be settled by and through the
1
ballot-box.
For you as voters are all responsible,
in some degree. for every grief and every
shame for which, or by which. our fellow
creatures suffer under the sweating
system or through and by the liquor
traffic:
For ormankfnd /, one in spirit,
And an instinct bears along,
Round the earth's electric circle
The swift flash of right or wrong.
Whether conscious or unconscious
Yet humanity's vast frame.
Through its ocean sundered hbers
Feels the gush OF joy or shame,
In the gain or loss of one run
All the rest have equal claim.
And to- night if there is one plea above
another that Z would leave with the
| mothers and sisters here assembled, it is
that you by example strike deep at the
root of the sweating system.
Hood has said: 80 God that bread
should be so dear, and flesh and blood SO
cheap"
| One of the strongest departments OF
this organization is that which reaches
out to the purifying of the home. But
little use is the attempt and futile must
be the effort, so long as the crowded
tenement with its poisoned atmosphere
exists.
To night in the great city that have
just left, in the city that you call the City
of Homes, are rooms where fifteen or
twenty men, women and children are
sleeping with the floor for bed. The
law says but seven persons shall be
allowed to one room If a certain dimen.
sion; but that law like too many others,
exist in words only. In such places as
these is it small wonder that disease,
death and vice turks In every form And
| yet all of this sin, all of this wretched.
ness, all of this pain, in spite of the fact
that there is comfort and to spare for
every one living under Americas sky. II
is not only for the wrong of this that
calls forth our sympathy, but it is the
waste. See what childhood, girlhood,
womanhood and manhood have become
there. What waste of beauty, what a
waste of virtue, what waste of power
that should 60 to make up great nation.
A PEN PICTURE.
Not long ago stood upon the Kitta-
tinny mountains through which the
Schuylkill river has forced its way. AS
looked upon 1t, thought what beau
tBsal and wholesome thing a river is.
FIRE 1t was fed by the laughing mountain
stream, here it run over a pebbly bed, a
little further on and it flowed between
grassy meadows deeked with water
lilies, fringed with flowing rushes and
shaded by stately trees. Cattle slaked
their thirst at it, tiny fish sported in its
waters. Clear as crystal was this noun
tain stream. But little farther on and
is is polluted by city sewers, it is stained
by the refuse of dye watts and chemical
works, its bed becomes slime, it's banks
ashes, and the lights that fall upon it is
the fame of forS. the shadows of mills
and prisons.
| Go b6 continued