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PROTECTED CRIME

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 27, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 9.

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PROTECTED CRIME.

By T.

The papers are full of talk about protected crime. Editors denounce it, ministers discuss and decry it, and cartoonists make fun about it, but still it goes on. There is a sentiment expressed that if crime can only be disclosed and the public have a chance to see it, the sentiment will become so strong against it that it will be crushed out. But investigations are going on in some of the Eastern cities almost continually, and in courts and before committees it is being proven again and again that crime of the most shameful character is allowed to go on unmolested thru the bribing of the police and other officers of the law. The California Legislature now in session has appointed a special committee to investigate the criminality that is protected in the city of San Francisco.
It has only been a little while since Bishop Potter said to a New York audience that they wanted a strong committee to take hold of the vice and crime in that city, something after the plan of the committee of 25,000 in San Francisco. It must come as quite a blow to the bishop to learn that this famous committee of San Francisco has been so inoperative or so powerless that vice has become so rampant that it is necessary for a legislative committee to be appointed to try to cope with it.
There is just this good that can possibly come out of these investigations, they show the evil, they reveal that what the Bible has foretold is actually coming to pass, but they do not remedy. As has been frequently pointed out in this paper, the Word of God plainly tells that the last days will be made perilous because of the vices and the crimes that men will be absorbed in. Will a knowledge of these things lead men to see that the world is not getting better, but that, as the Word tells us, it is getting “worse and worse”? We should school ourselves to look at facts and not to hold to theories, no matter how pleasing, that the facts will not warrant.
T.