Impure Literature by James White

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 1, 1873

Impure Literature.

By James White

We have received from Hon. C. L. Merriam, M. C., from New York, a copy of a speech made by him in the United States House of Representatives, on a bill for the suppression of the circulation of obscene literature, &c. The facts presented in this brief speech are truly startling. Mr. Merriam says:—

“It is terrible to contemplate that more than six thousand persons are daily employed in a carefully organized business, stimulated to activity by all the incentives that avarice and wickedness can invent, to place in the schools and homes of our country, books, pictures, and immoral appliances of so low and debasing a nature that it would seem as if the brute creation itself would turn from it in disgust.”

The extent of this business may be better appreciated when we learn that within one year, by the sole efforts of Mr. Anthony Comstock, of New York, there were destroyed in that city, “obscene photographs, stereoscopic and other pictures, more than 182,000; obscene books and pamphlets, more than 5 tons; obscene letter-press in sheets, more than 2 tons; sheets of impure songs, catalogues, handbills, &c., more than 21,000; obscene microscopic watch and knife charms and finger-rings, more than 5,000; obscene negative plates for printing photographs and stereoscopic views, about 625; obscene engraved steel and copper plates, 350; obscene lithographic stones destroyed, 20; obscene wood-cut engravings, more than 500; stereotype plates for printing obscene books, more than 5 tons; obscene transparent playing cards, 5,500 to 6,000; obscene and immoral rubber articles, over 30,000; lead moulds for manufacturing rubber goods, twelve sets, or more than 700 pounds; newspapers seized, about 4,600; letters from all parts of the country, ordering these goods, about 15,000; names of dealers in account books seized, about 6,000; list of names in the hands of dealers, that are sold as merchandise, to forward catalogues and circulars to, independent of letters and account books, seized, more than 7,000.”

Parents and guardians have no idea of the amount of such corrupting trash that is introduced among the students in all the large schools in the land. On this subject the following statement is made:—

“Among the seizures made in New York, are found twenty separate orders recorded on the books of a dealer, coming from the librarian of a public school in one of our proudest Western States.”

This is absolutely shocking. The “Prison Association” of New York, report that the traffic in these articles was never so great, or so systematically organized as at present. Houses of ill-fame and Insane Asylums are filled with the fruit of this business; as such vile reading and pictures not only corrupt, but destroy. Surely we have fallen upon “perilous times;” and the workers of this iniquity are emboldened by the knowledge that thousands in the land are publicly denouncing the marriage tie, and large conventions of spiritualists, often largely composed of people passing for “respectable,” unblushingly indorse the doctrines of Mrs. Woodhull. The signs of the times are giving a new commentary on the words of the Saviour: “As it was in the days when Lot went out of Sodom, so shall it be when the Son of man is revealed.”

J. H. W.