p. 685 | Legal Narcotics by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 11, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 43.

Legal Narcotics

By Editor

ONE large city after another is taking up the question of dealing with vice. Kansas City is one among the latest, and all that have taken up this work are telling us “horrible stories of juvenile excesses.” These excesses are regarded as more deplorable among the wealthy and the so-called higher classes than among the underpaid lower classes that were recently so much discussed in their relations to vice.

Organizations by the dozen are formed to fight these conditions of immorality. Almost every mail brings us matter from some of these organizations that are being formed, requesting that we publish it and help the good cause along. Evidently there are a great many people who regard the situation as becoming very desperate. Concerning this class of “reform” work the San Francisco Argonaut recently expressed its convictions in some paragraphs that are well worthy of consideration and study. They are in part:

“There will be no disposition anywhere to treat a terrible evil with levity or even with indifference. And it is a terrible evil. San Francisco has had her own experiences, and it is quite easy to believe that other cities are similarly situated. But unfortunately there is a disposition to resort to soap remedies and to treat the results rather than the causes. Nothing is so fatally easy as to pass a law. There is no more popular narcotic for an uneasy public conscience. But narcotics are not cures, and Kansas City will be likely to find that police control is the worst possible substitute for parental influences, and that even a curfew law can not take the place of those elementary duties that can be performed in the home, and nowhere but the home.

“But the neglect of parental duties is by no means the only cause for the apparent extinction of the moral barriers that were once so effective. The barriers of morality and convention are by no means so distinct as we like to suppose. Usually they supplement each other. During the last few years, we have seen the almost complete destruction of those reticences upon sex matters that doubtless had their own attendant evils, but that did actually prevent far more evils than they caused. What we call plain speaking became a vogue and a fashion. Literature and the drama combined in what was said to be a moral crusade, but that was actually a financial crusade. And now the churches have followed suit. Nothing is too private for public discussion, no audience too young for admission and participation, no vital fact too explosive for reckless handling. Upon every side we see gross familiarity at its deadly work. Here in San Francisco we are about to have what its promoters call a Purity Sunday. Countless sermons will be preached to audiences of young men and young women, and with their own sex relationships as a topic. Does any one with a sane knowledge of human nature suppose that even the most exquisite delicacy can neutralize the inevitable poison of those sermons? Is it not well known to even the tyro in such matters that here at least the most fatal and irresistible of all forces is that of suggestion, and that reason and prudence struggle in vain against it? The cure for this sort of evil is reticence and not publicity, mystery and not familiarity, the home and not the pulpit, the mother and not the school-teacher. To err in such a matter as this is to poison the rising generation.

“Therefore it is time that we called a halt to the sex fanatics. They have been at their work for some years past, and now the air is becoming unbreathable. Every field of publicity has been invaded. They have almost persuaded us that sex is the one thing worth thinking about and worth talking about. The results are sufficiently evil upon matured minds that have learned to govern themselves. Upon immature minds, to whom self-government has hardly occurred, it has been little short of disastrous. Every sacred mystery of life has been cheapened, coarsened, profaned.

S. A. Probst, Anti-Saloon League district president. He is making himself famous by his movement to close all the saloons in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Sundays.

“Let us hope that we are nearly at the end of this particular epoch, lest some worse thing befall us. It is bad enough that for years past our young people should have been forced to live in an atmosphere of public discussion comparable only with that of an open sewer.”

The Argonaut recognizes that these vice conditions are “a terrible evil,” and it well remarks that “nothing is so fatally easy as to pass a law. There is no more popular narcotic for an uneasy public conscience.” There are a great many people who are possessed with the mania that if we can only get certain laws passed, then the evil is cured. But these persons fail to recognize what the Argonaut points out so clearly, that “during the last few years, we have seen the almost complete destruction of those reticences upon sex matters that doubtless had their own attendant evils, but that did actually prevent far more evils than they caused.”

But now we have launched out upon an era of discussion that is spreading the evil. Not that all of this discussion is harmful, but it has become popular to discuss these matters in the open, and that has made it possible for injudicious speakers and writers to say things in public that never ought to be said except in the guarded intimacies of father and son or mother and daughter.

But deep down at the bottom of this whole difficulty is the fact that the moral backbone has been deliberately dissected away from society. We have much of the conventionalities left that present a kind of veneer of respectability. “The sex novel,” “the sex drama,” and things of that character, have been winked at by the churches. There is no more degenerate influence at the present time than the novels that are being printed, many of which are acted out upon the stage. Indecencies are paraded and applauded. The church as a whole doesn’t raise the warning voice against these things, but passes them by with indifference. A generation has been educated to laugh at the rugged piety of our grandfathers. A generation has been educated to believe that the Bible may possibly be studied as literature, but that it has no other place of importance. This generation has gone science- and pleasure-mad and money-mad, and we are reaping the results; and the divine Book has foretold, through its prophets, that just such conditions as these would prevail at the close of time. There is nothing clearer than that the social and moral status of society in this time is such that it is going to pieces under its own rapid decay. And while all of this is transpiring, men are vehement, not to say insulting, in decrying those who insist upon recognizing the facts.