Crime-Producing Literature
By Editor
WHILE vast sums of money are being expended in punishing crime, would it not be well to expend some of this solicitude and energy in removing the most active sources which produce crime and criminals? Some time since a den of young robbers was accidentally discovered under a sidewalk in Chicago. They were boys, fully organized and bound by terrible oaths written in blood. They had excavated the cave by night work, and it was adorned with arms, pictures from the Police Gazette, and furnished with cheap novels, which revel in blood and glorify crime. In San Francisco lately a policeman halted a footpad, who answered the challenge with a shot which dangerously wounded the officer. The fire was returned with fatal effect. Upon investigation, the criminal proved to be a man of noble physique, a boarder in a respectable place, who spent his entire days reading such books as have been mentioned. There was no possible necessity for such a course only as his mind, being drawn in that direction so strongly, impelled his hands to do the work of a robber and murderer. No words can adequately express the terrible Satanic nature of such reading. And it is everywhere. The minds of the youth are becoming imbued with such views of life as render crime and impurity matters of heroic virtue. Our cities are filling up and our police courts are crowded with the young of both sexes, who have left the quiet homes of country or village life for the exciting whirl of the city, lured away from innocence by these pictures painted by demons, to deeds of crime. The publication of this vile flood might be stopped, and would be were not the moral sense of this generation steeped in these very things. But while the name of Anthony Comstock and the few of his associates are held as a by-word and a hissing, and every impediment is thrown in their way by municipal authorities, public sentiment, and newspapers, and the vilest men are exalted, we but hasten to the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.