p. 255 | Increase of Crime

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 8, 1882

Increase of Crime.

Whether the increase of crime is due to the great influx of foreigners into the United States, to the laxity of our laws, or to the low standard of public morals, is a question which we will leave others to discover. That there is a growing tendency to crime there can be no doubt, and that whisky is one of the great causes of crime is equally clear. Although several temperance waves have swept over the country during the past decade, and apparently worked wonderful reforms; although the prohibition movement has carried two of our States, and shown great strength in others, yet drunkenness does not seem to be less common than it was twenty years ago. In this city (Chicago), for instance, we have over 4,000 saloons; dance houses are conducted openly; low concert saloons thrive on all sides, and gambling is openly and shamefully recognized as a legitimate business.

All this may be because Chicago is not a moral city, but it has as many churches and as many good citizens as any other city of its size on the continent. We are inclined to believe that the principal cause is the fact that children are not subjected to parental restraint as they ought to be. Young men are thrown upon the world at an age when their characters are not half formed; when their minds are open to false and injurious impressions; when excitement is sought and found easily, and when they are moved either toward the right or left by the companions which accident throws in their way. The boy of ten or fifteen years of age is as much of a man as his father in these days; he is beyond the control of his parents; swears like a trooper, uses tobacco like a sailor, and drinks like a fish. There must be something radically wrong in the early training of children, or this certainly would not be the case.—Sel.