An Unseemly Display by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jan 13, 1909

An Unseemly Display.

By Editor

APRIL 18, 1906, San Francisco was smitten by a mighty earthquake. From palace and hovel, from street and alley, came cries of terror and prayers to God, and weeping and mourning.

The fire followed the earthquake, till the heart of the city was eaten up by the devouring flames. And men and women still prayed and wept and moaned amid the ashes of their dwellings in the days that followed.

December 28 a mightier earthquake smote to destruction sunny Southern Italy and the fair island of Sicily. Sister cities and towns and villages went down in ruins. Coast lands sunk beneath the sea. Islands and their towns and people were engulfed forever. Fire followed the mighty temblor, and suffering indescribable, and praying and mourning fill the devastated district from which people are fleeing in the terror of madness and despair.

Yet in the very midst of this awful suffering, on the night of December 31, 1908, and January 1, 1909, San Francisco went pleasure-mad, revelry-mad, drunken-mad,—a great, mad, bacchanalian carnival,—lasting all the night, till physical powers or money were exhausted, nerves were worn to a frazzle, and jaded men and women, sodden with Circean drink and revel, sought homes or saloons. Among the floats and costumes and masques were represented witches and demons and hell. Bacchus and Circe and all the other brood of carnate deities reigned supreme, and Italia's suffering and agony and God were forgotten.

We are not decrying joy and thankfulness. San Francisco has been wonderfully blessed during the past two years notwithstanding all the evils of selfish, human greed she has had to meet, some of which were of her own choosing. The way in which she has been prospered ought to call for real joy, for sincere thankfulness, for devout gratitude to God. From a purely human standpoint, from considerations of ordinary decency, in the lurid, ghastly light of Italy's suffering, affecting so many of San Francisco's Italian citizens, the exhibition of joy ought to have taken on a more seemly display. It was almost a "dancing upon a volcano," "the dance of death."