GROWING DEPRAVITY by David Paulson

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 18, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 25.

GROWING DEPRAVITY.

By David Paulson

Why the People of To-Day are More Depraved than They were a Generation Ago.

There are at present half a million criminals in the United States. There are nearly a quarter of a million insane, feeble-minded, and imbecile persons in this country. Exclusive of the prescriptions of physicians and other legitimate sales, the inhabitants of one small New England State used three million doses of opium last year. Race deterioration is increasing. It requires no juggling of figures to demonstrate that this is a fact. When a nation expends many more millions for soul-and-body-destroying substances than it does for its bread, Bibles, and education, then we should expect nothing else.

The liquor curse is only one of the factors that contribute to this alarming race deterioration. It is amazing that at this age of progress so little attention is given to the study of practical dietetics. Thousands of girls are graduated from our higher institutions of learning, perfectly conversant with a number of more or less useless ancient and modern arts, but unable to prepare a wholesome meal. With such a situation it is not surprising that fresh recruits are daily being added to the already vast number of dyspeptics, and that thousands of our boys are tempted to resort to the saloons to drive away even temporarily the dreadful “all gone” feeling which invariably results from trying to subsist upon an improperly prepared dietary. There are sincere reformers and noble and enthusiastic temperance workers who fail to trace any relationship between an improper and unsuitable dietary and the saloon traffic; but the fact remains that if they could recognize this, the results from the efforts they put forth would be multiplied many fold.

Although the immediate effects of tobacco are not so apparent as those of alcohol, yet its slow, insidious influence is ultimately, in many cases, as baneful as that of liquor itself. Dr. I. N. Love, professor in the New York Post-Graduate Medical School, stated at a recent medical convention that “the numerous mental wrecks, youths who have come under my care whose lives were failures or who fill suicides’ graves, impress me that to-day tobacco stands as the greatest danger confronting the new century.” Leading educators have discovered that the cigaret fiend is ordinarily never found in the senior year; he drops out before he reaches this period. There is one company alone which produces from seven to nine million cigarets daily; and the overcrowded institutions for feeble-minded children, reform schools, and the hordes of pale-faced, hollow-chested, empty-brained boys, that throng the streets of our large cities, testify to the fact that the law of sowing and reaping has not been annulled.

When Adam fell, the Lord arranged that he would have to work hard enough to sweat. This was not a curse, but a blessing, and was essential to his happiness while in this wicked world; but there was never a time when honest labor was so much despised as at present, and when there was such a desperate attempt to get through the world without working. Every rescue-worker of experience will verify the statement that a large proportion of the ever-increasing army of fallen girls comes from homes that have in them the various comforts of modern life; but the gray-haired mother drudges in the kitchen and over the wash-tub, while the daughter enjoys the curse of “abundance of idleness.” Contempt for honest labor increases until she would rather barter her womanhood for bread than earn it legitimately. The young men of to-day use up their surplus energy while in college by playing pranks upon their fellow-students, and squander their useful activity in the wine-rooms in the evening; and by and by they discover that the shortest way of getting through the world without working is by gambling or forgery.

Some one has said that “an idle brain is the devil’s workshop.” It may be as truly said that it is his camping ground. The remedy for this evil consists in inculcating from early childhood the true dignity of labor, in giving industrial training equal prominence in the school curriculum with higher mathematics and the finer arts, in recognizing that the girl who does the kitchen work belongs on the same plane as her wealthy sister who never toiled, provided she otherwise possesses the character and qualifications. Just so long as society closes its social doors to boys and girls on the ground that they are toilers, while at the same time the dens of iniquity are extending their arms to them, society need shed no tears over the prosperity that these institutions are enjoying while sapping the life-blood of the nation.

Reformatory efforts will be successful just to the extent that they are directed to the removal of causes rather than the cure of effects. It is indeed a discouraging and disheartening task to pull up weeds with one hand while sowing for them with the other. Just to the extent that the correcting power of the Gospel is applied to the tap-roots of the fundamental defects of society, we shall see that it has in it the same power to inspire and uplift humanity that it possessed when it was enunciated by the lowly Nazarine on the hills of Galilee.

DAVID PAULSON, M.D.