VIOLENCE IN THE LAND by L. A. P.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 12, 1900

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 26, No. 37.

VIOLENCE IN THE LAND.

By L. A. P.

Not infrequently do Northern papers enlarge upon the regrettable conditions of race hatred in the South, taking for their text some blood-curdling account of lynching and mob rule. But unless a due spirit of meekness and appreciation of human weakness in general characterize these sermons, the judgment is liable to return on the head of the one judging. The time has quite fully come when sectional lines have little to do in determining where mobs shall suddenly rise and riot bear sway. Human hearts are awfully bad wherever human passions gain the ascendancy.

On Wednesday, August 22, a mob numbering thousands spread death and destruction in the city of Akron, Ohio, in an attempt to lynch a negro charged with attacking a white girl. The prisoner had been quietly sent away, but the mob would not believe the word of the officers, and forced its way into the jail and courthouse, searching them again and again. The frightened officers fired over the crowd, but the fire was returned, and hundreds of shots were exchanged. Stores were forcibly entered after guns and ammunition, and dynamite and fire were used by the lawless and excited crowd. The city building was greatly injured, a large hall near by was burned, and the fire department hindered in its endeavors to subdue the flames. Worst of all, several persons, among them children, were killed, and no one knows how many were injured by the shooting. Help was asked from neighboring cities, and later a body of the State militia was sent to the place to bring matters to rights. If this had occurred in South America, or Germany, or China, how unstable governments and anarchism and savagery would have been castigated in all other places! But it happened at home, in a locality considered law-abiding, and what shall be said?

The next day a negro killed a white man in a restaurant in Brooklyn, N. Y. As the murderer was conducted to jail, a rapidly-growing crowd followed, until hundreds gathered about the police station, shouting, "Kill the nigger." A day or two later a negro shot a white boy in New York City, and following these affairs some of the baser white element has set out to hunt negroes, injuring several, and committing depredations here and there. "Race riots" the papers call the disturbances. But it is not simply because the participants are of color black and white that these horrible things occur. Recent riots in other places have involved those not of the black race. It is because the spirit of lawlessness is rapidly spreading, and violence is in the land. What may be said is that such affairs tell louder than do words that the end of the age and of the world is at hand. "As it was in the days of Noah," said the Master, so shall it be also just before the coming of the Son of man. In the days of Noah, the Inspired Record tells us, the earth was "filled with violence." No one can truly fail to see, who believes the Word of God, that the day of the Son of man hasteth greatly. L. A. P.