DISTRESS OF NATIONS by Uriah Smith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 28, 1877

DISTRESS OF NATIONS.

By Uriah Smith

After the reader has looked at the following facts, he would do well to turn to Luke 21:25, and mark where the prediction has its application. An exchange speaking of the proposition of a small town in Michigan to spend $1200 in fireworks July 4th, presents the following picture of the present state of the country:—

“With the business of the land under a hideous nightmare, with thousands of mechanics out of employment, with the country swarming with tramps, whom lack of work has transformed into footpads, with pinching economy everywhere the guest of thousands of households hitherto well fed and well clothed, and with absolute want the constant inmate, and starvation daily impending, in myriads of homes in every part of our land—with all the distress, so phenomenal in extent and intensity, that is known to exist, and the prospect that the worst woes have not even yet been reached, and it is in our judgment no less than a CRIME to lavish money on Fourth of July or any other celebrations.”

In the British Parliament, the Secretary of State for India has been authorized to raise $25,000,000 on the credit of the Indian revenue, to “cover the deficits arising from successive famines.”

And now the nations are thrown into the most lively perplexity in regard to the safety of their means of defense. Such progress has been made in the construction of torpedoes that the heaviest iron-clads are powerless before them. The English government having put forth its utmost energy, and expended vast sums of money to provide an invincible ironclad fleet, suddenly finds itself, in this respect, at the complete mercy of an invisible foe, and is thrown into corresponding alarm. The Detroit News says:—

“The destruction of two Turkish ironclads in the Danube, the one by a shell which fired its magazine, and the other by a torpedo, has frightened the English press as to the safety of their own great iron fleet, and the Times is sounding the alarm in almost every issue. The progress made in torpedo construction, of late, has been of a nature to fully justify this anxiety, and the blowing up of the Turkish monitor, at Ibrail, was done under circumstances against which it might be impossible to defend even the most powerful British vessels. A few Russians and Roumanians, under cover of the darkness, put out from the Roumanian shore, and, approaching the gunboat, one of them dropped into the water and swam with the torpedo to the very side of the vessel, where he succeeded in attaching his deadly explosive. He also connected a wire, which was then carried to the shore, from whence the torpedo was fired by electricity, and the gunboat blown to atoms. Against such desperate courage as this, handling so irresistible a weapon, the Devastation, the Sultan and the other British sea monsters have no protection, even though their armor were twice as thick as it is. The torpedo boat, which is all missile, and which is hurled at a vessel from a thousand yards or so, under the water, is a still more formidable enemy, and equally insidious. A desperate and cunning enemy, says the Times, under certain circumstances, by the sudden destruction of seven or eight ironclads, might obtain command of the channel for a time and realize the ‘Battle of Dorking.’”

U. S.