The Washington, D. C., Reform Bureau
By L. A. S.
In a recent issue of the Washington, D. C., Post, nearly a column is devoted to a description of the purposes and prospects of the National Reform Bureau established and conducted at the national capital by Rev. W. F. Crafts, the champion of Sunday legislation. This Reform Bureau, which exists for the purpose of influencing congressional legislation, has recently received financial assistance which has given a great impetus to its work, and greatly added to its efficiency for creating public sentiment. We quote from the Post:— “The International Reform Bureau, ‘Crafts’ Christianity Lobby,’ as Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts calls it, is to have a great auditorium, an office building, and a reform hotel, three big new buildings for the prosecution of the numerous “causes” which it has espoused in the past three or four years. The sum of twenty-seven thousand dollars is to be expended for land immediately, and one hundred thousand is to go into buildings in the near future. By the time Congress assembles this winter, the Crafts forces will be entrenched within a stone’s throw of the Capitol, with superintendents, managers, secretaries, treasurers, lecturers, drafters of laws, editors, compilers, and many other competent and industrious reformers ready to fight all kinds of battles, with printing presses and congressional franks enough to send out millions of documents, and even with a reform hotel. No such long step in advance has been made by the reformers since the Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts, Ph. D., came to Washington. In the auditorium it is intended to have “a great new international correspondence school of philanthropy.” “This school,” says the Post, “is one of the chief ends and aims of the Reform Bureau. It will agree for a certain sum to educate a man on any reform subject or on all of them. It hopes to have five thousand pupils studying to become reformers in a very short time, and after a start is once made, it is not unlikely that five thousand can be turned out every year. In the basement of the building will be a great reform printing office, with rapid presses, a reform library and reading-room, a reform book store, and only an immense reform banquet hall, where noted reformers will give lively after-dinner talks on reform subjects. “The office building of the bureau will occupy the corner of the lot. It will have a front of thirty-five feet on Pennsylvania Avenue and of forty-three feet on Second Street. It will be four stories high. Here Reformer Crafts will be with many of his assistants. They will direct the four great lines of work carried on by the bureau: legislation, letters, lectures, and literature. Here will be drafted the bills which Dr. Crafts believes should become laws; here will be written the letters to hundreds of thousands of people all over the country, containing petitions to be sent to Congress and to Congressmen; here will be composed the lectures that the Rev. Dr. Crafts himself and his chief assistant, Rev. O. R. Miller, will deliver in their auditorium and throughout the country; here will be edited for the printers the Twentieth Century Quarterly, and the masses of other literature sent out hourly throughout the year to every part of the country.” The Post concludes its description with this interesting information:— The International Reform Bureau got the funds for its big new projects within the past two months, as the result of its success in getting laws passed by Congress. The bureau printed a leaflet of “Eight Bureau Bills Passed by Congress in Eight Years, with Eight More Half Way to Victory.” This showing of anti-canteen laws, anti-divorce laws, anti-prize-fight laws, anti-liquor laws, and others made a strong impression on a large number of people, and large sums have been received for the broadening of the work of the future. It is but just to this Reform Bureau to say that most of the enterprises it takes up are very worthy ones, such, for example, as the promotion of temperance, the suppression of the opium traffic, the protection of the youth from immoral influences, etc. We regret that in this good ointment there should be the dead fly of religious intolerance, which has been shown in repeated efforts to secure legislation compelling people to keep Sunday, a religious institution which stands as a rival of the Bible Sabbath, and to observe which involves the violation of the fourth commandment. Some day the whole force of this Reform Bureau will be directed toward the securing of national Sunday legislation by the Congress of the United States. Already it has expended much energy in this direction. Some day also the whole force of the great religious societies—the Society of Christian Endeavor, the Epworth League, and others—will be turned into the same channel. The Reform Bureau may start the movement, and when it is once strongly under way, other organizations will line up in its support. Among these will be not only religious societies and the churches5in general, but the labor unions, which are plainly coming to favor Sunday rest. These various organizations are working along different lines to-day, and are no doubt doing commendable work, but some day in the not distant future they will join forces in behalf of Sunday legislation, and in their united strength will bring a pressure to bear upon lawmaking bodies which they will not dare resist. Sunday legislation will become the great issue of the day. The nation, led by the Reform Bureau and the churches, will commit itself to the enforcement of an institution of the papacy. The Reform Bureau is carrying on a great educational campaign to prepare the public mind to accept its theory of a Christian state. Silently it has grown to its present dimensions, and it may rapidly grow to the dimensions outlined in this description by the Post. Is there in this anything that should stir the minds of Seventh-day Adventists? Now is our time to conduct an educational campaign among the people. Of late much time has been lost; but we trust there may be an earnest effort to redeem the time, and that literature giving the warning message due to the world may yet be circulated as never before.