THE CATARACT OF CRIME

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 14, 1897

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 23, No. 40.

THE CATARACT OF CRIME.

For more than twelve years the Christian Advocate has lugubriously prophesied an increase of crime and lynchings in this country, and the prophecy has been fulfilled to the horror of many communities and the disgrace and shame of the nation.

Among the causes are the maudlin sentimentality with which crimes are treated, the ease with which an expert can be procured to swear a criminal insane, or the crank expert who believes every one insane, the influence of detailed discussions of crime and murders in the newspapers, the law’s delays, the increasing depravity and recklessness of youth, the great decline in the conduct and order of judicial proceedings, the want of reverence for religion, and the flippancy of juries, the frequency of pardons, the denial of a place to retributive justice, and the unnatural and debilitating doctrine that the sole purpose of punishment is reformation.

Such lynchings as have taken place in Ohio and Maryland, where in the first case the prisoner was in jail, sentenced to prison for twenty years, and in the second was sentenced to death, are a shock and a frightful damage to civilization. They demonstrate what every student of history and observer of panics knows to be true, that the brutal mob-like instincts are very near the surface of our civilization, and nothing that ever has taken place is so terrible that it has not been paralleled in this country, and may not be yet again.—Christian Advocate.