Your ShelfYour Projects

Note and Comment

11%

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 18, 1915

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 92, No. 9.

Read the full edition

Note and Comment

Increase in Crime

NOTWITHSTANDING the zealous efforts of the advocates of the temporal millennium to make it appear that crime is on the decrease, evidences present themselves in every quarter to show that instead of the world growing better, crime and lawlessness are increasing out of all proportion to the increase in population. Regarding this the Rev. John Josiah Munroe, in the United Presbyterian for Nov. 19, 1914, declares:—
No fair-minded man can deny for a moment that for the past quarter of a century crime has been alarmingly on the increase. While the population of the country has increased at the rate of 400 per cent, during the same period crime has increased 1,400 per cent, and the end is not yet. This looks like burning the candles at both ends, which, if persisted in, will bring about calamitous results.
An illustration of this is given in some of the conditions reported in New York City. Of these conditions the Washington Herald for Dec. 6, 1914, says:—
Greater New York is engulfed in a crime wave of appalling proportions. Murderers can be hired like taxicabs, for the day, hour, or job. To hire a murder neatly and expeditiously done involves less risk of detection and punishment than to carry a lighted cigar into the subway.
Police Commissioner Woods is responsible for the statement that there were seventy-three homicides here in September, October, and November, with 623 felonious assaults, any one of which might have resulted fatally, in the same period.
Bomb throwing also is flourishing, and the police are almost powerless to check it. Between September 16 and November 26 there were nineteen bomb explosions, and only four men were arrested, three in one case and one in another. The perpetrators of the other seventeen dynamite outrages are still at large, without a clue to their identity.
In the week between October 18 and 25 there were eight murders in the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn alone, with two revolver assaults, where the assassins failed to kill. And on September 23 there were four murders.