p. 16 | Schools of Brutality

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 6, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 45.

Schools of Brutality.

The following from the Springfield Republican of not long ago is worthy of repeating:—

Six thousand people witnessed the burning of a negro at the stake in Tennessee last Sunday. Every one of them was brutalized by the spectacle. But, if our point be worth consideration, not only the six thousand, but every American who read the account of the burning, or noticing the headline turned from it with indifference as from a commonplace of the news, was also brutalized. What, then, is actually going on?—A whole nation of eighty million people is being lowered toward barbarism. It can not be otherwise. The growing practise of burning men at the stake in this country is a revival of one of the lowest forms of savagery. It can not continue without placing our civilization in real peril.

Is it not true? The first instance of the kind horrified the whole nation; now such incidents are mere matters of news. What does this indifference mean but an induration of the finer sensibilities, the chief thing that raises men above the brute, man's moral nature?