Shall we pass over the waste, the hereditary waste of human souls,
brought about by similar defects in every great city in the world?
Waste of human souls, human intellects, human characters--waste, saddest
of all, of the image of God in little children. That cannot be
necessary. There must be a fault somewhere. It cannot be the will of
God that one little one should perish by commerce, or by manufacture, any
more than by slavery, or by war.
As surely as I believe that there is a God, so surely do I believe that
commerce is the ordinance of God; that the great army of producers and
distributors is God's army. But for that very reason I must believe that
the production of human refuse, the waste of human character, is not part
of God's plan; not according to His ideal of what our social state should
be; and therefore what our social state can be. For God asks no
impossibilities of any human being.
But as things are, one has only to go into the streets of this, or any
great city, to see how we, with all our boasted civilisation, are, as
yet, but one step removed from barbarism.
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