p. 3 | As in the Days of Noah by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 25, 1909

As in the Days of Noah

By C. M. S.

The world has turned a warning voice upon itself. It is as if a sleeper, in the grip of a terrible dream, were shrieking to waken himself. For several years the greatest magazines in this country, if not in the world, have been blazoning forth to their readers the almost unthinkable conditions that exist in all the great cities of our country. They have done this with no idea of teaching the people that the end of the age is approaching, or that the second coming of Christ is nigh. They have seen no religious or prophetic significance in it all. But they have laid bare conditions which are unmistakable fulfilments of divine prophecy.

Said our Lord: “As were the days of Noah, so shall be the coming of the Son of man.” The wickedness of man was great in the earth when Jehovah decreed its destruction by a flood of waters. So also with Sodom. We read that “the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners against Jehovah exceedingly,” and the “cry of Sodom” was great. The angel of the Lord could not find ten righteous in it, and its name has become synonymous with the lowest sinful practise known to man.

But to-day, in every great city of the world, there is committed every crime and sin that Sodom knew, or that was practised by the nations of Noah’s day. From every great city in the world there are modern Sodoms crying up to God for the flood of fire, there is wickedness as great as that drowned out by the deluge of Noah’s day. In one issue of one great magazine alone (McClure’s for November) thirty-three pages are devoted to the political and social pollution

of one great city. The revelations therein made are shocking in the extreme. The conditions portrayed may in the future be worse in quantity, but they can not be worse in quality. The authors of the articles in question demonstrate that the greatest city in the New World is ruled by a well-organized band of criminals, the foundation and life of whose operations is prostitution. That degrading business has the protection and fostering care of the greatest political organization of the municipality, and in turn contributes to that organization the millions that keep that organization in power and support its body-guard. The buying and selling of girls, both local and immigrant, for immoral purposes has become a controlling factor in the politics of that great city. The political organization supported by that awful business has had absolute control of the police department and the police courts; and as a result, every kind of crime has found protection from those sworn to enforce the law.

So well did this arrangement serve the purposes of professional politicians, that “it has now established itself to some extent in at least three fourths of the large cities of the United States,” says George Kibbe Turner, in the magazine mentioned. Not only so, but the most active political workers in the city are the hosts of conscienceless young men who live upon the earnings of fallen women. The wicked business has no limits to its operations, and there is no place too sacred for it to set its trap for the unwary working girl. “Everywhere through the great cities of the country the sharp eyes of the wise ‘cadet’ [procurer] are watching, hunting her [the working girl] out at her amusements and places of work. And back of him the most adroit minds of the politicians of the slums are standing to protect and extend with him their mutual interests. . . . Special lawyers defend the ‘cadets’ when they are caught, and all have their direct access to the political machine.”

Gen. Theodore A. Bingham, recently deposed police commissioner of New York, telling his experience in endeavoring to break the power of the political-criminal organization in New York City, says: “I was opposed by a strong and organized body which fought every step of the way. At the end of that time [two and one-half years] I was suddenly removed from office. . . . The average decent citizen has no idea of the power of the organized criminals of New York.” He declares that the practise of law in the lower section of New York has one chief purpose in view,—the protection of the criminal,—and shows that many of the political leaders are engaged in questionable business that can not be mentioned in polite society.

The publisher of the magazine himself devotes many pages of his journal to a discussion of the same conditions. He says: “The struggle to degrade the standards and guaranties of civilization in America have come about largely through the populations of cities. . . . In this ample field for their enterprise have sprung up organizations for the profitable debauching of populations, such as have rarely, if ever, been equaled in the history of the world.”

Mr. McClure makes one statement which is full of meaning to every reader of this paper. He says: “The oldest and most infamous organization in America for exploiting this population is Tammany Hall of New York, which the great classical historian, Prof. Guglielmo Ferrero, recently compared to the very similar organizations that were formed for exploiting the city of Rome during its decadence.”

Concerning the prevalence of these conditions, Mr. McClure says: “The same political forces engaged in degrading civilization into barbarism are at work with general success in all the larger cities of the country.” Again: “The operation of the coroner’s court in New York in dealing with the average murder is one of the ghastliest travesties of justice in human government.”

Said Prof. Charles W. Eliot, of Harvard University, in New York, on Dec. 16, 1908: “The defenses of society against criminals have broken down.”

If these are the conditions in our great cities, as we have every evidence they are; and if they are growing daily in the quantity of crime and sin of every description, as we know they are, how urgently incumbent it is upon us to do in them our allotted work right speedily! Such places are no places for the thronging of our youth. They who must go there in the business of this message have a duty attended with peril, and implicit trust in God is their only sure defense; but they who go there without the duty have the peril without the defense.

The cities of this world are human inventions, and are fast becoming citadels of strength in the kingdom of darkness. They are growing constantly in size, and this very growth is an assurance of the certain increase of the debasing conditions found in them to-day. The verdict of the facts of history and the logic of cause and effect are dead against the idea of any permanent renovation of the cities of the world. “Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse.” Every great city of the world is sending up to heaven the cry that went up to God from Sodom of old, and the day when he will answer with fire is not far distant.

C. M. S.