Municipal Epidemics of Crime
The charge is made, by a leading attorney, that “everybody knows that graft and political corruption dominate the city administration of Oakland and the county administration of Alameda. The recent election frauds in Alameda County furnish proof enough that that was only a tithe of the things that could be uncovered by vigorous and aggressive investigation.” The city of Oakland, in Alameda County, California, has come to be one of the great centers of population on the Pacific coast. It is separated from San Francisco by nothing more than a comparatively narrow strip of the bay; hence these two great cities, for all practical purposes, are one. It would seem, from these charges, that Oakland at least ought to have an investigation to try to uproot her grafting. Charges of even more deep-rooted iniquity have recently been made by an Illinois state attorney concerning conditions in the city of Chicago. So we may go the rounds from one city to another, year after year, in observing the efforts to clear out the grafting, frauds, and criminality of various kinds. We are told that the world is getting better, but the conditions are not in harmony with the statements about the general uplift of society. The Master, who perfectly knows the hearts of men, has given us no other assurance than that “strait is the gate, and narrow is the way” that leads to life, and only the few are going that road, while the many are passing through the broad gate into the wide way that leads to destruction. The evil conditions of the time have become not only an international problem, but an international peril; for what is true of the conditions in the great cities of this nation is equally true of conditions in the great cities of the other portions of the world. There is a splendid outward veneer of respectability, but the core of society is rapidly bringing the world to those depths of corruption and degradation that will call for the visiting judgments of the almighty God, as in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah of old.