p. 3 | THE HARVEST OF CRIME by Percy T. Magan

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, Cal., Kansas City, and New York · Nov 29, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, Nos. 48, 49.

THE HARVEST OF CRIME

By Percy T. Magan

By Prof. Percy T. Magan, of Battle Creek College.

LONG ago the prophet Ezekiel said, "Make a chain; for the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence." Certainly this time has been reached, for the land is full of bloody crimes, and the cities are full of violence. Within the last few years there has sprung into existence a type known to students of economics as the "criminal classes." There is an ever-augmenting stratum of society nowadays from which nothing but crime is expected. Their fathers and mothers are criminals. The children were conceived in crime, born in iniquity, and reared in sins too horrible to contemplate. This class may now be found in all of our large cities, and the portions of the cities where they reside are so dangerous to human life and limb that they are not safe to enter unless accompanied by an armed guard. In these places wickedness of all kinds is the regular order of things, and righteousness the rare exception.

But, aside from the criminal classes proper, the record of crime is something appalling. Witness the terrible lynching affairs in various parts of the country of late. Such crimes "outcrime" that which they are designed to punish and to check. The perpetrators of them are husbands, fathers, and sons, members of farming communities. They were not criminals in the legal sense of the term.

A report from the largest city in the country is as follows: "In several quarters of the city life is no longer safe. The night streets of the district lying between Union Square and Long Acre and Seventh and Third Avenues are in the possession of the disorderly elements. The police force is already demoralized, and the demoralization is progressing rapidly toward chaos. . . . What shall be done? What can be done to avert chaos and restore order and security? Is it impossible for a community as intelligent as this to find some mean between the exasperating crushing of personal liberty and the terrifying domination of criminals and semi-criminals?"

The testimony given by reputable witnesses before the now famous Mazet Committee in New York goes to show that the governmental machinery organized for the very purpose of preventing crime is engaged in a most wholesale fashion in aiding and abetting it. I refer to the metropolitan police force. Saloons, gambling dens, pool-rooms, opium dens, houses of ill fame, and every evil of the kind, is protected in its business on payment of a certain percentage of its receipts to the officers of the law. Nor does iniquity stop here. Boards of Aldermen are given over to the influence of boodle, and representatives and senators are amenable to bribes.

In more than one instance of late trusts and giant corporations have resorted to the use of explosives to get rid of their competitors. These things are well known in the petroleum industry. Attempts have been made by one powerful corporation to blow up the refineries of another. Men who could fasten the crime have been made away with, and never heard from again. (See the testimony in Buffalo Explosion Case, printed in "Trusts," Congress, 1888, p. 894.) These giant aggregations of capital have stopped at nothing. Attempts have been made by the most wealthy men of the land to bribe State attorney-generals.

Even ordinary every-day business and commerce are being invaded by crime of the most deplorable and cold-blooded kind. A committee of the last Congress has obtained valuable information as to the adulteration of flour. Investigations show that in 1897, when the business was only in its infancy, there were manufactured and sold in the United States between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 barrels of adulterated flour.

Thus it appears that everywhere, in every line of life, view it from whatever standpoint you may, there are crimes of the most fearful kind being committed. How long before a just and holy God will visit retributive judgments for all this fearful Harvest of Crime?