THE MORALS OF NEW YORK.
By C. P. B.
"Is New York growing better?" is a question recently put by the Independent to a number of old residents of that city, and their replies are published in that paper of March 17. Howard Crosby, pastor of the Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Church, after stating a number of interesting facts relative to the growth of the city during the last fifty years, says:— "The people are more religious than they were. In this statement I do not include the foreign element, a large part of which is wholly irreligious, but I mean the citizens born and those who have been naturalized for twenty years. These are they who rightfully represent the city. I say they are more religious than they were. I mean that they consider practical life more from the religious standpoint. The tone of morals is higher. Drinking to excess used to prevail among all classes. Now it is mostly confined to the lower classes. Brandy is not found now, as then, on every sideboard. The open haunts of shame do not now appear. Such places are obliged now to hide. While I mark these improvements, I am well aware of prevailing evils, gross ones too, and do not consider New York a Utopia." Nearly two-thirds of the people who make up the population of New York are either foreigners or born of foreign parents, and when Doctor Crosby excludes the foreign element from his opinion it shows that he does not feel at all certain that the improvement which he fancies he sees is very marked. His statement that "they are more religious than they were" is also materially modified by the sentence which follows it, and he does well to add that he does not consider "New York a Utopia." The pastor of St. Elizabeth's Roman Catholic Church said, among other things:— "The great infidels whose principles would destroy our country, the great bank thieves, and the worst criminals generally, live in luxurious homes. They have no religion, and their numbers are increasing. While my observation of the Catholic poor and laboring classes in New York makes me say, therefore, that as to them the city has religiously improved, I cannot say the same thing of the Protestant poor. They seem to me not to be as church-going a class as they used to be. They seem to be losing religious belief, if their absence from church is a test of it." This condition of affairs the priest attributed to lack of religious education. Anthony B. Comstock, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, said:— "For years the crime-breeders, intemperance, gambling in its various forms, criminal illustrated papers, blood-and-thunder story papers, and dime and half-dime novels, infidel publications, licentious books and pictures, loose French art and publications, and the traffickers in articles for indecent and immoral use, have been sowing the seeds of corruption, dishonesty, criminal living, irreverence, irreligion, licentiousness, and impurity broadcast.
"And now, as the fruitage of this devil seed sowing of the past is being realized, and the harvest gathered in, the question is asked of me, 'Is New York growing better?'
"A categorical answer cannot be given. 'Yes' and 'No' might be the reply according as the particular phase of reform is considered. The preponderance of the response, in my judgment, must be in the negative. 'Be not deceived. God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.' After seed sowing cometh the harvest. So speaks the word of God, and the laws of nature." Certainly there is nothing in these replies to indicate the near approach of the fabled millennium, or that New York is a Christian city in any proper sense of the word.