Thus in Chicago alone, 5000 automobiles were stolen in a single year.  Once murder was an infrequent and abnormal crime.  To-day in our large cities it is of almost daily occurrence.  In New York, in 1917, there were 236 murders and only 67 convictions; in 1918, 221, and 77 convictions.  In Chicago, in 1919, there were 336, and 44 convictions.

When the crime wave was at its height a year ago, the police authorities in more than one American city confessed their impotence to impose effective restraints.  Life and property had seemingly become almost as insecure as during the Middle Ages.[3]

[Footnote 3:  The reader will bear in mind that these words were spoken in August 1921.  Unquestionably, the situation has greatly improved during the present year(1922).]

As to the subtler and more insidious crimes against the political state, it is enough to say that graft has become a science in city, state and nation.  Losses by such misapplication of public funds—­piled Pelion on Ossa—­no longer run in the millions but the hundreds of millions.  Our city governments are, in many instances, foul cancers on the body politic; and for us to boast of having solved the problem of local self-government is as fatuous as for a strong man to exult in his health when his body is covered with running sores.  It has been estimated that the annual profits from violations of the prohibition laws have reached $300,000,000.  Men who thus violate these laws for sordid gain are not likely to obey other laws, and the respect for law among all classes steadily diminishes as our people become familiar with, and tolerant to, wholesale criminality.  Whether the moral and economic results of Prohibition overbalance this rising wave of crime, time will tell.

In limine, let us note the significant fact that this spirit of revolt against authority is not confined to the political state, and therefore its causes lie beyond that sphere of human action.

Human life is governed by all manner of man-made laws—­laws of art, of social intercourse, of literature, music, business—­all evolved by custom and imposed by the collective will of society.  Here we find the same revolt against tradition and authority.

In music, its fundamental canons have been thrown aside and discord has been substituted for harmony as its ideal.  Its culmination—­jazz—­is a musical crime.  If the forms of dancing and music are symptomatic of an age, what shall be said of the universal craze to indulge in crude and clumsy dancing to the vile discords of so-called “jazz” music?  The cry of the time is: 

    “On with the dance, let joy be” unrefined.

In the plastic arts, the laws of form and the criteria of beauty have been swept aside by the futurists, cubists, vorticists, tactilists, and other aesthetic Bolsheviki.

In poetry, where beauty of rhythm, melody of sound and nobility of thought were once regarded as the true tests, we now have in freak forms of poetry the exaltation of the grotesque and brutal.  Hundreds of poets are feebly echoing the “barbaric yawp” of Walt Whitman, without the redeeming merit of his occasional sublimity of thought.