HOPE DEFERRED | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 26, 1877

HOPE DEFERRED.

A comment on the following article from the Detroit Evening News, was made eighteen hundred and forty-six years ago, and may be found recorded in Luke 21: 25, 26:—

“Midsummer is upon us, with the usual general collapse of trade which follows the Fourth of July, and nothing is to be done now but close up and review the spring and early summer business, and wait through the dog days for the renewed activity which movement of the crops produces in the fall. It is a good time to look back and consider whether the hopes indulged during the winter of the revival of trade this season have been justified by the commercial history of the last six months. With no love for a pessimist view of things, we confess that there is very little in the retrospect to cheer, or encourage hope for the future. It is but a repetition of the experience of every season since the panic of 1873.

“It is hardly necessary to refer for proof to the reports of the commercial agencies, or to the appalling number of bankruptcies that have occurred. The latter show a slight decrease in aggregate amount when compared with those of the first half of 1876, but exceed the aggregate of 1875 by nearly twenty-three millions, and in the number of separate failures surpass even 1876 by 149. The slight decrease in amount is less an indication of improved prospects than of decreased credit.

“But it does not need statistics to convince every one in business, even of the humblest kind, that the times have grown harder instead of better since 1873. The government of India measures the distress among the teeming millions of Hindostan by the amount of trinkets brought to the mint for coinage, the people thus turning their ornaments into food as the latter grows scarcer and scarcer. There are many analogous measures of distress in America. The street car companies are pinched all over the country, and particularly miss the thousands of fares for short rides, only those riding now who are compelled by distance. The cheap papers everywhere are beginning to drop off in circulation—while the high-priced ones are consolidating or going out of existence by the dozen—the masses feeling unable to spare even so small a sum as two cents. Shop-keepers of all sorts complain that purchasers select the cheapest and coarsest goods, and people now haggle at prices who in former times never asked the cost of an article.

“All these symptoms are more numerous and marked this year than ever before. That there is not so loud a cry of distress as there was in the winters of 1873 and 1874 can be accounted for not by a decrease of suffering, but by an increase of indifference to it, both in those who endure it and those who are usually called upon to relieve it.

“Nor does the future show any sign of a sudden change from this deplorable state of things. The condition does not seem to be an abnormal, but a natural one, which gives no sign of being thrown off, or rallied against by the patient. We have apparently reached, very prematurely, the condition of European communities where wholesale human suffering is the rule, where the increase of the species constantly keeps in advance of the increase of food, and where the very law of nature operates to make misery inevitable.

“One thing seems certain. It is vain to look forward to any such state of affairs as we were some time ago accustomed to call good times. The times we have would not be regarded as so dull, but for the unhealthy fever to which we had been toned up by the unnatural temporary conditions of a few years ago. Some merchants have already recognized this, and instead of trying vainly to adjust the times to their expectations, have adjusted themselves and their business methods to the times, and have ceased growing. The quicker business men generally make up their minds that the present commercial conditions—as far at least as they are governed by the wants of the people and the ability of the people to supply those wants—are permanent, the quicker will the enormous annual aggregate of bankruptcies show an appreciable decrease.”