The people are greatly shocked at automobile accidents. There is one such every minute and the frequency of their occurrence as well as the tragic character of so many of them draws out public consideration. We protest against the recklessness of drivers, against the speed with which motor vehicles are drawn, against the condition of so many of the drivers, against the terrible disregard for human life indicated by chauffeurs. And it is well that we should manifest a keen concern for such accidents and for the snuffing out of so many human lives by reason of reckless speeding and careless handling of automobiles.
But there are more moral smashups than there are mechanical, and nobody seems to be much concerned about. Perhaps, a few raise their voices in protest, but society seems totally calloused to the recklessness with which many of the people, especially young people, are living and the gaits that they are going.
The remedy for this sort of smashup is the same sort as that for mechanical disasters. Application of brakes will do the work for both. There is a vast amount of reckless, lawless driving in the social and moral world.
Some are passing it up on the ground that it is inevitable because of the restraints imposed upon the people during the war. They figure, no doubt, that there is a certain amount of devilishness in the human body and that if, during some emergency period, a certain proportion of this devilishness is withheld and restrained, there will be corresponding periods when there will be an excessive outgush of it. And so they are saying that it is the aftermath of the war. Of course, that may have been an incident in the intensification of the spirit out of which present-day conditions of lawlessness have grown, but the spirit itself is deep-seated and long-standing. The sowing and the cultivation have been going on for a long time. It is not a thing of mushroom moment. We have simply been reaping the harvest of the sowings of other days. The teeth of the dragons have ripened. The situation is such that corrective and remedial measures are not merely a matter of option, but a matter of imperative urgency. Of course, there are all kinds of propositions being made to effect a cure. It is a day of the freaks and the fakirs. Various nostrums are being proposed. There are some who think we need merely more laws to put an end to this social and moral recklessness in driving of life. They would pass a law and fix the thing up. And society is so accustomed to this method of restraint that it listens to the criers of the legislative wares and is rather impressed by their insistent appeals. There is always a place for legislative edicts among a people tending toward excessive misconduct.
There is nothing to be said in castigation of what the prohibition laws are accomplishing. They are serving a splendid purpose in keeping the people from falling into the gross wickedness to which they would otherwise be freely offered and laws like that that hold back and brush aside the alluring lights of iniquity are effective as constructive of society.
But laws, of themselves, ae not what is needed to put the brakes and the chains on the wheels of the chariots of life. Some great thinker said the other day that what is needed primarily is personal religion and we imagine that he just about toucred (? touched?) the bottom of the equation in the proffer of that remedy. We are having a lot of what appears to be outward and spectacular religion, a great deal of splendid charity, a pouring out of the riches of the people toward causes that are in need of such behests, but even in these things, there may be the peril that we are growing superficially religious, leaving aside the deep, vital and fundamental affairs that concern personal living.
The call, therefore coming to humanity in the midst of its engulfments of the times is for a re-assertion of the great spiritual ideals and a fresh taking hold of those principles of life and of action which were put down in the Book. Mr. Babson said recently “we must be born again,” and this modern business and industrial Moses was then merely repeating one of the superlative utterances of the Master in offering a remedy for the falseness and the frailties of flesh.
From the editorial page of The Charlotte News, Saturday, May 21, 1922, Julian S. Miller, editor, and W.C. Dowd, president and general manager.
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