What Shall Be the End Thereof?
A SUBSCRIBER sends us the following fearful picture of the present condition of society clipped from the Toledo Blade. The Christian Inquirer says: The reaction of the war upon the taste, habits, ambition and morals of our people, has proved fearfully damaging. The old order of things has been entirely broken up. The leaders of other days are left behind if not forgotten.—Classes are dissolved. The ideas and usages with which we had become familiar are thrown aside. New men, new customs, new notions, are everywhere uppermost. The low have been lifted up. Followers have become leaders. Beggars of yesterday are millionaires to-day, and set the fashion for whoever is so foolish as to follow their guidance. The consequences are legitimate. Such an intense and insane rush and struggle for wealth, such reckless, ruinous extravagance of expenditure, such a delirium for vulgar display, this country has never seen. And alas! not only taste, refinement, purity and piety have gone down before the tide, but even honesty, the only firm basis of commercial prosperity, the only sure support of social order, the one essential condition of individual and public welfare, is yielding to the weight and pressure of popular fashions and fatuity. Speculations, which are merely gambling under a less obnoxious name, frauds, and all imaginable villainies, are carried on almost openly. It is estimated that a single interest bled the Government out of sixty millions of dollars last year. More than half of the Revenue officers are suspected of peculation, which means plunder. The food we eat is nauseous with adulterations. Our coffee is made of stale ship bread and oil nuts, and even the milk we would give our little ones is thick with diseases and tinctured with poison. And while every legitimate business has dropped to a lower grade of method and spirit than it formerly occupied, every vice has increased in an alarming degree. Intemperance; not only are our streets and public places full of it, not only do young men and old men, and mere boys fall before it by scores and hundreds, but even women, beautiful, accomplished, beloved wives and daughters carry its fiery blush on their cheeks, and reel and totter under its influence on the side-walks. There are more gaming places in the city to-day than there were dry goods stores twenty years ago; and the gamblers include all classes from the boy of fifteen to the roue of fifty. But why enumerate? Every vice on the black catalogue of transgression has more than doubled in volume and in victims within these five years, and our youth, the pride and hope of the land, are falling beneath the subtle destroyer faster than ever they fell in Southern campaigns. Marriages are diminishing. Homes are breaking up. The streets are unclean. Places of amusement are vitiated with vulgarity. Echoes of profanity ring in the air, and pitfalls are everywhere.