The "Crime Wave" Still Spreading.
THE Homiletic Review, always optimistic, is compelled by facts to say in its May issue: "Since we commented on the 'crime wave' last summer, the situation has not improved. Bomb outrages have increased. Large districts of Kentucky have been terrorized by an oath-bound organization numbering thousands of men, whose head, says the governor of the state, has the power of life and death over the members, who freely employ the torch and bullet to gain their ends. "On April 4 the president of the American Federation of Labor informed a Congressional committee that either Congress must enact the demands of the Federation into law, or 'there will spring up secret organizations bound by oath to the service of the cause of labor and to the fight we have already waged.' "All this is disquieting enough; and besides, we have in consequence of a financial panic, a large army of the unemployed, many of them bitter and desperate. The social atmosphere is evidently full of electricity. The public peace is in a condition of unstable equilibrium, which, like dynamite, a sudden shock may upset destructively." This is a mild and conservative view of the situation. God foresaw it and predicted it. "This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come," "distress of nations with perplexity," "men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth," are all predictions of these times, and the conditions precursors of the "coming of the Just One."