Increasing Crime by L. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Mar 31, 1904

Increasing Crime

By L. A. S.

PRESIDENT HENRY HOPKINS, of WILLIAMS COLLEGE, is of the opinion that the very foundations of the national life in this country are threatened by the increasing prevalence of crime. In a recent address before the Patria Club in New York City, he is reported as saying:—

There are some very ugly features in the present situation. There is abounding evidence of an alarming increase in crime, of crime of every sort, but especially of the kind that undermines honesty, chastity, and respect for law. . . .

There is a constant tendency in evil to embed and embody itself in corporate life until society is as a whole involved. Wrongs and shames are accepted and embodied in the organization, as, for example, the saloon, the brothel, the gambling house, a police department that exists primarily not for the protection of the citizens, but as a part of a political machine, or a municipal government that is manipulated for private and corporate gains and party control, instead of being administered by business men in business ways for the general good. This process going on must bring any community to the pass to which the Rome of Livy had come, and of which he said that the evils were so great that they could neither be cured nor endured.

Leaving out of consideration the ghastly growth in the number of murders and suicides, we are compelled to admit that there is a growing infidelity to financial trust in the business world, so that there is a visible loss of confidence of man in his fellow man. Defalcations continue and multiply in disheartening succession. The proportion of divorces to marriages is astonishing and sickening not only in the newest States, but in the oldest commonwealths. Disintegration, decadence, and often destruction of the family and lowering of the ideal of the home go on unceasingly; and back of it all is a vast and swelling volume of dishonesty, unchastity, and crime.

But most startling and disheartening of all is the progress of the spirit of lawlessness in our towns and cities, where there have grown up crowds of idle hoodlums, where there is an increasing population who break out into reckless violence at times of strikes and lock-outs. Of the same nature as these manifestations are the worse than brutal exhibitions in defiance of all authority and decency, in the lynchings and burnings that continue to disgrace our common country, and to dishonor human nature itself. . . .

Lynch law, as we have lately seen it, is a defiance of all moral order, a denial of free civil government, a crime against the life of the State itself. Considering society as an organism, the extensive prevalence of the luxury, artificiality, and materialism of our life, the get-rich-quick craze, alcoholism, the drug habit, cigarette slavery, social vice, and disease, all tending to weaken the brain tissue, to destroy moral fiber, and to bring on not only neurosis, but insane or semi-insane neurosis.

As among the “most potent and most continually operative causes of crime,” President Hopkins mentions “the vast volume of criminal suggestion flowing in upon the public mind through various means, but especially through the public press. In the detailed accounts of criminal actions in the average newspaper there is minute instruction in crime as a fine art. The reader is taught both how to perform the criminal part and how to evade his merited punishment. Our criminal court rooms are schools for expert criminals.” To these he adds the theater and the novel—“not only the yellow-covered variety, which has not lost its sway, but also the more pretentious literary productions,” many of these being “hostile to what is purest and best in family life.” Also “the unmentionable publications that are kept out of sight and sold secretly,” to advertise and circulate which is like spreading “the germs of smallpox in a crowded community.”

Such statements from prominent educators should help us to appreciate the instruction from God given us at this time concerning Christian education for our youth, and the danger of remaining with our children in the great cities. This instruction we can not too closely heed.

L. A. S.