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Tools spoke against his old ally, and with great effect. Squire Ben Stout, as moderator, could speak on neither side, and so made the more merit of trying to give each party an impartial trial of strength. Mr. Armstrong worked hard with Savage. Mr. Haddock swung in his historical arguments, and Ketchum proposed inquiries that made the other party reel. But when the question came to a vote as to what course the town would take, it was so evident that a strong party yet remained to be overcome, the heart of the new-measure men grew faint and depressed. The moderator called the house to order for a vote, when a voice was heard from the other end of the hall, and a gentleman, more youthful in appearance than any who had spoken before him, but wearing in his features marks of the utmost firmness and decision -- tall and dignified in his person -- walked boldly forward and addressed the meeting. We need hardly say that this was James. Murmurs of discontent and applause rose as he laid his hat on the table before him, and commenced a speech. But silence soon stole over the crowd, and people in the hall and outside the building all gathered in, and crept up on tiptoe nearer and nearer, as they heard his voice. Never had he before spoken in the hall on this question, and now had been returned from Chicago but a week. James felt the importance of the position he now assumed, as the public advocate of the cause of the poor, and that unless his speech should open the eyes and hearts of the opposition, again, as was most probable, would the town of Crampton be disgraced by selling its town paupers to the lowest bidder, to be supported for the year of our Lord 185-; and his whole spirit rose up to meet the foul injustice and oppose the wrong. He laid before the meeting a carefully arranged table of statistics, showing the cost of the poor to the town, as compared' with some other communities where a different plan was followed, and that in those towns the income of the farm-house system had been equal to the expense, and even frequently greater; and this, beside all the moral improvement, and the general health and good name of the institution. (33) He showed how easily the same course might be adopted here, and the great good it would at once and in all the future accomplish. Then he argued against the present plan, as grossly unjust to man as a human being; its cruelty; its inhumanity; its unbounded selfishness; its certainty of degradation and suffering.

"It is the last cruelty that can fall on a human being this side the grave," said he. "You put him there to endure all he can ere he lies down in his death sleep and expires, simply because there is no provision made to help lengthen out his existence; you place him where he can never rise, but must ever feel the omnipotence and dishonor of poverty. And there, in this great dismal charnel house, where thirty per cent, of all your paupers yearly go to the grave, he struggles in vain to feel himself a man; you disfranchise him, you rob him of his children; under certain conditions only, and those not looking to the good of the individual but of the town, and therefore purely selfish, you allow him to marry; you do not provide for him a good and comfort- able home, but strive to procure a bid for his support that will save as much as possible to the town; in all your arrangements for him, you look to a saving on the part of the town, and in every sense the working of the system tends to the degradation and intense mortification of the pauper. He cannot choose his own food, his own room, his own clothes, his own associates, his own employment; he is allowed to own no property, to command no money. He cannot choose his own masters or keepers, but must go wherever the overseers of the town send him under a contract, of which he knows none of its conditions; in effect, you make a slave mart of your Town Hall, and take bids for your slaves, not holding them up as valuable chattels worth round sums to their purchasers, but as poor stock -- the poorer the better -- whose value lies in their proximity to the grave, and of whom full thirty per cent, a year may safely be calculated as falling off the bidder's hands. You place them where cruelties may be experienced daily, inhumanities that should stifle the breath to hear of, indecencies and vulgarities constantly forcing themselves upon the mind; profanity and blasphemy cultivated into gigantic growth, and you deny your paupers Christian charity". The system as practiced has in it cruelties. Look here," said he, flinging off" his coat and baring his arm, "I am one who can speak from experience. On that arm I can trace the scars of many a rawhide, of many a flogging which I carry with me to the grave, and I point you to them as evidence of the desperate cruelty of the plan. You degrade man -- see yonder proof of it," said he, pointing to him as Tucker came blundering half-drunk into the hall, "and now perhaps he comes to tell us that the son of one of the first gentlemen of a neighboring State, lately sick in our poor-house, has given up the ghost, no one but his miserable companions near him to receive his last messages, or to render him the attentions dying men all need. Who of you will go hence to follow him to the grave? "Who of you attended the sick and dying bed of Mr. Hicks, formerly the public surveyor of this town, a man of great reputation, and how many of you went to his grave? As it now is, your poor-house is little better than a highway to corruption and death. And well may every one of you who votes to keep it what it has now become, fear, that like as Hicks and Pepper have found it their old age asylum, so may you go into it in shame. Vote to continue your present poor-house system and to sell your paupers as slaves! Well may every Southerner shout over you exultingly, and bid you first wash your own garments ere you complain of his. Do you say the laws that cover him are humane, and are framedto protect his life and to secure his comfort? So may reply to you the owner of a thousand slaves -- 'I am forbidden to injure them -- and am required to use my power in them for their good.' But laws secure not the object where the work itself is wrong. If you give men the power to exercise cruelty", what security have you they will not? If you sell fifteen or twenty of the town poor to a citizen of the town for five hundred dollars a year, i.e., promising to give him so much to support them, which is at the rate of forty dollars a month for the whole twenty persons; twenty-six dollars a year, each, or fifty cents a week, which is SEVEN CENTS A DAY! think you he will not make them work to meet the bill of their expenses, or reduce them to the simplest, cheapest, coarsest diet in his power? (34) I know it all -- so may you, if you do not already. You give the masters an opportunity to grind these people down to the very dust, and grind them they do, and will, if poorly paid, human nature remaining as it is.