THE INCREASING EPIDEMIC OF CRIME.
By T.
The alarming increase of crime is causing men everywhere to seriously ask, “What are we coming to?” And many able editorials are being written, urging that active measures be taken by the people and the government to suppress this tidal wave of lawlessness. The New York Tribune of January 11 has the following:— Criminals Becoming Bolder.
“The practise among burglars and highwaymen of using torture to compel their victims to tell where they may have hidden their money, seems to be on the increase, and thieves appear to be even more ready now with knife or pistol than they were in former years. It is painfully evident that murderous criminals now feel less fear of punishment in many parts of the country than they felt in the eighties or the early nineties. These public enemies are encouraged to maim and to mutilate, to wound and to kill, because too many of the policemen and the constables, the sheriffs and other officers of the law, in cities, townships, and villages, are slow and stupid, and because in a lamentable number of instances the worst of law-breakers are not punished as they deserve to be punished. In almost every State of the Union the failures to inflict adequate penalties for the taking of human life are frequent, and in the comparatively few cases in which murderers are finally put to death, the delays are usually so excessive that law-breakers are encouraged to defy the statutes. Hosts of lawyers in the United States exhibit extreme ingenuity in protecting assassins from the gallows or the electric chair. . . . “Acts of violence, street fights with knives and pistols, shootings from ambush, unjustifiable killings of all kinds, are appallingly frequent in the North and in the East, as well as in the West and in the South. The States, the Legislatures, the bench, the bar, and all the people of this country, need to feel that the nation is shamed by the inexcusable delays in putting murderers to death, and by the almost innumerable instances in which men who have taken human life are shielded from adequate punishment.” How forcibly does this great and ever-increasing plague of crime remind one of the prophecy: “Hear the Word of the Lord, ye children of Israel; for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.” Hos. 4:1, 2. Other scriptures also show that the last days are to be made “perilous” by the prevalence of crime. Reader, as you view the situation to-day, do you not find an inner conviction that the “last days” are reached?