FORETOKENS OF OUR LORD'S RETURN
By George W. Rine
GREED AND HER PROGENY OF SIN AND CRIME.
IN these days of unprecedented economic development and commercial prosperity, approximately the whole world is bending the knee to Mammon. The dollar is to-day the god par excellence of "this world"—a god enthroned and crowned, a god served with an intenser, keener, and more exacting devotion than ever galley-slave rendered to Medieval despot. The thirst for gold—cruel and remorseless as death itself—knows no law but Success; that sanctifies everything. Certain it is that no other agency of the devil is working greater moral havoc in society than this all-inclusive, all-pervasive infatuation for the dollar. In their feverish haste and rush to get rich, men are selling their country, their manhood, their souls. O, Success—business Success—what idolatries, what crimes, are committed in thy name! The very thought of gold casts a hypnotic spell over us. The multi-millionaire—he must be made the hero of the fashionable novel of the day; he is the subject of fulsome adulation by a subsidized press and by a sycophantic pulpit and platform. Before him men cringe, and dance attendance on his slightest nod. To the millionaire the world pays court because he is a millionaire. The love of money constrains the world to truckle to the master of money. How very few, indeed, of the hurried, anxious throngs that fill our business streets and market-places really believe the terse, stern, unqualified deliverance of our Lord, "Ye can not serve God and Mammon." Obviously, in the hearts of most of us, the sweet Gospel of love that God so graciously sent us through Jesus Christ has been supplanted by the man-made gospel of "getting on in the world." Yes, in the very teeth of the awful and startling warning which God, in boundless love to the world, sent us straight from heaven, as to the fatal evils that must attend the selfish quest for gold, all the world surrenders in utter abandon to the demon of Greed. The warning rings unmistakably clear: "But they that are minded to be rich fall into a temptation and a snare and many foolish and hurtful lusts, such as drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil; which some reaching after have been led astray from the faith, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows." As briefly as practicable, I shall now place before the reader a statement of some of the "all kinds of evil" that, in these very days in which you and I live—in these stressful and crucial "last days"—are begotten of this fecund "root" which ramifies the soil of the universal human heart. Venality of the Electorate.
In a previous article I produced an array of facts, all conspiring to prove that most public officials and political leaders are corruptible, or pliably amenable to the argument of coin. The most alarming symptom, however, of social and political decadence, at least in our own country, is the incredible extent to which the great body of citizens, the voters, are ready to sell their sacred right of suffrage. In so conservative a journal as Harper's Weekly, Mr. John Gilmer Speed recently averred that so large a proportion of the voters in every closely-contested section of the United States is purchasable, that enough votes can be bought at elections to determine which party shall win. "Moreover, these purchases are made." (Italics are Mr. Speed's). They are made brutally, openly, as a trader would buy any commodity, as a vegetable vendor would buy potatoes and cabbages. How useless it seems, then, to try to elect honest officers of the law, if the people who control the selection of these officials are themselves corrupt in such numbers that the purchasable element can determine which party shall win, when there is money enough to command their votes! After a long, laborious investigation, Mr. Speed affirms, unchallenged, that in New York City there are at least 170,000 venal voters. He thinks that if the actual number of mercenary voters could be ascertained, they would exceed 200,000. Every one of this host of American freemen (?) expect to be paid for their votes, and when the party organizations have full treasuries, they are paid handsomely. A majority of 60,000 in a New York City election is counted high; one of a 100,000 is called a landslide. It is evident, then, that that phalanx of 170,000 venal voters can determine the result of an election, when properly enlisted; and such enlistment is merely a matter of dollars adroitly manipulated. These corrupt electors are, as a rule, so dexterously marshalled by the still more corrupt "bosses" that, as a result, Mr. Speed declares, "Our civic body, infected in the source of its life, is corrupt all through, from the bottom upwards, from extremity to extremity." He concludes that it is "safe" to say that at the election, Nov. 8, 1904, $574,000 was spent, in New York City, by the two leading parties in the purchase of votes. He says that he has not the shadow of a doubt that his estimate underrates, rather than overrates, the facts. This shameful prostitution of what we once were proud to call universal manhood suffrage, this wholesale rape of the ballot, so unblushingly perpetrated in the great American metropolis, is fairly typical of the debauchery, through bribery, of the electors in all the large cities of the nation. Rural Folk Not Immune to Infection.
Anent the political corruption in Connecticut, Dr. Newman Smith alleges that in one hill town in that state the number of purchasable votes became so large that the town committees of both parties made a mutual bargain not to buy any votes that year. The moral turpitude of that community is evidenced by the fact that the compact resulted in a popular outcry, and the owner of the village store protested against a movement calculated to cut down the revenues.10 This sample of New England intelligence and virtue can, as the New York Evening Post and the Springfield Republican have shown, be exactly matched across the border in Rhode Island. Ex-Governor Garvin of the latter state, recently wrote regarding the purchase of votes in that commonwealth: "Upon the original plan of buying individual voters at retail, the improvement has been made of purchasing en bloc—the money to be paid over only in case of the delivery of the goods. In this modern bribery by wholesale, the venal voters organize, choose an agent to conduct negotiations, and sell the entire block of voters to the highest bidder. When success is achieved, as shown by the count of the ballots, hundreds of dollars are paid to the agent, and by him distributed to the members of the gang." The ex-governor tells his readers that a long experience has shown that, in a multitude of small constituencies a few dollars placed in the hand of a voter is sufficient to outweigh every consideration of patriotism or enlightened self-interest. "Wherever this habitually occurs, the rule of a few moneyed men has been substituted for a government by the people." Mr. Garvin says further: "Election officers may be bought and are bought to defraud honest voters in a variety of ways. . . . It is needless to say that if corrupt practices in elections continue to increase, the end of popular government in this country is in sight. Already there exists a widespread and deep-seated distrust of the result of elections." Mr. Speed, whose testimony as to the venality of a vast multitude of the electors of New York City, I have cited above, says that when he made his home in a rural district, in New Jersey, twenty years ago, he found that if one thing condemned a man, in the estimation of his neighbors, more than another, it was that he was known to receive money for his vote. That was a fatal and final bar to respectability. Less than one-fifth of the voters in that township were then venal, and they were held in disesteem which it would be flattery to call disgrace. "Since then," he declares, "the number of purchasable voters has increased enormously." The buying of votes is now done in a way almost open. Every one knows that men in large numbers receive bribes for their votes, but such knowledge provokes no comment, as such bribery is now looked upon as a matter of course. He says that many of the voters boasted that they had received graft from both parties, thinking themselves clever because of their success in extorting "boodle" from opposing parties. Nearly twenty-five per cent. of the electorate of that township are now openly venal. Thinking that this deplorable status of the public morals might be only local, Mr. Speed made a thorough and methodical investigation of the whole state of New Jersey, as to the extent that votes were bought and sold. To his chagrin, he found that the per cent. of venal citizens was greater in the county than in his township, and far greater in the state as a whole than in his county. In a tone of despair he exclaims: "The whole business begets a cynical disregard of civic virtue that is alarming." Even farmers, who are prosperous and wealthy, take the market rate for their votes each year just as deliberately as tho they were selling a ton of hay or a bushel of potatoes. Mr. Speed divides the mercenary voters of the up-state counties of New York into four classes. Of the third class, he remarks: "They are property-owners, renting farmers, and store-keepers. But they want money for their votes, because their votes appear to have a money value. . . . To this class there are more and more accessions every year, and from this class there is more danger than from any other, for the men who compose it are generally heads of families, with homes of their own, and their example is a taint which corrupts the coming voters, and makes any reform of this evil fearfully difficult." A surprisingly large number of these rural voters are willing to receive bribes from both opposing parties; and when they succeed, they jocularly refer to it as one of the jokes of the game. Thirty per cent. of the voters in Albany (county and city) are regularly on the alert to prostitute their honor by selling their suffrage rights. Mr. Speed asserts his conviction that the corruption of the electorate in the rural sections of New York State is even greater than it is in the metropolis, and much more demoralizing, because of the closer intimacy of the people in the country, and, accordingly, the greater influence of example. We have all been wont to look complacently on our rustic cousins as constituting the moral leaven of society, but apparently they are not one whit behind the denizens of the city in moral baseness. To our shame we must confess that America has become notorious among the nations of the world for the enormity and variety of her food adulterations. Tho Congress, in 1903, enacted a law prohibiting the importation of adulterated and misbranded foods, our own food manufacturers are practically free to flood our markets with foods rendered vile and poisonous by the use of cheap adulterants. The head of a large manufactory admitted to a food commissioner that if he were compelled to discontinue the use of adulterants, he would make $10,000 less profits each month. Hence, this one manufacturer alone exploits the people every year to the extent of $120,000, through his ability to make what the people do not want resemble that which they do want. This immense sum—call it graft or what not—is, plainly speaking, stolen money. Food adulterations now cost the people of the United States nearly $600,000 annually. I have it from reliable sources, that, in the manufacture of the various food products, nothing of the raw fruits is unused except the smell, just as Chicago meat-packers openly boast that nothing of the hog escapes but the squeal. After the edible part of the fruit has been used for making the best grades of canned goods, the residuum, in the form of peels, cores, worms, together with all the decayed apples, pears, etc., are dumped together and ground into a composite pulp. Made of the refuse of all kinds of fruit, this pulp is converted into a marvelous variety of different brands of temptingly-colored bottled and canned goods. Of course the abominable stuff is labeled "pure apple jelly," "pure quince jelly," and so on endlessly. Needless to say that these reeking conglomerations have been thoroughly "doctored" with cheap and poisonous flavorings and chemicals. The same conditions obtain in the manufacture of all other classes of foods. Every scrap of refuse is made into marketable adulterations. For example: worn-out horses and mules, and those injured so as to incapacitate them for service as beasts of burden, have been slaughtered and the meat served in restaurants and free-lunch counters, as roast beef, corned beef, beef stew, hamburger steak, etc. Hoofs of horses and cattle are used not alone for making glue and mucilage, but for the manufacture of gelatines and jellies. Enormous quantities of cheap jelly are made in Chicago from soused pigs' feet and other refuse of the packing-houses. The expert chemist, Dr. L. S. Waters, said recently that hogs' livers are dried, baked, powdered, and mixed with chicory and coffee essence and marketed as ground coffee. Old bones from the alleys are ground into dust and mixed with flour, "More and more is it becoming so that nearly everything thrown into the streets and alleys of American cities is turned into foods." Mr. Paul Pierce goes even so far as to declare that the gleanings from the sewers are often utilized in the manufacture of food (?) products under America's remarkable system of "commercial economy." Of the colorings and chemicals used by these criminal manufacturers, are such poisons as aniline, coal-tar dyes, beading oil, arsenic, ethers, wood alcohol, zinc, fusel oil, sulphate of copper, sulphuric acid, citric acid, beta-naphthol, and copper salts. The milder poisons are, ammonia, alum, pumice-stone, turpentine, petroleum, sandstone, lemon grass, cologne, grape pomace, borax, sodium sulphite, etc. Mr. Pierce tells us that so great has become the demand for some of the most poisonous chemicals named, that large factories are engaged exclusively in their production for use in foods alone. For instance, the manufacture of coal-tar dyes, used in coloring candy and food products, has become one of the biggest enterprises in America. Slaughtering the Innocents.
By far the most horrifying result of food-adulteration is the sacrifice of the lives of nearly half a million infants every year in this country alone. Dr. J. N. Hurty, secretary of the Indiana State Board of Health, estimates that sixty-five per cent. of the total infantile deaths of America are the result of bad feeding and poisons administered in sophisticated foods. Last year more than 70,000 babies died in the United States. Dr. Hurty's estimate has been accepted by sociologists as entirely trustworthy. Accordingly, an army of 450,000 infants was murdered last year by the base fellows who ply their dastardly business for paltry gold! Of course these sharks in human form did not aim to kill. They are the cold-blooded slaves to greed; and, in their blind scramble for pelf, they scoff at the sentimental notion that innocent and helpless human life is sufficiently sacred to deserve consideration. Herod slew his thousands; but these, their hundreds of thousands!11 And yet our wise, rotund, churchly optimists, in their immaculate sacerdotal garb, never weary of telling us that "the world is getting better;" and this, too, in the very face of divine testimony to the contrary. The Holy Spirit expressly declares that "in the last days . . . evil men and impostors shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived." 2 Tim. 3: 1-13. Why is this dastardly fraud of poisoning food products permitted to continue? is not infrequently asked.—In the first place, these opulent food manufacturers wield a most powerful influence in politics. They control as much capital as any of the giant trusts. They are more reckless in taking the lives of their patrons than are the railway companies or the mine-owners, because the prospect of detection is far more remote. The man who counterfeits a dollar is branded as a criminal, and is ostracized by society; but the man who counterfeits foods is honored as one of our millionaire social leaders. Some one has likened law to a spider's web, that catches the little things which are not heavy enough to fall through. A contributor to Public Opinion writes: "No other field in America produces such a verdant crop of millionaires as does the adulterated food manufacturing enterprise." Ah, yes! and to produce these "verdant millionaires" we offer up on the altar of Mammon, yearly, 450,000 HUMAN-lambs! But why not shut our eyes to this harrowing thought, and find rest in the comforting assurance, "The world is getting better"? Carnival of Embezzlements.
Financial circles were startled the last week in April by the announcement that the president of the First National Bank of Milwaukee, Frank G. Bigelow, had confessed to the embezzlement of $1,500,000 of the people's funds in the keeping of the bank. This enormous sum was sunk in the wheat speculation centering around the John W. Gates' corner, which suddenly collapsed. Here was a man who had private property worth from $300,000 to $400,000, and a princely salary from his position in a strong and prosperous financial institution, but the lust for more, MORE! drove him to plunge into the mad vortex of the wheat pit. Says the Public Ledger: "Lavish expenditure, greed for money, gambling, and then theft—that is the story." In the following terms the Boston Transcript shows that there was no excuse for the embezzler: He can not even urge the weak defense that he employed the stolen money for ends that would have been legitimate had the money been his own to use. It went into the huge gamble whose success depended upon adding to the burdens that the people of the country have to bear. His success would have caused more widespread injury than follows upon his failure. It is hard to find a single feature of this transaction upon which to hang a shred of sympathy. In the last dozen years the highway of American finance has become strewn with the wrecks of embezzlers. The most conspicuous instances are four in New York City—one for $6,000,000, one for $3,000,000, one for $700,000, and another for $100,000; one in Elizabeth, N. J., for $109,000; one in Perth Amboy, N. J., for $220,000; one in Philadelphia for $1,000,000; two in Chicago, one for $1,200,000, and one for $316,000; one in Boston for $900,000; one in Newport, Ky., for $200,000; one in Detroit for $662,000; one in Buffalo for $500,000; one in Los Angeles for $100,000; one in San Francisco for $150,000; and the one, above described, in Milwaukee, for $1,500,000. These, of course, are only the "conspicuous" cases. Ah, verily, "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." Have not all these thieves indeed "pierced themselves through with many sorrows?" Is there any wonder that our heavenly Father, in His "everlasting kindness," has sent us this gracious message: "Be ye free from the love of money; content with such things as ye have; for Himself hath said, I will in nowise fail thee, neither will I in any wise forsake thee?" Heb. 13:5. (In the concluding part of the second instalment of this article I shall apply the appropriate prophecy. G. W. R.)