and in the tracts which he leaves with them, all the religious instruction they receive. Without his care, they would be beyond the reach of any of the direct influences of our religion.

Let me say a word of the moral exposures of the poor, for they are indeed hardly to be conceived but by those who are intimately acquainted with the poor. We must go into the rooms in which they live, and see how they live, and what they suffer there, to feel as we should feel for them, and to realize the extent and the strength of their claims upon us. Take the case of a mother, whose intemperate husband is daily spending his small earnings to obtain the rum which he drinks daily; who is herself working like a slave, when she can get work, to procure bread for her children; whose ragged children are not only every day so treated by their father, that they lose, as far as children can lose, all affection for him, but who are at once the daily witnesses of his profaneness and degradation, and who are even daily encouraged by him to disobey their mother; I say, what are you to look for in these children, but that they will be as vicious and debased as their father? I can take you from house to house into families of this description. Or, suppose the case of an intemperate mother, or where both parents are intemperate. Rum is here the chief ingredient of breakfast, of dinner, and of supper. Is it wonderful, then, that there should be not a few among us, who are drunkards at the age of 14 or 15 years? Or, does it excite any surprise, that children who are reared under such influences, will not go to school? At 9 or 10 years of age they are wholly beyond parental control. Their home is in the streets; and they go to the habitations of their parents, only to obtain a supply of the wants which they

cannot supply elsewhere. It is a matter of course, therefore, that they should not only be intemperate, but profane, deceitful and dishonest. No plan could be devised for their moral ruin, more certain in its results, than the very manner in which they are now living. Will any one say, that this is a necessary evil? I cannot think so. The obligation is most solemn upon those to whom God has given the means of rescuing these young immortals from perdition, to attempt at least what may be attempted for their rescue. These children are now in a regular course of training for the House of Correction, and for the State Prison. My heart has ached to see a mother, and to hear her sobs of anguish, at the House of Correction, while she was visiting her son there, who was only 14 years old; and to see this boy, after weeping for a few moments with his agonized mother, return to be a companion of convicts, with five or six of whom he must be shut up at night in a cell, where he may learn more of the mysteries of iniquity in eight nights, than he would acquire in as many years by his own unaided experience. Government has a right to employ any means that are requisite for the prevention of so great an evil; and a power should be delegated to men who will faithfully exercise it, of taking children who are so exposed from the condition in which they now are, and of placing them, as far as may be, beyond the reach of the temptations, which otherwise will inevitably prove their destruction. I am aware that the difficulties of the case are great. But they are not insuperable. I suggest the subject, only because I wish that attention may be directed to it.

For some weeks past, either on Thursday or Saturday afternoon, I have met the children who live in the neigh

borhood of my Lecture Room, to pass an hour there. The time so passed we call the pleasant hour. It is opened and closed with a very short prayer, and religious instruction is one of the objects of the meeting. But this instruction is given rather incidentally, than directly. I give them familiar lectures upon subjects of natural history; and I begin each exercise by questions respecting the preceding lecture. The service is popular among the children; and I hope that it will be a means of exciting in them a thirst of knowledge, a taste at once for intellectual and moral gratification, and an early reverence and love of Him, of whose wisdom and goodness I am thus enabled to furnish them with so many testimonies in his works.

The Sunday evening services of the Lecture Room are continued, and the room is uniformly well filled with attentive hearers. I wish that it was possible to obtain a permanent free lecture room in the section of the city in which I now officiate on Sunday evenings. This might be done at a small cost compared with the good that might be looked for from it. Our present room is not large enough to accommodate all who are disposed to unite with us. Besides, some aged people find it difficult, in the evening, to ascend two flights of stairs. If we could obtain a cheap building as a permanent place of worship, I think that it would not be difficult to obtain a supply of the pulpit half of each Sunday, as well as for the evening service. Is there no one among us who is at once able, and who so loves the poor, that he is willing to build for them a synagogue?

Very respectfully,

BOSTON, May 5th, 1827.

JOSEPH TUCKERMAN.

MR. TUCKERMAN'S

THIRD QUARTERLY REPORT,

ADDRESSED TO THE

American Unitarian Association.

BOSTON,

BOWLES AND DEARBORN, 72 WASHINGTON STREET.

Isaac R. Butts & Co. Printers.