ONLY ONE REMEDY by S.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 10, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 37.

ONLY ONE REMEDY.

By S.

Southern papers are holding up to ridicule what they term the “New England conscience.” New England periodicals have been condemning the employment of young children in the mills of the South. The Southern editors retort that it is New England capital that operates the mills where this child labor is carried on, and that the New England capitalists would not come to the South with their mills until the laws were such that child labor could be employed; that they threatened to leave if laws were enacted to prohibit it; thus pointing out that the North has nothing to boast of in the matter of conscience and disinterested purity of purpose.

Neither has it. The present god of this world is Mammon, and the world is teeming with his devotees to-day, bartering principle and the instincts of humanity for the tantalizing bauble of the bubble of wealth, which the touch of an infant hand may shatter and scatter to the winds. The Mammon worshiper is the same in every part of the country. In the South just now some of them are sacrificing the child of tender years to the insatiate demands of their money hunger. Many of these idolaters are from the North, but that makes no difference in the cruelty of the practise or its blighting effects upon the lives of the tender victims. Southern Legislatures allow it to go on, that it may bring capital into that part of the country. And so on both sides it is money, or the desire for it, that is responsible for the conditions that exist there. The people who take advantage of the opportunity afforded, and send their children into the mills, do so because they need the money. They would rather that the conditions were not so exacting, that the hours of work were not so many; but the corporation is pitiless. It is, work the hours or leave the job. And the children work till the tired heads drop over their work and the tired limbs are scarce able to carry them to their homes.

Gold is the first consideration, and multitudinous are the ways to-day in which life and honor and the considerations of humanity are sacrificed to obtain it. It is not restricted to any locality; but wherever mankind is found there it is. It is not provincial; it is not national; it is individual. It is indigenous in every unregenerate heart. The only remedy for it is true conversion of heart, complete surrender of the will and the affections and the ambitions to Christ, letting His mind take the place of our money-loving desires, turning our aspiration away from the sensual, the material, the temporal, to the heavenly, the spiritual, and the eternal.

The idea of censuring localities for the results of

the worship of Mammon is all wrong. The disease is nearer home; it is in the hearts of men. The world is busy with heaping together “treasure in the last days” (James 5:3, R. V.), and men will not be turned away from their purpose by criticisms of the localities in which it is done. There is one remedy, and but one, the Gospel of Jesus—not in forms, not in dead ceremonies and formal acknowledgments; but by a living controlling power in the heart and life. The lack of this is one of the infallible signs that the coming of the just One draweth nigh.