THE BETTER DAYS by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 4, 1903

“THE BETTER DAYS.”

By Editor

What Are the Prospects?

Let those who dream of a millennium of peace and safety read McClure’s Magazine for January,—read “The Shame of Minneapolis,” where a moral leper was elected mayor of the city four times, where thieves, gamblers, prostitutes, and blacklegs of all sorts gathered and thrived by the connivance and contrivance of the city government itself, till the thieves in office lost the legendary honor among themselves, and one brave man at the head of a grand jury, by means not wholly honorable, succeeded in breaking the ring, and bringing some of the leading criminals to justice. Had these city officials been as shrewd and cool as the Standard Oil directors, told about by Miss Tarbell in another article in the same magazine, they might have been exploiting Minneapolis to the present.

Of the great magnate of the Standard Oil Company Miss Tarbell says (italics and bold face ours):—

Mr. Rockefeller was “good.” There was no more faithful Baptist in Cleveland than he. Every enterprise of that church he had supported liberally from his youth. He gave to its poor. He visited its sick. He wept with its suffering. Moreover, he gave unostentatiously to many outside charities of whose worthiness he was satisfied. He was simple and frugal in his habits. He never went to the theater, never drank wine. He was a devoted husband, and he gave much time to the training of his children, seeking to develop in them his own habits of economy and of charity. Yet he was willing to strain every nerve to obtain for himself special and illegal privileges from the railroads which were bound to ruin every man in the oil business not sharing them with him. Religious emotions and sentiments of charity, propriety and self-denial seem to have taken the place in him of notions [principles] of justice and regard for the rights of others.

And this is typical of trade methods widely prevalent down even to the corner grocer. But both of these are tolerable compared with the unnatural, satanic cruelty set forth in Mr. Ray Stannard Baker’s article on the “Right to Work.” Mr. Baker was sent by the editor of McClure’s to make an “impartial investigation” “of the conditions under which the seventeen thousand non-striking [coal] miners worked,” and to report. Mr. Baker has not tried to tell all he found, only a very small part, and this composed of typical cases. But vividly indeed does his story show how the cherishing of wrong principles turns men into monsters and friends into fiends. We can only say, as we said last week, Let our readers obtain McClure’s Magazine for January, and read the typical stories of corruption in municipal governments, illegal methods in money trusts, and cruelty in labor trusts; and then read in Isaiah 59 and 2 Tim. 3:1–5, a few of the divine predictions of these things, and know that this age is nearing its end, and Christ the King of Justice is about to come.

Following this is an editorial from the magazine quoted above.