INCREASE OF CRIME by M. E. K.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 6, 1898

INCREASE OF CRIME.

By M. E. K.

The rapid increase of crime in our land is without a parallel. The public prints are loaded with the most shocking recitals of blood and violence. In one State a young woman instigates her lover to murder his own father; and the two, after killing him, kerosened his clothes and set him afire. In another State three young men engage in a triangular duel over a young woman, on the way to a prayer-meeting, and all three are shot to death. And so the bloody record grows bigger and more awful every day.

Another sickening feature of the times is that people are coming to enjoy such reading; a morbid and prurient taste is thus fed, and a newspaper which prints the fullest details of crime with flaming headlines gains the largest public patronage. The press of to-day, with its daily record of evil, written up in a sensational and tragic style, supplies to the modern the satisfaction of the same desires which in ancient Rome were furnished by the gladiatorial contests in the arena. Worst of all, the reading of such things by those people, whom an eminent physician has lately described as “the physically unstable and viciously endowed, the neuropathic cripples, the mentally squint-brained and obliquely-visioned, the lame and halt and blind in mind and morals,” has a direct tendency to lead the readers to the commission of similar crimes. Thus the demand for this kind of reading actually contributes to a never ending supply of it. Surely to-day, as in the day of Noah, “the earth is filled with violence.”

The National Prison Association of Texas lately convened at Austin, in that State. A reporter of the Chicago Inter-Ocean, writing up this meeting, says:—

The report of the committee on criminal-law reform stated that the progress of crime is something frightful, and recommends that it should be checked by the following changes in the handling of the criminals of the world: Greater security of punishment, doing away with all technicalities in trials; abolishment of juries, making conviction more summary and trial more speedy; depriving defendants of the right to appeal to a higher court; offering rewards for the discovery and conviction of criminals; sterilization of defectives, both moral and physical; abolishment of poverty; removing or restricting the power to pardon; prohibiting the use of intoxicating liquors; reconstruction of the ethical code of lawyers; curing inherent defects in the law as distinguished from its enforcement; developing a scientific motherhood; state regulation of marriage; restricting immigration; popular education and colonization of criminals; the reformation of criminals by the abolition of the definite sentence.

Some of the above suggestions can be carried out; others are entirely impracticable; and none of them will do what is hoped will be done—eliminate, or even to any appreciable extent lessen, crime.

We are living in the last days, when, according to the predictions of the Word of God, “evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse.” God alone has a sovereign remedy for all the evils of this age. It may be found in the Gospel of His Son. Whoever, in his plans of reform, leaves out the Gospel, is at once shorn of the highest power. All other powers are human; they depend upon human efforts. The Gospel is divine. It brings to the soul that accepts it the very strength of God both to resist evil and to do good. He who expects to stand firm against the temptations that are in the world without divine assistance, will surely fail, and did not the Spirit of God still strive with men, keeping them oftimes, even against their inclinations, from crime, the world would be in a far more deplorable condition than it now is.

In the days of Noah, which these days so much resemble, God said, “My Spirit shall not always strive with man.” There is a limit even to the wonderful long-suffering and forbearance of God. Now, as in the days of Noah, His Spirit pleads. But as the day God had appointed for the deluge came on, the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawn from those who had slighted it, and they were left to destruction. So will it be in the end of this world; so it may be even now. How else can we account for the frightful increase of crime on every hand, Let us cherish the Spirit of God; only in so doing is there safety. M. E. K.