Killing for Rewards by Frances H. Rowley

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 20, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 20.

Killing for Rewards

By Frances H. Rowley

We have not been greatly taken with the endeavor to send out an army of children to kill flies.

The killing propensity in human nature needs no encouragement.

Indeed, we believe there is a better way to get rid of the fly than by enlisting boys and girls to destroy them at so much a thousand.

Get rid of the dirt and filth—that’s the real foe. Awaken in the young antagonism to whatever makes the fly a pest.

At the International Congress of Entomology, recently held at Oxford, England, a distinguished scientist declared that the true preventive of the house-fly as dangerous to the human life was the destruction of decomposing matter, dust heaps, and such nuisances, at the time when the fly is breeding. He affirmed that it was a fact that in all countries where a proper system of dust and dirt removal was in operation, the diseases attributed to the house-fly as a carrier were practically non-existent.

Several times men have seriously interfered with the balance of nature by the destruction of certain forms of supposedly noxious life, and paid dearly for their blunder.

At least let us keep the children from all our killing crusades.—Frances H. Rowley.