Is the World getting Better?
By F. A. Buzzell
A FEW believe that wickedness increases; many the opposite. If righteousness is increasing, drunkenness will decrease. “Figures won’t lie,” and we can furnish a few. Boston is called the “Modern Athens,” its moral status is as good, if not better than any place of its size in the world, we think. Rev. Wm. B. Wright, of Boston, in a recent discourse brought forward the following statements and figures. From a report of his discourse in the Boston Herald, we make this extract: “The Chief of Police of Boston reports that there were 400,000 arrests in seventeen years, 275,000 of which were for drunkenness, besides 28,000 who were assisted home intoxicated. It was a notorious and undeniable fact that there was a steady and fearful increase of drunkenness, in proportion to the increase of population. In 1856 the number of arrests for this offense was 6780; in 1870, 18,678—an increase in fourteen years of 175 per cent, while the increase of population was but 53 per cent, and this increase was in the time when stringent laws were upon the statute books, and an effort made to enforce them.”