HAVE WE REACHED A CRISIS?
Who among us has not watched the labor agitations, the long and fiercely contested strikes, followed by military domination in Colorado with almost bated breath? Who has not taken notice of the deadly intensity of the opposing factions? In some of the fearful outbreaks that have occurred, property has been destroyed, and human lives have been sacrificed with a recklessness that is appalling. We have emerged from one deadly strife only to be plunged into another more fierce and more terrible than the one which preceded it. For months military rule has prevailed in some parts of Colorado. The spirit of lawlessness and anarchy which has characterized the strikers and agitators has been duplicated by the Citizens’ Alliance, and by the military. Crime and disaster meet us on every hand, in our daily walks of life until we have grown so familiar with them that they no longer terrify us as they once did. The military power of our state is only able to restrain these turbulent elements from still more desperate acts of crime and violence by sheer force. From this long reign of unrest, of uncertainty and disquietude, we find Colorado in a state of financial and industrial depression from which it will not soon recover. Men’s hearts are “failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth.” These terrible things which are transpiring all about us, at our very doors, mean something, and it is well for us to know what they do mean. Are they not the mutterings of the fearful storm soon to break upon us? And are we ready for it? Have we finished the work God has given us to do? Surely we are in the midst of times so fraught with peril and disaster that even the casual observer must ask himself the question, “What do these9things mean?” There is but one answer: it is the beginning of the end, and God has given to this people the answer to carry to the world.—Echoes from the Field.