DISTRESS OF NATIONS by C. P. B.

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 26, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 33.

DISTRESS OF NATIONS.

By C. P. B.

THERE probably never was a time when there was so much abject poverty in all parts of the world as at the present. The population never was so great nor oppression so general. Accordingly Commercial Agent Smith, in the "United States Consular Report" for October, 1888, says that "All over Germany $2.25 to $3.00 per week is all that the day laborer makes." His children are described as, "pale-faced," with "hungry countenances, lank bodies, and scrofulous heads." Consul Tanner of Chemnitz, Saxony, describes the poorer class thus: "They live upon nothing but a crust of dry, dark bread, and spend all they can earn on strong liquors. Apart from such drink, they live on about 7 or 8 cents per day." The state of affairs in other European countries is little if any better; there is abject poverty and absolute wretchedness everywhere.

Nor is our own country free from similar distress, as the following from a late number of America will show:—

"A committee from the Boston clothing-trade unions has been investigating the tenement 'sweating' system of New York. Many rookeries in the latter city were found crowded from cellar to garret with foreigners of both sexes, who worked sixteen and eighteen hours a day, and made from $2 to $4 a week as a return for their intolerable slavery. Many small rooms were simply packed with poor wretches working near hot stoves, and nearly prostrated by the heat. To such terrible conditions all labor in America is being brought by the stern competition of foreign immigrants, who land starving on these shores."

Everywhere the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer. We are clearly in the time referred to in James 5:1-5. Oh, that all the oppressed of earth could have a good hope of eternal life and eternal riches in the soon-coming kingdom of our Lord. C. P. B.