Youthful Highwaymen

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 2, 1915

Youthful Highwaymen

A RECENT news dispatch tells of two armed youths who locked the cashier of a bank in the vault and got away with five thousand dollars in cash. News dispatches of this kind are becoming so common that they attract but very little attention, and yet they are significant of a growing condition in society. The criminal element is becoming bolder and more daring all the time, and the officers of the law are wholly unable to cope with the situation.

One striking feature of the condition is that youths yet in their teens are among those who are most active and daring in these criminal depredations. The foundations of our social structure are being undermined, regardless of the fact that many people are trying to have us believe to the contrary. One of the noticeable characteristics of history is that when luxury, degrading vice, and criminality are sweeping a nation to its doom, its leading men are chanting its praises the most loudly, and painting pictures of great progress and development that the future holds in store.

These occurrences might be studied with profit in this time in which we are living. Most people can give an unbiased judgment of the conditions of the past, in which they are not personally concerned; but there are very few people who can properly read or understand the present. Their personal interests and personal ambitions are too apt to blind them to the indisputable facts that ought to show them the unsoundness of their theories.