Teaching Both Morality and Immorality
By Editor
IN one of the states of this Union, a highwayman, who was also a murderer, was caught, convicted of his crime, and sentenced to be hanged. The unfortunate fellow was young. He pleaded for clemency, desiring that his sentence be commuted to life imprisonment. This young man offered the argument that if he were permitted to go to prison he could do a great deal of writing for the papers, and thus warn other young people against the snares and pitfalls that had entrapped him. An editor in one of the leading dailies of the nation deplores the fact that this— "daring and hard-hearted young criminal had reason to believe that he might be able to do just what he had planned. For the very same thing had already been done and was being done. . . .
"He had read, day by day, that society is the real criminal, and the robber and assassin the mere irresponsible creature of his environment.
"He had seen, every day, columns devoted to apologizing for crime and to lionizing criminals, and he had seen scoundrels as depraved as himself lecturing, issuing books, exploiting their shame without shame, and impudently setting themselves up in print and on the platform as advisers and exhorters of honest men and women.
"And seeing and hearing all this, this young man embraced a life of robbery and assassination as a natural and inviting highroad to distinction and sympathy, with the incidental promise of a flourishing career as a moral uplifter." The foregoing utterances from the editorial are quite true to fact. The deplorable sentiments and conditions of the time in regard to criminality are not overdrawn. But it can not be possible that the editorial writer of that particular paper gives very close attention to what is placed in his journal, outside the editorial columns; for if he did, he would find that his paper has been carrying a full-page story, with big illustrations, recounting in graphic detail the life incidents of a person who is said to be one of the greatest "reformed" criminals of the age—a criminal who had been successful in eluding arrest for years, and who is now set forth "in print and on the platform as adviser and exhorter of honest men and women." In other words, a feature of the Sunday issue of the very paper in which that editorial occurs, is the identical thing that is so strongly condemned. This is one of the most alarming characteristics of our time. The news columns of our dailies, with their Sunday magazine sections, are parading crimes, oftentimes making heroes of the criminals. They are also caricaturing continually the most sacred relations of life. And this education that they are giving through their news columns and their magazine sections is helping, more than anything else, to create the conditions that the editorial so properly inveighs against. Yet the men who are the chief actors in such inconsistencies are exceedingly indignant when it is suggested that there is no evidence whatever that our world is getting better, but, on the other hand, that it is getting worse and worse, just as the Bible said it would in these times. It seems more reasonable to accept the straightforward Biblical prediction than to take the testimony of witnesses who are so contradictory in their course of action.