The Age of Commercialism by Editor

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Dec 5, 1907

The Age of Commercialism

By Editor

Our first-page illustration shows the answer of the architect to the demands of modern commercialism as exemplified in a great city. It is the building of the City Investment Company of New York City, and is the largest office building in the world, containing half a million square feet of floor space. It is thirty-three stories high, and its foundation rests on solid rock eighty feet below the street level. Twenty-three elevators are necessary to handle the transportation of persons doing business in this building. There are two other great office buildings in New York City that are taller than this, the Singer Building and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, but neither of them contains as much floor space or cubic capacity. Who can look upon the multiplication of these mammoth structures without feeling that this is the age of commercialism, the age of the heaping together of treasure foretold by the apostle, and an incontestable sign of the last days? No such buildings as these, for the purposes of wealth getting, were ever before constructed in the history of man.

A UNITED and well-organized campaign has already been entered upon by the ministers of Washington in the interest of the better observance of Sunday in the District of Columbia. The plans contemplate a mass-meeting, sermons on the same day by all the clergymen of the city upon the observance of Sunday, the distribution of literature upon the subject, and a determined effort to induce the next Congress to pass a Sunday law for the District of Columbia. In view of the prominent part which the Seventh-day Adventists and the Jews acted nearly three years ago in the defeat of the effort to introduce religious instruction into the public schools of Washington, the leaders of this Sunday-observance movement decided not to invite representatives of these two religious bodies to attend their conferences. This new effort to commit Congress to Sunday legislation will call for a vigorous campaign in behalf of the truth, and the work has already been entered upon by the Religious Liberty Bureau. The progress of this whole movement will be reported from time to time in the columns of the REVIEW.