Christopher Smith
speaker
315 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 20 Jul
Christopher Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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 doorknob and dash its awful surge against the marble of your doorsteps, 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 for ever and ever?
If a slaughterhouse 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 power to lift men up to office and to cast them down against a hundred thousand slaughterhouses 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.
My belief is that such an exposition of public immoralities will do good by exciting pity for the victims and wholesale indignation against their betters and perpetrators.
Who is that man fallen against the kerbstone, covered with bruises and beastliness?
He was as bright faced a lad as ever looked up from your nursery.
His mother rocked him, prayed for him, fondled him, would not let the night air touch his cheek, and held him up and looked down into his loving eyes and wondered for what high position he was being fitted.
He entered life with bright hopes, the world beckoned him, friends cheered him, but the archers shot at him, vile men set traps for him, bad habits hooked fast to him with thy iron grapples, his feet slipped on the way, and there he lies.
Who would think that that uncombed hair was once toyed with by a father's fingers?
Who would think that those bloated cheeks were ever kissed by a mother's lips?
Would you guess that that thick tongue once made a household glad with its innocent prattle?
Utter no harsh words in his ear.
Help him up.
Showing 101–120 of 315 · page 6 of 16
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