The Carnival of Crime

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 2, 1867

The Carnival of Crime.

The N. Y. correspondent of the Springfield Republican, not presumed to be a “Millerite,” writes to that Journal, June 17, 1867, as follows:—Really a pleasant state of things is prevailing in our country at the present time. I question whether ever before crime held such high carnival. A morning paper without its suicide, or a cheerful murder or two, would be too tame to contemplate or read with any feeling akin to satisfaction. Suicides, seductions, murders, adulteries, burglaries,—these are the staple. Amusements may flag, merchants may fail, and manufactures be suspended, but we have the charming assurance that murder and all that sort of thing will go on as regularly as though the crimson wheels which regulate its recurrence moved by superior clock-work. The terrible epidemic is abroad, and how to stay it is a question which may well occupy the minds of those who aim to control the morals of the age. Whither are we drifting? and where is all this to end? It certainly is not pleasant to lay your head upon your pillow at night with the chances rather against a comfortable waking, or to walk the street, if business calls you out after nightfall, in anticipation of a bludgeon falling on your lovely head. The favorite amusement of going to Brooklyn—the city of churches, where sparrows and sky-larks cannot fly without danger of being spitted on spires—must be abandoned. One would rather refrain from taking the air at all than run the risk of receiving his quietus by the thud of the silent messenger which an air-gun dispatches. A friend was telling me that he never goes upon a lonely street of an evening without a feeling of dread—a footstep behind him causes him to start into a cold perspiration, and he always waits for the pedestrian to go before him, or crosses the street at once, so that his course resembles that of a ship backing and filling for a port which she cannot make direct.