I open to you a door, through which you see—­what?  Pictures and fountains, and mirrors and flowers?  No:  it is a lazar-house of disease.  The walls drip, drip, drip with the damps of sepulchres.  The victims, strewn over the floor, writhe and twist among each other in contortions indescribable, holding up their ulcerous wounds, tearing their matted hair, weeping tears of blood:  some hooting with revengeful cry; some howling with a maniac’s fear; some chattering with idiot’s stare; some calling upon God; some calling upon fiends; wasting away; thrusting each other back; mocking each other’s pains; tearing open each other’s ulcers; dropping with the ichor of death!  The wider I open the door, the ghastlier the scene.—­Worse the horrors.  More desperate recoils.  Deeper curses.  More blood.  I can no longer endure the vision, and I shut the door, and cover my eyes, and turn my back, and cry, “God pity them!”

Some one may say, “What is the use of such an exposure as you propose to make?  Our families are all respectable.”  I answer, that no family, however elevated and exclusive, can be independent of the state of public morals.

However pleasant the block of houses in which you dwell, the wretchedness, the temptation, and the outrage of municipal crime will put its hand on your door-knob, and dash its awful surge against the marble of your door-steps, as the stormy sea drives on a rocky beach.

That condition of morals is now being formed, amid which our children must walk.  Do you tell me it is none of my business what street profanity shall curse my boy’s ear, on his way to school?  Think you it is no concern of yours what infamous advertisements, placarded on the walls, or in the public newspaper, shall smite the vision of your innocent little ones?  Shall I be nervous about a stagnant pool of water, lest it breed malaria, and be careless when there are in the very heart of our city thousands of houses, devoted to various forms of dissipation, which day and night steam with miasma, and pour out the fiery lava of pollution, and darken the air with their horrors, and fill the skies with the smoke of their torment, that ascendeth up forever and ever?  If a slaughter-house be opened in the midst of the town, we hasten down to the Mayor to have the nuisance abated.  But now I make complaint, not to the Mayor or Common Council, but to the masses of the people, who have the power to lift men up to office, and to cast them down, against a hundred thousand slaughter-houses in our American cities.  In the name of our happy homes, of our refined circles, of our schools, of our churches,—­in the name of all that is dear and beautiful and valuable and holy,—­I enter the complaint.  If you now sit unconcerned, and leave to professed philanthropists the work, and care not who are in authority or what laws remain unexecuted, you may live to see the time when you will curse the day in which your children were born.