Causes of Sunday Crime by Editor

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 3, 1859

Causes of Sunday Crime

By Editor

From the SABBATH RECORDER. # Causes of Sunday Crime.

Not at all a pleasant picture to look upon, this from the Christian Intelligencer, presenting some of the streets of New York city in the Sunday dress:

The amount of Sunday crime is fearful. It exceeds that of any other day of the week. Take up one of our Dailies on Monday or Tuesday, and you will find, almost invariably, some shocking case of homicide, directly traceable to Sunday debauchery; sometimes a whole column of the murderous doings of drunken rowdies. Thus, a week ago, a Sunday night's row in Grand street ended in the stabbing of three men—one fatally, by an intoxicated boy. On the same evening, policeman Davidson was twice stabbed, it is feared fatally, by one Coburn, at the corner of Prince and Green streets; and a little later, an abandoned woman was found in Canal street, also stabbed; and so the record runs from week to week.

The truth is, we are verging toward barbarism. Our courts and officers of law have ceased to be a terror to evil-doers. Law itself is systematically violated and contemned. Rum rules the city. We have stringent statutes and ordinances against the traffic in liquors on Sunday, and our public officers are sworn to execute them. Do they?

Pass along Chatham street and the Bowery, and see. As you enter Chatham street from the Park, of a Sunday evening, you will hear strains of music from numerous bands of music; and if you enter, you will find hundreds of roystering tippers firing up for the night's debauch. Pass around a single block, and you may count forty or fifty dram-shops and lager-beer saloons in full blast, with perhaps a policeman patrolling the streets in full view of what he knows to be illegal and demoralizing, but without a word of remonstrance.

Now make your way a little above Chatham Square, and enter the City Theatre. A thousand people and more are listening to a play, on a Sabbath night. Go into the next door, and amidst the paraphernalia of a gambling-hell, billiards roulette-tables, raffling, shooting-galleries, etc.—you will find ten or twelve hundred men, women and children, swigging lager-beer by the hour, while they listen to low comedies and songs, or witness the lascivious dance. As you cast your eye over the dense throng, you will see that young men and lads compose the bulk of the assembly. What a school for them! What wonder that 60 or 70 per cent, of our almost 30,000 criminals in a year, are found to be from 10 to 20 years of age.

Go into another of these training places in the same block, and you will find every square foot occupied, afternoon and evening, with smokers, drinkers, theatre-goers and gamblers. It is the Sabbath (Sunday) remember, when you witness these scenes.

But if you think the evil local and exceptional, extend your walk to Fourth street, and take a look at the People's Theatre (Volk's Theatre) near Avenue A. There, in that ante-room open to all, see that group of a hundred boys from 16 to 22 years of age, around those four billiard tables, forming the taste and habit of gambling, drowning their consciences with intoxicants, and learning the language and the arts of rowdies and outlaws. Or, cross the room, and see that eager, excited throng of juvenile gamblers around the novel instrument of play. Or, enter the drinking-room and theatre, in the rear, with its thousand guests of a fair Sunday night, and see how many lads and lasses are getting their lessons in dissipation and folly, if not in crime.

When you have finished the survey, and reached your home, you will have seen more people at theatres, and drinking saloons, and gambling places—open to the public, and without the least concealment—than were gathered in the Academy of Music, Cooper Institute, and the National Theatre, to listen to the preaching of the Gospel on the same evening. And you will cease your marvels that the records of crime are so extended in the columns of our Monday and Tuesday journals. The men and boys who break the Sabbath, and drink, and gamble, furnish the shooters, and stabbers, and burglars, and thieves, with whom the police have to do. And they will have a plenty to do in catching and punishing them, until the people rise in their might and determine that the Sunday liquor-traffic shall be suppressed.

[It is not to be expected that the people generally can have much conscientious regard for the first day of the week as a sacred day; for there is nothing in the Scriptures of which a conscience for this day can be formed, and as a general thing the people know this. It may therefore be expected that such persons as are addicted to intemperance and rowdyism will be more likely to indulge in these vices, when they have leisure than when they can be employed to some useful purpose. Ed.—Sab. Recorder.]