THE AGE OF MURDER by D. T. Taylor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 2, 1869

THE AGE OF MURDER.

By D. T. Taylor

We commend to the serious attention of the readers of the Review the following from the pen of Eld. D. T. Taylor. It was first published in the columns of The Christian, 19 Lindall St., Boston, Mass. The editor of that sheet, Eld. H. L. Hastings, has also published the article in tract form for general circulation. It can be obtained of the author at Rouse’s Point, N. Y., and also of the publisher.

The writer has presented, in a concise form, a most powerful array of facts to show that the present is emphatically the Age of Murder. This is certainly a startling assertion. Yet we venture to say that every candid reader of this tract will acknowledge that the author has proved its truthfulness. The tract is valuable as shedding great light on the present condition of the world. It is particularly adapted to place in the hands of those who think that we are on the eve of the millennium.—Ed. Review.

This, truly, is an age of murder. It is fast becoming notorious for deeds of blood and violence. We seek not to encourage a gloomy apprehension respecting the present or the future. We would occasion no unnecessary alarm in society touching the general peril. We only present stubborn facts, and leave the reader to scan the issue.

Crime is frightfully on the increase, especially those species of it which indicate an utter disregard of the sanctities of human life. Murder defiles the age. There are murders of fathers and murders of mothers; murders of brothers and murders of sisters; murders of unborn babes and murders of little children; murders of neighbors and of strangers; murders of rich and of poor; murders in high life and in low; murders in broad daylight and in the dark,—in the open street and in by-ways; murders by ones, and twos, and threes, and murders of whole families; murders of men for a mere difference of opinion; murders for a few paltry dollars; murders for hate and revenge; and murders in all horrible ways that human fiendishness, worked up into frenzy by poisoned liquors, and infuriated by the devil, can invent.

When in 1843 the United States Gazette examined the statistics of crime in this country and recorded the occurrence of two hundred and fifteen (215) murders by means of guns, pistols, bowie-knives, etc., in the first six months of that year in all our land, the other journals repeated the tale as a “melancholy picture,” and the community was shocked at the fearful story of bloodshed and homicide. Only six years after this, the Police Gazette with horror recorded for the single month of May, 1849, the killing, by human hands, of twenty-four persons in the United States, and did then emphatically style the present time “The Age of Murder.” Let us examine the facts and statistics that justify this appellation.

We will take Boston for our first example. From 1843 to 1849 the increase of population was thirty per cent, while a committee, chosen for the purpose, reported to the mayor, February 12, on the increase of crime, relating only to deeds of violence, an average increase of five hundred and fifty (550) per cent. The population of the city at that time was one hundred and twenty thousand (120,000), and the arrests by the police for the previous year amounted to eleven thousand one hundred and seventy-eight (11,178) persons, or one for every ten. The report says: “The grand jury complain of the increase of crime beyond that of population.” In the whole State of Massachusetts the homicides in five years, from 1855 to 1859, amounted to one hundred and nine (109), averaging twenty-two per annum: in the last named year there being twenty-five deaths by violence. Ten years later, in 1869, a January number of the Boston Journal, under the head of “The boldness of Crime,” speaks of robbery, violence, and murder, having “a constant and steady growth for some years past,” and its New York correspondent, writing to the paper, denominates these times “The reign of Violence.”

In a single week in January, 1853, there were eight murders in New York City. In 1856 only eleven homicides were reported, but the next year the number leaped up to fifty-five. In 1858 there were inquests held over the bodies of forty-nine murdered persons, but the whole number who met violent deaths in the city that year was seventy-nine. In 1859 there were sixty murders, and in all this time only one murderer was hung. In 1860 there were one hundred and three (103) inquests over murdered persons in the city, while the arrests for crime were sixty-eight thousand eight hundred and ninety (68,890), of whom only three thousand nine hundred and seventy-three (3,973) were convicted on trial and punished;—the remainder who were guilty, escaped justice to pursue a career of crime. Only a year or two later it was announced in the journals that over seventy murderers lay in the prisons of New York City, either awaiting trial or under sentence of death. Neither Paris, with its population of two millions (2,000,000), nor any other city in the Christian and civilized world, was declared to have an equal number. It was said that this fact was “startling;” the “spirit of Cain it seemed had descended on the island;” “who could explain the dreadful problem?” In ten years, from 1859 to 1868, inclusive, there were in the city, five hundred and thirty-two (532) known deaths by violence, while in thirteen years previous to 1868, there were one hundred and sixty-five (165) murders committed in the city, the perpetrators of which have never been discovered. “Make a chain, for the land is full of bloody crimes, the city is full of violence.” Ezek. vii, 23.

A New York paper of 1869 says: “During the past nine years there have been eight hundred and five thousand one hundred and forty-nine (805,149) persons arrested by our police, and that does not by any means indicate that this nearly a million were a tenth of those who, in the time named, were drunk and disorderly, and committed often the entire list of crimes.” In February, 1858, the New York Observer spoke in an alarming strain of the uninterrupted course and increase of crime, and says, “Is this state of things to continue?—then we may fearfully apprehend the future.” Five years earlier than this, in 1853, the Hartford Courant of April declared, “It is a lamentable fact that crime throughout the country is on the increase. Murders for the mere purpose of plunder, highway robberies and burglaries, are much more common now than they were forty years ago, and have increased in a ratio greater than the increase in the number of the inhabitants.” Such was the constant testimony relating both to city and country. Sixteen years ago, in 1853, the children trained in crime, the receivers of stolen goods, gamblers, beggars, drunkards, habitual tipplers, thieves, and profligate persons of New York City, were estimated at one hundred and fifty-three thousand (153,000); a terrible army when compared with the sixty-four thousand (64,000) which make up the total of Protestant communicants there; “a greater number in proportion to the population than in London,” said a city paper while deploring these facts.

The whole country is no better off. “The Carnival of Crime,” is the current name given to this seething deluge of corruption, this insane lust for blood. In San Francisco in the four years, from 1849 to 1852, inclusive, there were twelve hundred (1,200) murders committed, while, in the single year 1855, there were five hundred (500) persons in the city killed by violence. Incredible as it may seem, it has been estimated that in all California during the six years previous to 1860, there were five thousand (5,000) persons murdered, doubtless, mostly for gold. Who can enumerate the murders in Kansas in 1856-7? Who can tell the deaths of both whites and blacks by violence, in all the Southern States within ten years past? A great pen on high has kept the record, though unknown to mortals; and God will surely “make inquisition for blood.” The papers report over five hun-

dred (500) murders in the State of Louisiana in the two months of November and December, 1868, a reign of terror prevailing. In the single county of Marion, in Texas, there were twenty-seven murders in one week in November, and not a murderer was arrested, while in all Texas, from the close of the war in 1864 to the year 1868, it was stated that there had been seven hundred and sixty-one (761) murders perpetrated, and during all that time there was but one execution for murder. Can the imagination picture a condition of society like this? It is also reported in the U. S. Senate, in January, 1869, that there were three hundred and thirty-six (336) murders in the State of Georgia, in a period of but nine and a half months of last year. Most of these persons, doubtless, were colored, but, nevertheless, they were men who were slain.

In the Northern States, where Christianity and education exert their most powerful influence, there is, as elsewhere, the same sanguinary tale. In Schuylkill County, Penn., in the brief space of four years, between 1863 and 1867, there were fifty-seven murders committed. In the south-east county of New Hampshire, there were five cases of murder trial on the docket for the courts, all committed during the season of 1868. Last year (1868), there were thirty murders and an equal number of suicides in one western city, St. Louis; while some years ago it was declared that there were annually in the United States five hundred thousand (500,000) cases of assault and battery, with over eight hundred (800) self murders, beside an equal number murdered by other and bloody hands. Truly, the “soul is wearied because of murderers.” Jer. iv, 31. All authorities acknowledge an increase of the mania for crime. In 1867 the Penitentiary of Illinois had eleven hundred (1,100) convicts, which were eighty per cent more than in 1865.

Rev. Dr. Eddy said at Worcester, September, 1868, that “crime, drunkenness, embezzlement, and irregularities of every kind are on the increase.” Rev. Dr. Chapin asserts in The Liberal Christian, that “Society is honey-combed with evils and vices. It seems as though the fountain springs of vice had overflowed and oozed down through a thousand invisible channels, and made the very ground beneath our feet one vast quagmire of sensuality, corruption, and crime;” while the startled Rev. H. W. Beecher exclaims, “All the framework of society seems to be dissolving!” Zion’s Herald declares, concerning the increasing catalogue of crimes, that “the devil was never busier than now;” while the Albany Journal unequivocally asserts the existence of a mania for crime of the most desperate and daring character, and ominously predicts that this wild mania will become universal. The picture is indeed horrible. We have no love to exhibit it. But if these things actually do exist, why should not sober, moral men and women look into the jaws of this hell, and be ready to meet their responsibilities?

Not only in our own country, but in the best countries in Europe, crime increases. In Blackwood’s Magazine for July, 1844, published in Edinburgh, it was said: “Since the year 1805, that is, during a period of less than forty years, in the course of which population has advanced about sixty-five per cent in Great Britain and Ireland, crime in England has increased seven hundred per cent, in Ireland, about eight hundred per cent, and in Scotland, about thirty-six hundred per cent.” All this, too, we are told, has occurred in a half century of prosperity and material progress. At that time the annual commitments for crime were about one hundred and eighty thousand (180,000); while the commitments since five years ago had gone up twenty-five per cent above these figures. In 1858, fourteen years subsequent to Blackwood’s estimates, the Boston Recorder stated that “Within forty years, commitments for crime have increased in England from five thousand (5,000) to thirty-one thousand (31,000), more than six fold; and four times faster than the increase of population. In Scotland, the increase of crime in the same period has risen from eighty-nine (89) to three thousand eight hundred and eighty-four (3,884), which is forty-three fold, or twenty-five times faster than the population.” Ten years ago, in 1859, England and Wales had one hundred and four thousand nine hundred and eighty-five (104,985) criminals at large, enough to make seventy regiments of the line, and these villains were estimated to cost British society every year the sum of one hundred and fifty million dollars ($150,000,000), or about double the money spent upon the Royal Navy; and fifty times as much as was expended for foreign missions.

In the year 1864, the convictions for crime in England numbered two hundred and forty-six thousand five hundred and seventy-six (246,576) persons, and the number arrested and convicted for criminal offenses in France during the same year, was six hundred and fifty-three thousand nine hundred and fifty-four (653,954). British authorities say that at the present time, drunkenness, lawlessness, and violence, in the whole kingdom, are on the increase, especially in large cities. We are told there were twenty-seven murders in Liverpool in 1868, and the head constable reports intemperance and crime increasing, but declares his inability to account for it. Such is the awful record of the preponderance of sin and evil in its worst forms, right in the very heart of Christendom.

It may be earnestly asked, “What is the cause of this strange thirst for blood, this reckless disregard of human life, this onward march of crime?” Our answer is, The age is reaching its climax of iniquity preparatory to the coming of the great day of God’s wrath. And while the causes of this rising tide of evil are various, we shall here refer to but two; viz., novel-reading and intemperance. Never was there so great a demand for works of fiction; and, to supply this demand, the tribe of novel-writers has come to be named “Legion.” Especially do all classes seek those sensational works full of horrible deeds and licentious allusions, whose tendency is to destroy all love for sober reading, corrupt the morals, and loosen the restraints of virtue. The American Publisher and Bookseller says, that of two thousand one hundred and sixty-nine (2,169) new books printed in this country in 1868, classed as fiction, religious, law, biography, agricultural, historical, and educational, no less than seven hundred and fifty-four (754), or more than one third, were works of fiction; while the religious works numbered only two hundred and fifty-eight (258), there being three novels to one godly book. On the pages of a vain and vicious sheet issuing from a small town in New Hampshire, we count over four hundred works of this class, embracing novels, foolish song books, and productions of the worst authors, all on sale by the publishers of that monthly paper.

What the perverted taste of the age demands, is seen in the fact that the immense Public Library of Boston aims to keep on hand for circulation and general reading, a copy of every novel published in the English language, and that these are the books most sought for there; also in the fact that of two thousand one hundred and ninety-seven (2,197) books called for and issued by the Oxford Free Library, England, in three months ending August 31, 1857, no less than one thousand four hundred and one (1,401) were novels and tales, while only two hundred and seventy-one (271) were religious; and again, when it is stated that during the month of June, 1855, of seven hundred and thirty-four (734) books drawn from the Mercantile Library at San Francisco, three hundred and eleven (311) were works of fiction, while only seven, or one two hundredth part of the whole were religious books; the vain and lying works that poison the mind, being, when compared with the religious and serious, as nearly forty-five to one. The Advance of Feb. 11, 1869, is responsible for the statement that “more copies of the light literature papers are sold in New England than the total circulation of all the religious weeklies published there.”

The religious press caters to this depraved taste, Sunday School libraries are as full of pious novels as Egypt was of frogs, a great Tract Society openly announces as reading for the Sabbath at home, “Fictions in form, in substance Facts,” eminent ministers are found writing novels for the “Satanic Press,” so-called Christian women spread the land with their romances and false tales, and staid religious and evangelical weeklies which stand as representatives of morality, religion and orthodoxy, not only advertise (as a mere matter of business of course!) Spiritualistic sheets, set for the overthrow of Christianity, but also give regular notices of all novels, light literature and silly books sent to them, not excepting those allowed by the courts to be of the most scandalous and worst kind. We claim that this irruption of fiction largely increases vice and crime.

A second cause is intoxicating liquors, all of which are poisoned with drugs. With the awful increase in the manufacture, sale, and use, of these, crime everywhere keeps bold and steady pace. Rev. W. H. H. Murray, in an address at Music Hall, Boston, March 14, 1869, said, on the subject of crime being aggravated by the use of intoxicating drinks, that “In New York State, in 1849, the number committing crimes while under the influence of liquor was thirty-six thousand one hundred and fourteen (36,114). The Sheriff of Albany county reported the proportion of crimes directly traceable to intoxication in his jurisdiction as eight-tenths. In Duchess county it was four-fifths; in Erie county, eight-tenths; in Niagara county, three-fourths; the police justice of Buffalo reported nine-tenths. In 1848, in the State of Connecticut, the keepers of the prison reported ninety-one hundredths; in the city of Norwich, seventy-five hundredths. Massachusetts, in one year, sent twelve thousand (12,000) criminals to her prisons, and reported nine thousand (9,000) directly made such by intemperance. Sir Matthew Hale, after twenty-four years of observation on the bench, said: “If all the murders, manslaughters, burglaries, riots, tumults, adulteries, fornications, rapes, and other enormities committed in England, were represented by five parts, at least four parts would, beyond dispute, be directly due to intemperance.” Mr. Murray did not give one-half the dismal picture of rum’s doings, and yet the Boston Advertiser of March 15, which published this able lecture, in a leading editorial asserts that “If the alarming picture of the moral condition of the country drawn by the Rev. Mr. Murray were true, it would be high time for the purifying fires to descend and begin their work.” And they will descend.

In Sweden, the depth of misery and crime caused by the liquor traffic is so great that the voice of thousands in alarm is demanding legal and legislative prohibition of the manufacture of such drinks. In England, the drunkenness of the masses is frightful to contemplate. In all England, during the five years ending September, 1867, there were nearly one million cases of arrest for assaults and disorderly conduct, a vast majority of them growing out of intoxication. In 1862, the number of drunken persons proceeded against was eighty-two thousand one hundred and ninety-six (82,196), while in the year following it ran up to ninety-four thousand nine hundred and eight (94,908), the justices asserting that “the returns show a great increase over the preceding year.”

This annual increase has not at all diminished, as proved by the figures of crime in Liverpool in 1868, where, as already stated, there were twenty-seven murders, and where, out of sixteen thousand seven hundred and seventy (16,770) persons arrested for criminal offenses, no less than fourteen thousand four hundred and fifty-one (14,451) were drunk at the time of arrest, and where the city authorities still report inebriety increasing, and education and general morality much less. Indeed, Mr. Robert Baxter, in an address to the City Missionary Society of London, declared that the abundant inducements to criminal pleasures and “drinking” were the main causes of all the misery that was daily witnessed in London and in the country; and a member of Parliament is responsible for saying that the yearly expense to England for the use and disastrous effects of intoxicating drinks is estimated to amount to five hundred million dollars.

In this country the figures are still more saddening and frightful. In 1850 the value of the spirituous and malt liquors produced in the United States was twenty-one and a half millions of dollars ($21,500,000). In 1860 this sum had nearly doubled, it being forty-one and a half millions ($41,500,000). Only seven years later, in 1867, the number of gallons of intoxicating liquors manufactured amounted to two hundred and forty millions ($240,000,000,) or about

six gallons per year to each and every man, woman and child in the United States. In this last brief interval of years the distilleries had increased from one thousand one hundred and ninety-three (1,193) in 1860, to three thousand (3,000) in 1867. These drugged and damnable liquids, together with others imported, were, it is well known, according to the report of Commissioner Wells, made out from the sworn returns sent in to him, sold at retail during the year, for the gigantic sum of one billion, four hundred and eighty-three millions, four hundred and ninety-one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-five dollars,† ($1,483,491,865.) Such being the sum expended for drinks of this kind in a single year ending June 30, 1867, we have here in part the secret of the Age of Murder; the horrible figures and facts which underlie the Carnival of crime with which the whole land is being flooded and desolated. Indeed, the New York Tribune of November 18, 1868, goes further, and makes the yearly loss to the whole country by the use and abuse of intoxicating drinks to be equal to “two billions, two hundred and fifty millions of dollars, ($2,250,000,000,) or considerably more than the interest-bearing portion of the national debt.” Have the people in this land looked these figures in the face?

As the result of this general drunkenness, Hall’s Journal of Health a few years since, stated that of six thousand (6,000) persons tried in one year before the New York Court of Sessions, only ninety-four (i. e., one in sixty-three), were sober when arrested. Senator Henry Wilson recently declared in public that we have now five hundred thousand (500,000) drunkards in the country; and Mr. Murray, whose address is already quoted from, with a terrible earnestness, declares: “Bear me witness if I exaggerate when I say that the country is rapidly becoming one VAST grog-shop, to which half a million of its youth are yearly introduced, and over whose threshold sixty thousand are annually carted to a drunkard’s grave.” With these facts before us it is easy to see that a desperate and fearful struggle is at hand. Will the Christianity of this age, the moral conscience of the country, meet and defeat this tidal wave of hell? We shall see. Thus far, heedless of law, careless of death or the judgment, bidding defiance to all restraint, and all appeal,—crime, murder, and drunkenness, stalk right on, bold and impudent, mocking all hope of reform or of better days,—the gospel of Jesus being powerless, and the Christianity of the age being impotent to stay their career even in the most favored, enlightened, and Christian lands. These are not the ages of darkness; nor are we writing of heathen lands, such as India, where Archdeacon Jeffries declares that “for every person truly converted to Christianity the drinking practices of the English have made fully a thousand drunkards,” but of countries whose united ministry would perhaps reach a hundred thousand, and where Bibles are as thick as the green leaves of summer. If these things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? Alas, man is every day proving himself incapable of governing the earth, and the great want of the times is “another king, one Jesus,” to rule the world in visible splendor and righteousness.

It is our solemn conviction that this Carnival of Crime, this Age of Murder, this sad era, when a country of nearly forty millions of free and enlightened people has become one vast grog-shop, this overflowing wickedness of the careless multitudes, is the predicted iniquity which, in the waning years of time, was to come to its full tide, not only as proceeding from the depravity of human nature, but also from the increased activity and intense anger of Satan, who is the prince of this kingdom of darkness;—and that the last days, with all their foretold deluge of evil, are upon the world, and that the coming of the Lord is very near. And it is our deliberate opinion that the crimes of this last age are provoking the most terrific divine judgments on cities and countries, and that before long there will be such calamities and catastrophes in the earth as will cause the ears of men to tingle when they hear the tale. The Judge has said, “As it was in the days of Noah so shall it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed;” and in Noah’s time, just anterior to the world’s destruction, not only was man’s heart given to continual sin and evil, but this inward evil overflowed until “the whole earth was filled with violence.” Gen. vi.

And while there remains for the pure and the good, one “blessed hope,” namely, the personal coming of Jesus to the everlasting joy of all who love his appearing, there waits for the impenitent, the prayerless, and the persistently wicked, the nearing Judgment Throne, the sentence, Depart, and the fiery lake. In view of these things we cry to the child of God, Stand fast! and in the ears of drunken and bloody men, proclaim God’s law, “Thou shalt not kill;” “Woe unto him that putteth the bottle to his neighbor’s lips and maketh him drunken;” “No drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God;” “No murderer hath eternal life in him;” “but murderers shall have their part in the lake of fire, which is the second death.”

Thus saith God: REPENT!