EDITORIALS from the HEARST NEWSPAPERS {Arthur Brisbane}



CONTENTS Why Are All Men Gamblers? No Man Understands Iron We Long for Immortal Imperfection—We Can't Have It. Three Water-Drops Converse Did We Once Live on the Moon? William Henry Channing's Symphony The Existence of God—Parable of the Blind Kittens Have the Animals Souls? Jesus' Attitude Toward Children Study of the Character of God The Fascinating Problem of Immortality Discontent the Motive Power of Progress The Automobile Will Make Us More Human Let Us Be Thankful The Harm That Is Done by Our Friends Shall We Tame and Chain the Invisible Microbe As We Now Chain Niagara? The Elephant That Will Not Move Has Better Excuses Than We Have for Folly Displayed Let Us Be Thankful What Will 999 Years Mean to the Human Race? The Azores—A Small Lost World in a Universe of Water No Napoleonic Chess Player on an Air Cushion A Girl's Face in the Gaslight The "Criminal" Class The Wonderful Magnet Who Is Independent? Nobody When We Begin Using Land Under the Oceans Where Your Body Came From How Marriage Began Man's Willingness to Work The Human Brain Beats the Coal Mines How the Other Planets Will Talk to Us Shall We Do Without Sleep Some Day? The Three Best Things in the World The Value of Solitude There Should Be a Monument to Time A Mother's Work and Her Hopes Your Work Is Your Brain's Gymnasium The Steeple, Moving Like the Hand of a Clock Cultivate Thought-Teach Your Brain to Work Early The Wind Does Not Rule Your Destiny One of the Many Corpses in the Johnstown Mine "Limiting the Amount of a Day's Work" Catching a Red-Hot Bolt The Trusts and the Union—How Do They Differ? France Has Learned Her Lesson Union Men as Slave Owners Again the Limited Day's Work To the Merchants What About the Chinese, Kind Sir? 150 against 150,000—We Favor the 150,000 To-day's World-Struggle White-Rabbit Millionaires and Other Things No Happiness Save in Mental and Physical Activity The Owner of a Golden Mountain The Human Weeds in Prison Crime Is Dying Out The Value of Poverty to the World 600 Teachers Now, 600,000 Good Americans in the Future Education—The First Duty of Government Poverty Is the Father of Vice, Crime and Failure The Importance of Education Proved in Lincoln's Case Knowledge Is Growth A Whiskey Bottle Those Who Laugh at a Drunken Man Law Cannot Stop Drunkenness—Education Can The Drunkard's Side of It Drink a Slow Poison To Those Who Drink Hard—You Have Slipped the Belt Try Whiskey on Your Friend's Eyeball What Are the Ten Best Books? The Marvelous Balance of the Universe—A Lesson in the Texas Flood The Earth Is Only a Front Yard Last Week's Baby Will Surely Talk Some Day The Good That Is Done by the Trusts Trusts and the Senate The Promising Toad's Head Trusts Will Drive Labor Unions Into Politics The Trusts Are National School Teachers A Woman to Be Pitied When Will Woman's Mental Life Begin? The Cow That Kicks Her Weaned Calf Is All Heart Respectable Women Who Listen to "Faust" Why Women Should Vote Astronomy- Woman's Future Work Woman's Vanity Is Useful To Editorial Writers—Adopt Ruskin's Main Idea Imagination Without Dreaming the Secret of Material Success The One Who Needs No Statue The Vast Importance of Sleep Woman Sustains, Guides and Controls the World The Story of the Complaining Diamond Don't Be in a Hurry, Young Gentlemen hen the Baby Changed Into a Fourteen-year-old The Eye That Weighs a Ton What Animal Controls Your Spirit? From Mammoths to Mosquitoes—From Murder to Hypocrisy The Monkey and the Snake Fight Too Little and Too Much Do You Feel Discouraged? Two Kinds of Discontent What the Bartender Sees What Should Be a Man's Object in Life? Cruel Frightening of Children It Is Natural for Children to Be Cruel Two Thin Little Babies Are Left A Baby Can Educate a Man

The articles in this book were published originally in the editorial columns of the various Hearst newspapers throughout the country.

These articles may have some interest for the student of modern happenings, because of the fact that the newspapers publishing them have an aggregate daily circulation of two millions of copies, and are read each day by no fewer than five millions of men and women. Such wide circulation of identical opinions on current events, in different parts of the country, is a new feature of our national life. The character of such writings, and their probable influence upon the public mind, whatever their lack of intrinsic merit, may be of sufficient importance to justify the publication of this collection of ephemeral writings.

WHY ARE ALL MEN GAMBLERS?

The annual report of the gambling house at Monte Carlo shows a profit of about $5,000,000.

A large collection of human beings travel from all parts of the world to Monte Carlo for the sake of giving $5,000,000 to the gambling concern there.

Wherever you look on earth to-day or in the past you find human beings gambling, and you will find the gambling instinct stronger than any other—stronger than the love of drink, infinitely stronger than the love of normal, honest gain.

* * *

Christopher Columbus's sailors gambled on the way over, and the Indians on this side were gambling while waiting to be discovered.

In an office overlooking Trinity graveyard, in New York City, an old man, past eighty, with a fortune of at least $50,000,000, gambles every day with all the excitement of youth. The fluctuations in his game bring to his sallow cheeks the color that no other human emotion could bring there.

On his way home this old man passes crowds of children in the streets and looks down, concerned and sorrowful, to find that they, too, are gambling.

They are matching pennies or shaking dice.

* * *

Clergymen are startled and amazed to find that women are gambling heavily.

They have gambled heavily ever since civilization has progressed far enough to give them large sums to gamble with.

Marie Antoinette staked thousands of louis at a time at Versailles.

She was so wrapped up in gambling she could not see that her neck was in danger.

When the lava came down from Vesuvius it buried Pompeiians who were gambling.

The men who dig up the old monuments in Africa find gambling instruments crumbling away side by side with appliances for taking human life.

* * *

Nowhere in the lower forms of animal life, so far as we know, is there the slightest indication of the gambling instinct.

The monkey, the elephant, love whiskey, and easily become drunkards.

The passion for alcohol seems innate in animal life; even the wise ant can be readily induced to disgrace himself if alcohol is put near him.

For all the human weaknesses and mainsprings—ambition, affection, vanity, drunkenness, ferocity, greediness, cunning—we can find beginnings among the lower animals.

But man appears to have evolved from within himself the gambling instinct for his own especial damnation.

Where did the instinct come from? Why was it planted in us?

Like every other instinct with which intelligent nature endows us, it must have its good purpose, and it must not be judged merely in the corrupted form in which we study it at Monte Carlo or in Wall Street.

Perhaps the spirit of gambling is really only an atrophied, perverted form of the spirit of adventure.

Columbus staked his life and gambled, when he started across the water.

The leaders of the American Revolution expressly staked their lives, their fortunes and their "sacred honor" in signing the Declaration of Independence. They were noble gamblers, working for the welfare of their fellows.

Perhaps gambling is only a perverted form of intelligent ambition—we are all natural gamblers because we have within us the quality which makes us willing to risk our own comfort, security and present happiness for a result that seems better worth while.

The universality of the gambling instinct in human beings is certainly worthy of our study.



NO MAN UNDERSTANDS IRON HOW CAN WE HOPE TO UNDERSTAND GOD?

Is there laughter in heaven—or can nothing move the eternal heavenly calm?

If mirth exists among the perpetually blissful, how must the angels laugh when in idle moments they listen to our speculations concerning the Divinity? They peer down at us as we look at ants dragging home a fragment of dead caterpillar. They hear us say things like this:

If God exists, why does He not reveal himself to ME?

How could God exist before He created the world? Force cannot exist or demonstrate its existence without matter. How could a creator exist except with creation around him?

Where did He live before He made heaven?

If He is all-powerful, could He in five seconds make a six months' old calf? If He made it in five seconds it would not be six months old.

Nonsense more subtle comes from the educated, from those who know enough to be preposterous in a pretentious way.

Hear the wise man:

God does not exist, because I cannot prove His existence: I can prove everything else. With my law of gravitation I point to a speck in space and say: "You'll find a new planet there," and you find it. If a God existed could I not also point to Him? If I can trace a comet in its flight, could I not trace the comet's maker?

Huxley says: "The cosmic process has no sort of relation to moral ends." That's a philosopher's way of saying something foolish. Lalande, the astronomer, remarked that he had swept the entire heavens with his telescope and found no God there. That's funnier than any ant who should say: "I've searched this whole dead caterpillar and found no God, so THERE IS NO GOD." The corner of space which our telescopes can "sweep" is smaller, compared to the universe, than a dead caterpillar compared with this earth.

Moleschott, an able physiologist, believed that phosphorus was essential to mental activity. Perhaps he did prove that. But he said: "No thought without phosphorus," and thought he had wiped the human soul out of existence. Philosophers do not laugh at Moleschott. But they would laugh at a savage who would say:

"I have discovered that there is a catgut in a fiddle. No fiddle without catgut—no music without cats. Don't talk to me about soul or musical genius—it's all catgut."

We peek out at this universe from our half-developed corner of it. We see faintly the millions of huge suns circling with their planet families billions of miles away. We see our own little sun rise and set; we ask ourselves a thousand foolish questions of cause and Ruler—and because we cannot answer, we decry faith.

Wise doubter, look at a small piece of iron. It looks solid. You suppose that its various parts touch. But submit it to cold.

You make it smaller. Then the particles did not touch. Do they touch now? No; relatively they are farther apart than this planet from its nearest neighbor.

That piece of iron, apparently solid, consists of clusters of atoms wonderfully grouped, each cluster called a molecule. The molecular cluster is invisible, millions of clusters in the smallest visible fragment. The atom is accepted by science as the final particle of matter. Its name indicates that it is supposed to be indivisible. When science gets to the atom it calmly gives up and says: "That is so small that it can no longer be divided." A reasonable enough conclusion on the surface, considering that you might have millions of atoms of iron in one corner of your eye and not know it.

But why should the atom be incapable of further division? If it is any size at all it can be thought of as split.

Where does the divisibility of matter end, if anywhere? What is there SOLID about iron? Nothing in reality, except that it seems to us solid. Already, with the X-ray, we can look through it. Forces such as heat and electricity pass through it more readily than through free air.

Science, which gradually finds things out, denying as it goes along everything one step beyond, tells you truly that the clusters of atoms in iron float in a sea of ether, just as do our planets going round the sun. Heat the iron intensely. What happens? You get what you call white heat. The white heat and the white light come from the increase of wave motion in this ether, and this ether, absolutely imponderable, of a tenuity inconceivable, possesses elasticity greater and more powerful than that of coiled steel. ——

So much for one small piece of iron, such as you would kick to one side in a junk heap. If it interests you, read pages 159 to 162 of John Fiske's admirable little book, "Through Nature to God." You will finish the book the day you get it.

If you are surprised to learn how much you did not know about iron—after living near bits of iron all your life—is it not just possible that your mind may be too feeble to conceive of God?

For the fly buzzing about the edge of Niagara Falls, the falls do not exist. The fly's brain cannot grasp their grandeur. It can understand only the speck of spray that falls on its wing.

You live with God around you, hopelessly incapable of perceiving His existence save through that faint spark of unconscious faith that was mercifully planted in you. Snuff that out with dull efforts at reason, and you have nothing.



WE LONG FOR IMMORTAL IMPERFECTION— WE CAN'T HAVE IT.

All our longings for immortality, all our plans for immortal life are based on the hope that Divine Providence will condescend to let us live in another world as we live here.

Each of us wants to be himself in the future life, and to see his friends as he knew them.

We want to preserve individuality forever and ever, when the stars shall have faded away and the days of matter ended.

But what is individuality except imperfection? You are different from Smith, Smith is different from Jones. But it is simply a difference of imperfect construction. One is more foolish than another, one is more irresponsibly moved to laughter or anger—that constitutes his personality.

Remove our imperfections and we should all be alike—smooth off all agglomerations of matter on all sides and everything would be spherical.

What would be the use of keeping so many of us if we were all perfect, and therefore all alike? One talks through his nose, one has a deep voice. But shall kind Providence provide two sets of wings for nose talkers and chest talkers? Why not make the two into one good talker and save one pair of wings?

Why not, in fact, keep just one perfect sample, and let all the rest placidly drift back to nothingness? Or, better, why not take all the goodness that there is in all the men and women that ever were and melt it all down into one cosmic human being? ——

The rain drops, the mist and the sprays of Niagara all go back to the ocean in time. Possibly we all go back at the end to the sea of divine wisdom, whence we were sent forth to do, well or badly, our little work down here:

Future punishment? We think not.

One drop of water revives the wounded hero—another helps to give wet feet and consumption to a little child. It all depends on circumstances.

Both drops go back to the ocean. There is no rule that sends the good drop to heaven and the other to boil forever and ever in a sulphur pit. ——

Troubles beset us when we think of a future state and our reason quarrels always with our longings. We all want—in heaven—to meet Voltaire with his very thin legs. But we cannot believe that those skinny shanks are to be immortal. We shall miss the snuff and the grease on Sam Johnson's collar. If an angel comes up neat and smiling and says "Permit me to introduce myself —I am the great lexicographer," we shall say "Tell that to some other angel. The great Samuel was dirty and wheezy, and I liked him that way."

And children. The idea of children in heaven flying about with their little fluffy wings is fascinating. But would eternal childhood be fair to them? If a babe dies while teething, shall it remain forever toothless? How shall its mother know it if it is allowed to grow up?

Listen to Heine—that marvellous genius of the Jewish race:

"Yes, yes! You talk of reunion in a transfigured shape. What would that be to me? I knew him in his old brown surtout, and so I would see him again. Thus he sat at table, the salt cellar and pepper caster on either hand. And if the pepper was on the right and the salt on the left hand he shifted them over. I knew him in a brown surtout, and so I would see him again."

Thus he spoke of his dead father. Thus many of us think and speak of those that are gone. How foolish to hope for the preservation of what is imperfect!

How important to have FAITH, and to feel that reality will surpass anticipation, and that whatever IS will be the best thing for us and satisfy us utterly.



THREE WATER DROPS CONVERSE

Three drops of water, stranded in a crevice on the side of an inland mountain, talked in this way:

First Drop—"They say there is an ocean whence we came and to which we shall return."

Second Drop—"They say we three drops are made in the image of that ocean; that as far as we go, which is not far, we are miniature oceans."

Third Drop—"Bosh and nonsense. There is no ocean. It is all superstition. Before we were born here, from the mist, what were we? When we evaporate in a few minutes what becomes of us? You two drops make me feel sorry for you. I know that when I cease reflecting that white cloud up there, that ends ME. I have no delusions about oceans or going back to anything." ——

You know what happened. The cloud formed into rain and our three drops were washed into a tiny trickling stream. The thin stream of rain ran into a brook, the brook into a river. Soon the three drops were back in the ocean—possibly without knowing it.

Shall we some day go rolling back to the ocean of cosmic wisdom whence we came?

Is it possible that man is indeed made in the image of God, as drops are made in the ocean's image—the individual men, like the individual drops, being sent forth to do necessary cosmic work through the universe, going back to the ocean after each errand is done, and so going back and forth, forever and ever?

That would not be such a mean destiny, we should say. It would certainly be a very democratic form of cosmic government. ——

Inferior men, inferior women, unworthy of comparison with perfect, cosmic wisdom?

Not at all. Not inferior men and women, but inferior mediums, inferior brains, bodies and planets through which to work.

Is one drop of water inferior to another? Is any inferior to the purest drop in the ocean?

No. But one drop runs through the gutter of a stable, another rolls from a mountain spring, a third carries in solution the germ of typhus. But all three came pure from the ocean and all will go back to the ocean pure.



DID WE ONCE LIVE ON THE MOON? AND SHALL WE MOVE ON TO THE SUN SOME FINE DAY?

The most interesting questions are such as these:

Whence did we come?

Whither are we going?

And, by the way, what are we? Are we of any true importance? Are we a permanent part of the universal scheme, privileged to move along through the ages and see the end as we have seen the beginning? Or are we, as advanced science says, merely like the weevil in the biscuit—no part of the Baker's plan?

Are we indestructible specks of cosmic intelligence, lighting up and animating one material body after another—never destroyed—or do we play on this earth the passing part of the microbe in the Brie cheese, which gives that cheese its flavor? ——

A great scientist, coldly analyzing the chemical processes essential to the creation of each new human being, scoffs at any possibility of immortality. With the microscope at his eye, he magnifies nature's mysteries; he sums up the investigations of the Hertwig brothers; he discourses learnedly of the nucleolus of the Cytula—or progeny cell. He declares that science is able to watch the creation of a human being, as it watches the progress of a chick in the egg. He asserts that each new creature is merely the result of a chemical process blending qualities of the mother and father. Having a "final beginning," man must have a final end. Man—a mixture of two sets of qualities—has no more chance of immortality than has beer, which is a mixture of malt and hops.

Read and think over this cold summing-up of our mean, limited destiny as science farthest advanced now sees it:

"It must appear utterly senseless now to speak of the immortality of the human person, when we know how this person, with all its individual qualities of body and mind, has arisen. How can this person possess an eternal life without end? The human person, like every other many-celled individual, IS BUT A PASSING PHENOMENON OF ORGANIC LIFE. With its death, the series of its vital activities ceases entirely, just as it began."

That certainly is discouraging to a man who for fifty years has sung "I want to be an angel."

Yet that is what Haeckel has to say about our chance of immortality. But the other side of the grave has the LAST say, and we think it will discredit Haeckel. We should even undertake to do that now and here in two columns of a yellow journal. But we are DETERMINED before the column ends to ask you what you think of our moon-earth-sun transmigration notion.

The sun is now a blazing mass, inconceivably huge, inconceivably fierce in our eyes. Its flames leap hundreds of thousands of miles into space. If our earth fell to the sun, it would melt as a snow-flake falling upon a blazing forest. We certainly do not readily look upon the sun as our future home, if we accept its present condition as permanent.

But once upon a time, hundreds of millions of years back, this earth used to look TO THE MOON, on a smaller scale, as the sun now looks to us. If there were on the moon at that time inferior human beings, in a low state of cosmic evolution, they undoubtedly had to thank the earth for their life, as we thank the sun. To them the earth, then incandescent, blazing with the heat that now reveals itself through volcanoes, was simply a whirling ball of fire, put in its place to warm them.

They could no more think that men would ever come to live here than we can now think of moving on to the sun. ——

In course of time this earth cooled off. It cooled so thoroughly that the moon died of cold. Life could no longer continue there.

The dead satellite's destiny thenceforward was to show gratitude for past heat by moving our tides and cheering our poets. As life died out on the cold moon which had given us temporary hospitality, life sprang into being on this planet, now fitted to support it.

Here, on a larger sphere, with greater opportunities, mankind is growing, and will far outstrip all that it could have done on the poor little moon.

Meanwhile, as we struggle on, improving slowly, the sun, as science proves, is cooling off in its turn. The flames become less fierce as the thousands of centuries roll by. When we shall have developed as much as possible on this limited planet, our home will be cooled and ready on the sun, centre of our life in this corner of space.

We shall move up a step—as boys do in the public schools. We shall have been moon men, earth men, and shall graduate into sun men. Think of a home so vast! On that grand star we shall lead lives worth while, and justify Huxley's belief that men exist somewhere compared to whom we should "be as black beetles compared to us."

The excitement of meeting our brothers from other planets as they move up to the sun in batchcs will be great.



WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING'S SYMPHONY

THE THOUGHT—

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common—this is my symphony.

WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING.

TO LIVE CONTENT WITH SMALL MEANS.

This means to realize to the full the possibilities of life. Contentment means ABSENCE OF WORRY. It is only when free from worry that the brain can act normally, up to its highest standard. The man content with small means does his best work, devotes his energies to that which is worth while, and not to acquiring that which has no value.

TO SEEK ELEGANCE RATHER THAN LUXURY.

The difference between elegance and luxury is the difference between the thin, graceful deer, browsing on the scanty but sufficient forest pasture, and the fat swine revelling in plentiful garbage.

REFINEMENT RATHER THAN FASHION.

The difference between refinement and fashion is the difference between brains and clothing, the difference between an Emerson or a Huxley and a Beau Brummel or other worthless but elaborately decked carcass.

TO BE WORTHY, NOT RESPECTABLE.

In other words, to be like Henry George, and not like the owner of a trust.

WEALTHY, NOT RICH.

The man who has a good wife and good children, enough to take care of them, but not enough to spoil them, is WEALTHY. He is happier than the man who is RICH enough to be worried, rich enough to make it certain that his children will be ruined by extravagance, and perhaps live to be ashamed of him.

TO LISTEN TO STARS AND BIRDS, BABES AND SAGES, WITH OPEN HEART.

This means to enjoy the noblest gifts that God has given to man. He is happy who takes more pleasure in a beautiful sunset than in the sight of a flunky with powdered hair, artificial calves and lofty manners, handing him something indigestible on a plate of gold.

TO STUDY HARD; TO THINK QUIETLY, ACT FRANKLY, TALK GENTLY.

To exercise in this way the brain that is given to us is to lead the life of a MAN, a life of self-control, a life that is worth while, that leads to something and helps forward the improvement of the race.

In the words which we have quoted at the top of this column William Henry Channing has given a recipe for wise living. ——

WHO WAS CHANNING?

He was a good man, and a wise man. He was one of the most eloquent clergymen ever born in this country, and as sincere a friend of individual man and of the race in general as ever lived.

He was an enthusiast and an optimist—admirable combination.

He was born in 1810, and died in 1884. His biography has been written by Octavius B. Frothingham.

Channing saw the world through generous, charitable eyes.

He was an ardent admirer of Charles Fourier, and appreciated the philosophy and social law-giving of that gigantic intellect.

The quotation we print above is an index to his whole character, just as one flower tells the story of the beautiful garden in which it grew.

Channing, unlike many sayers of fine things, was personally as fine as the things he said. He was worthy even of his own best thoughts, and that can be said for few fine thinkers.

Admire him. Read some of his sermons and other writings if you have the chance.



THE EXISTENCE OF GOD—PARABLE OF THE BLIND KITTENS

The notion that small things, the petty details of life, such as money getting, marriage questions, etc., are uppermost in the modern human brain is entirely false.

If an editor asks: "Is marriage a failure?" he receives just so many answers, and then the interest dies out.

If he asks: "Should a wife have pin money?" or "What is the easiest way for a woman to earn a living?" he ceases to receive answers after a short time.

But to questions concerning the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and man's destiny here and hereafter, the answers are endless. Letters on such matters have been received here by thousands. Every day the mail brings new and intelligent contributions to the questions that have kept men praying, thinking, fighting and hoping through the centuries:

"IS THERE A GOD, AND WILL MY SOUL LIVE FOREVER?" ——

Very interesting are the expressions of faith which fill a majority of the letters. Interesting also are the letters of doubters atheists, agnostics and the many intoxicated with a very little knowledge, who have decided to substitute their own wisdom and doubt for the belief of the ages—the belief in God and in personal immortality.

Many think science has discovered that we could get on very well without a God. But science has done just the contrary. And here, if you please, we shall build up a sort of parable: ——

A Man had a box full of motherless blind kittens. He was very kind to them. He put their box on wheels and moved it about to keep it in the sun. He gave them milk at regular intervals. With loving kindness he drove away the dog which growled and scared the little kittens into spitting and back raising.

The kittens trusted the Man, loved him and felt that they needed him. That was the age of faith.

One day a dog got a kitten and tore it to pieces.

The kitten had disobeyed orders and laws. It had crawled away from the box.

Another kitten, with one eye now partly open, got thoughtful and said: "There is no such thing as Man. Or, if there is such a thing, he is a monster to let little Willie get torn up. Don't talk to me about Kitten Wiliie being a sufferer through his own fault. I say there is no such thing as a Man. We kittens are bosses of the universe and must do our own fighting."

That speaker was the Ingersoll kitten.

A kitten of higher mental class opened both eyes just a little and actually made observations.

Said he: "I am a scientist. I discover that we owe nothing to Man's kindness. We are governed by laws. This box is on wheels.

It rolls around in the sunlight of its own volition. True, I do not know who shoves it, but no Man could do it. Further, I discover that there is such a thing as the law of 'milk-passing.' Milk comes this way just so often. Its coming is nature's law. It has always come. It always will come. Good-night, I am going to sleep. But don't talk to me any more about a kind Man. It's all law, and I am certainly great, for I saw the laws first."

That was the Newton kitten, but he lacked the Newton faith.

We have no time to tell what the Darwin kitten said. He was very long-winded.

But this happened. The kittens grew up—such as did not perish through their own fault. They got their eyes fully opened. They saw the Man, recognized him and asked only to be allowed to stay in his house. "Excuse us," they said, "for being such foolish kittens. But you know our eyes were not quite open."

"Don't mention it," said the kind Man. "Go down cellar and help yourselves to mice."

That's the end of the parable. We are all blind kittens, and our few attempts at explaining nature's wonders and kindness only get us into deeper and deeper mysteries.

We discover that the earth goes round the sun. But the greatest scientist must admit his inability to tell or guess why it goes. "Give me the initial impulse," he says, "and all the rest is easy."

The blind kittens in their wagon say: "Give our wagon just one shove and we'll explain the rest."

The kitten gets hold of a law of "milk-passing" and substitutes that for man's individual kindness.

The feeble-minded agnostic seizes the law of gravitation and thinks he can discard God with gravity's help.

But the great mind that defined gravity's law was a religious mind—too profound to see anything final in its own feeble power.

Newton was no atheist. None better than he knew the mysterious character of his law. That it has worked from all eternity "directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance" he knew and told his fellow-creatures. That is all he knew and all that any man knows about it.

To-day Lord Kelvin, a worthy follower in Newton's steps, is asked to explain WHY gravity acts. He can only say:

"I accept no theory of gravitation. Present science has no right to attempt to explain gravitation. We know nothing about it. We simply know NOTHING about it."

Darwin asks, without answering his question:

"Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravitation?" ——

To our doubting friends we say: Doubt if you must. But doubt intelligently and doubt first of all your own blind kitten wisdom. Remember that you at least know absolutely nothing. Study and think. Read. But don't let the half-developed wisdom of others choke up your brain and leave you a mere clogged-up doubting machine.

Whatever you do, never interfere with the faith of others. Spread KNOWLEDGE, spread FACTS. Keep to yourself the doubts that would disturb others' happiness and do them no good. Tell what you KNOW. Keep quiet about what you GUESS.



HAVE THE ANIMALS SOULS?

"For that which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; YEA, THEY HAVE ALL ONE BREATH; SO THAT A MAN HATH NO PRE-EMINENCE ABOVE A BEAST: for all is vanity.

"Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the SPIRIT of the beast that goeth downward to the earth." —Ecclesiastes iii., 19-21.

The surface of the earth, the air as high as we can study it, the depths of the sea, swarm with animal life.

The earth rolls around the sun bathed in its warm light. Millions of creatures die with every revolution of the little planet which is their home. And man "going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it" rules the little animals and the big ones and calls himself sole heir of immortality. He says: "For ME this earth was made and balanced in its wonderful journey; for ME alone the marvels of future life are reserved."

He digs up the strange creatures from the slimy depths of the ocean, studies and labels them.

He dissects one animal to study his own diseases. He skins another to cover his feet with leather. He eats one ox and hitches its brother to the plough. He uses nature's explosive forces to bring down the bird on the wing. He sweeps the rivers with his nets.

The stomach of the well-fed man is the graveyard of the animal kingdom.

When his dinner is finished, the man well fed strokes his stomach contentedly and says to himself:

All is well. For I have a soul and THEY have none. They have died to feed me. I am happy and they should be satisfied. ——

What is the nature of the spirit that directs our humble animal brothers and sisters? They cover the earth as long as we let them, give place to us as the human race increases, and, without any thought of organized resistance, die that we may live.

HAVE THESE ANIMALS SOULS?

You have seen the bird grieving over the destruction of its nest.

You have studied the pathetic eyes of the lost dog, and the sad submission of the tired, beaten horse.

Is there not soul in those stricken creatures, and spiritual feeling deeper than that displayed by many men?

First came all ANIMAL life, as we know it, and then came MAN.

Science and religion agree on this point, at least.

All owe their being to the same eternal FORCE. On this point again religion and science agree.

Is the life in animals merely a passing dream, or does it express in its humble way the promise of life eternal?

In Italy a scientific villain experimented on a dog to ascertain the power of maternal affection.

The dog was most cruelly tortured. Its newborn puppy was beside it. Its nerves were racked, its spine injured, BUT WHENEVER PERMITTED TO DO SO, THE POOR TORTURED, ANIMAL MOTHER TURNED ITS HEAD TOWARD ITS WHINING CHILD AND LICKED IT AFFECTIONATELY.

Until it died there was nothing that could overcome maternal love in the heart of that poor dumb mother.

Is there not soul in such love as that?



JESUS' ATTITUDE TOWARD CHILDREN A SUNDAY SERMON

"Suffer the little children to come unto me; and forbid them not; for of such is the Kingdom of God."—Mark X., 14.

Jesus gave to the child its place in the world's society.

With all the power of divine authority He built around the feeblest among us a wall that has protected them through the ages.

Before His day the child existed only by sufferance. It had no rights.

It was but a counter, an infinitesimal atom. It was considered simply the property of the parent. Its father had power of life and death over it. The homeless dog that roams the streets to-day is more effectively shielded from cruelty than was the friendless child before Jesus came to live and to die for the weak and poor.

The law had said:

"The parent is ruler of the child, and may dispose of it as he sees fit."

But Jesus said—and these are the most beautiful and affecting words in all the moral law of the world:

"Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven."—Matthew xviii., 10.

No threats so terrifying as those aimed at men who should harm little children:

"It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."—Matthew xviii., 6.

It is impossible now to conceive the horrid indifference to childhood's rights which preceded the birth of Christianity.

Infanticide was not the exception, but a settled custom. So much so, that in Rome the "exposure" of children in desert places was almost a virtue, since it gave the child some slight chance of surviving.

Not a few, but thousands and tens of thousands of children were thus "exposed." They fell a prey to wild beasts, or to the human beasts, still more ferocious, who took the children to make slaves or criminals of them.

Jesus came, and a miracle was worked—a miracle that no man will deny.

This was the miracle:

Jesus said:

"For I say unto you, their angels behold the face of my Father which is in heaven."

Jesus spoke, and thousands of millions of men, through nineteen centuries, have believed, and obeyed the command.

Every man was warned that the child dying goes straightway into the presence of God, and there, looking upon His face, bears witness to the treatment meted out to him here.

Well might it be said of the man who mistreated such a child:

"It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

Every man should study with awe and reverence the sad, lonely misunderstood life of Jesus, the friend of children. He had no home, and for companions only a few humble fishermen, to whom He spoke in simple parables, as to children.

"The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head."—Matthew viii., 20.

It was this childless, homeless Man that ever used His marvellous power to protect children.

It was He who gave to children their definite share in the kingdom of God.

Before His coming the wisdom of the world was devoted to telling the child ITS duty.

But Jesus explained to grown men THEIR duty toward children.

The family life was His ideal.

All men were His brothers, and, with Him, sons of God.

The loving kindness shown by God toward helpless men and women THEY should show to helpless children.

Neither the rights nor the WISDOM of children must be despised:

"I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes; even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight."—Luke x., 21.

Wherever Jesus went, children followed Him, and the tiniest little soul, in its mother's arms or tottering along in wide-eyed curiosity, could arrest His loving attention.

How beautiful is the picture that the Bible story presents to the mind!

Jesus is at Capernaum, on the sunny shore of the Sea of Galilee.

The Disciples—simple, honest men, often excited as to precedence and filled with deep longing to stand first in the Master's esteem—ask Him:

"Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?"—Matthew xviii., 1.

Around them is gathered the typical Oriental group, and many olive-skinned women, with their children:

"And Jesus called a little child unto Him, and set him in the midst of them and said: 'Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

"'Whosoever, therefore, shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

"'And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.'"

Teach your children to think of and to love the divine Soul that pleaded their cause. Teach them that in all the words He uttered there can be found only love for them. No threats, no warnings— only love.

STUDY OF THE CHARACTER OF GOD

"Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said . . . . Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding."—Job xxxviii. 1, 4.

Since men have lived on earth their feeble intellects have struggled to realize the majesty of God.

Succeeding nations and civilizations have expressed through laws or religions their puny conceptions of the power that controls the universe.

As mental and moral standards have improved, there has been constant improvement in the conception of God.

The Greeks and Romans imagined a variety of gods, and attributed to these the vices and weaknesses of men.

The Fijians worshipped a god who devoured the souls of the dead, inflicting torture in the eating, but mercifully releasing souls from pain when the meal was ended.

The ancient Mexicans went to war "because their gods demanded something to eat." Their armies fought "only endeavoring to take prisoners, that they might have men to feed those gods." ——

Even with the birth of the one great idea—THE UNITY OF GOD—the personality of the universal Creator was but a reflection of His worshippers.

He was a "jealous" God, a "man of war." "God Himself is with us for our captain."— Chron. xiii., 12.

God dwelt in a city made of nothing cheaper than gold and precious stones. For His own glory, He maintained a court Oriental in form, with strange beasts to sing His praises, and He tortured forever and ever creatures that He had made.

The present conception of an omnipotent God has changed greatly since the old days, when cruelty was the rule and was admired. There is to-day insistence on God's LOVE, on His JUSTICE, on His MERCY that "endureth forever"—there is practically no teaching of the old belief that a creature, born of circumstances, and good or bad as circumstances may determine, is to suffer endless torment under never-changing conditions of horror. ——

The writing of this editorial is based upon frequent reading of the book of Job. In that ancient and wonderful book, as in no other writing, the Jewish forces of poetry and of prophecy are exhausted in the effort to portray God's majesty.

All of the old prophet's knowledge of the world, all of his mystic notions of sidereal government, are used in the effort to glorify his Creator.

"Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days?

"Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, Here we are?

"Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow?

"Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks?

"Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?

"Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee?

"Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail?"

Thus through chapters of greatest beauty the primitive mind seeks to portray for the benefit of other primitive minds the omnipotence of the world's Ruler. ——

What hope has man of conceiving, even approximately, the great law-giving Force that rules the universe? Shall we ever do more than attribute to Him those qualities which our own pygmy minds admire? Shall we forever conceive Him as a glorified "individual"?

We believe that in the Book of Job there is suggested the method of studying God that alone can aid us to a better, higher conception.

The study of God must be prosecuted through the study of astronomy, and this the old prophet foreshadows clearly:

"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?

"Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?"

Long years ago children were taught to admire a god who created a leviathan, a unicorn, and "Behemoth."

Children of the future will be told:

You live on a globe twenty-five thousand miles round. It travels ceaselessly through space at a speed of eighteen miles a second. Compared to the huge sun that lights and gives us life, our earth is but a pinhead, and the sun itself is but one tiny dot in the ocean of space. Through that space the sun rushes on an errand unknown, carrying us with it.

Everything moves, revolves, rushes ceaselessly, yet a balance registering the one-thousandth part of a grain is not adjusted as nicely as these huge behemoths of limitless space. Laplace shows positive proof that the earth, travelling eighteen miles per second, has not changed the period of its rotation by the hundredth part of a second in two thousand years.

The mind of the future, imbued with respect for the Force that controls, conducts and makes the laws for the universe, will attain more nearly to a conception of God. But a study of God will remain man's chief and constant effort while he lives here. That study is never-ending.



THE FASCINATING PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY

(If you read this you will probably feel that you have wasted time.)

If you travel back far enough you can see in your mind's eye a primitive man with long, red hair, shivering in some icy pool. He has taken refuge there from a pursuing bear or other foe. He sees that he must die of cold or of the bear's teeth. His dark mind—product of a brain primitive and poor in convolutions—contemplates vaguely the prospect ahead of him. He hopes that after death he may through some mysterious kindness be permitted to meet again the red-haired women and the wolfish cave children left behind.

There, in the cave man's mind, is the first craving for immortality. Born in that poor brain long centuries ago, it has steadily grown stronger with man's mental development. ——

No man looks at death without looking beyond it. None but has a craving for a future life, with consciousness of his personality AND WITH RECOLLECTION OF FRIENDS, FACES AND DEEDS HERE.

Say to a man, "You shall be immortal, but you shall not know that you are you." He will not give you thanks for such immortality.

So strong is man's craving for personal, individual immortality that hell with its fires would be preferred by many to annihilation. The strongest argument against immortality—weak and ignorant at best—is but a frantic attempt of the mind to prove negatively the existence of what it covets.

Fortunately for human happiness in general, FAITH, covers the requirements of millions. They live and die contented, the instinct within them fortified by the teachings of a faith not to be questioned. ——

But what of the men and women who ask for evidence, or at least for plausible argument, proving the reasonableness of immortality? What can be said to please them?

Not much, alas! Probably because we are still so undeveloped that it would be, for many reasons, unsafe to let us know how great a future is before us. Strongest in hope is the argument of Charles Fourier, based on what he declared to be a natural law.

"Attractions are proportionate to destinies."

By this Fourier meant that a universal longing among human beings was certain proof that their ultimate destiny involved the fulfilment of the longing. The little girl fondling a doll foretells maternity. The hectoring boy foretells the soldier's career. No universal attraction, save with a destiny proportionate. ——

The human race since it began to think and believe has thought of and believed in immortality. The half wise declare that belief in immortality and a spirit world came to savage peoples through dreams, that it has been kept alive through superstition and the power of religion. Trivial, certainly, is such an explanation of a phenomenon as wide as mankind's existence. ——

A very consoling fact for the doubter is this. The strongest minds born on the earth have almost invariably, at some stage of development, rejected belief in immortality—only to return to the belief, or at least to the HOPE, with fuller age and riper wisdom. That no great mind has seen any positive argument against the hope of immortality is certainly comforting to all of us. Intelligence can always refute improbability and falsehood. ——

What about the nature of immortality? The Indian hopes for dogs and hunting, the Turk for a life of which the least said the better. The Christian, borrowing his ideas from the writings of the old Hebrews, looks forward to what may be called a solid gold existence—everything made of gold or of something more expensive.

We do not think that religious docility demands implicit belief in any of the published details of our future existence. Gold is not comfortable; jasper would not well replace the green turf.

Is it not more reasonable to assume, since immortality is to be ours, that it is ours now and always has been? We cannot imagine creation of the indestructible. Is it not sensible to take literally that most beautiful invocation: "Thy kingdom come ON EARTH as it is in heaven"?

We know that heaven cannot be above us or hell below; because as we whirl round in each twenty-four hour period those abodes would have to whirl also—quite unreasonable. ——

This earth would make a very good heaven—properly improved and managed. Wipe out human selfishness, and the Sahara and other deserts. Establish universal philanthropy, regulate the climate, confine human manual labor to the pushing of an electric button—all quite possible—and you have the sort of heaven that man would select if left to choose.

Why should we not come back here again and again, taking varying human forms, doing our duty well or badly each time according to our start in life, and finally enjoying perfect terrestrial happiness here as a finished race of immortal beings—immortal in the sense of being indestructible and of possessing the gift of perpetual reincarnation? ——

Now, this earthly reincarnation idea is what we have been driving at since the beginning of this particular article. What is the argument against prior and subsequent existence here? It is this:

"If I am to live here again, I must have lived here before. If I have lived here before I do not know it, and I do not look forward with pleasure to future existence here in which I shall not know myself."

This is a reasonable objection, certainly. Reincarnation without consciousness of former existences would miss half the fun. ——

But it is possible to be in too much of a hurry. Let us suppose that as yet we are not sufficiently developed to carry from one existence to another the memory of former existence. Suppose the time is to come when we shall suddenly advance as far beyond this intellectual stage as this stage of intellect is beyond that of the Bushman. Is it not conceivable that we may suddenly be enabled to recall all former existences and to remember all the various happenings of our former lives? May we not say, "There is Mrs. Jones. I was married to her six million years ago, and we quarrelled"? It seems quite hopeable.

You cannot deny that it is possible. For instance: You now lead a continuous existence. You know that you were alive three days ago and you remember what you did then. But a baby four weeks old does NOT know that he was alive three days ago and he does not know what he did then. He has not reached a stage where his mind can grasp even the fact of continuous existence. We may not have reached a stage enabling us to grasp continuous reincarnation.

Think of this, and see if you cannot get some comfort, or at least some amusing speculation out of it. ——

Science admits and thinks it proves that the inorganic atom of matter is indestructible—that it persists forever. Why should we not admit—and ultimately prove—that the atom of organic force called a soul is indestructible and exists forever?

Every atom of matter, every particle of force, existing in the visible universe will continue to exist billions of centuries after the universe shall have melted and lost its present shape. The nail on your finger will exist as separate atoms when the Milky Way shall have faded from the heavens. How does that strike you for immortality?

We predict that the mysterious force-atom called your soul will exist AND KNOW ITSELF AND ITS FRIENDS ten thousand billions of centuries from now and be as young as ever.



DISCONTENT THE MOTIVE POWER OF PROGRESS

At first the baby lies fiat on his back, eyes staring up at the ceiling.

By and by he gets tired of lying on his back. DISCONTENT with his condition makes him wriggle and wriggle. At last he succeeds in turning over.

If he were contented then, there would be no men on earth—only huge babies. But DISCONTENT again seizes him, and through discontent he learns to crawl.

Crawling—travelling on hands and knees—satisfied lower forms of animal life. It used to satisfy us, in the old days of early evolutionary stages.

But the human infant—thanks to inborn cravings—is DISCONTENTED with crawling. With much trouble and risk and many feeble totterings, he learns to walk erect. He gets up into a position that takes his eyes off the ground. He is able to look at the sun and stars and takes the position of a man. DISCONTENT is his mainspring at every stage. ——

What discontent does in the limited life of a child, it does on a much larger scale in the life of a man—and on a scale still larger in the life of a race.

You can always tell when a man has reached the limit of his possible development. He ceases to be discontented—or at least to show discontent actively.

Contentment, apathy, are signs of decadence and of a career ended in either a man or a nation.

If a baby lies still, no longer wiggling or trying to swallow his toe, you may be sure that he is seriously ill. The nation that no longer wiggles is in a condition as serious as that of the motionless infant. ——

The man or newspaper which imparts dissatisfaction—wise discontent to a nation or to individuals, gives them the motive power that brings improvement.

Ruskin as a young man declared that his one hope in life was to arouse "some dissatisfaction."

The constant aim of men in talking to each other, in writing for newspapers, even in writing novels, should be to arouse discontent.

In this column, as our readers will have noticed, the constant aim is to make the great crowd dissatisfied.

Only through discontent can changes come and are there not causes enough for discontent and need enough for changes?

A majority of the people half educated, and tens of thousands half fed.

Children run over daily because they have no playground but the gutter.

Men of noble aspirations kept down by hard work and poverty.

Children left locked up alone all day while their mothers work for a pittance.

Men, uncertain of their future and of their children's future, engage in a constant struggle for wealth that is not needed—a struggle that develops in the end a passion as useless as it is degrading.

Unless you believe that the world is perfect because YOU happen to have enough to eat and to wear, you should be discontented.

You should remember that the world's achievements and great changes have all come from discontent, and you should be, in as many ways as possible, a breeder of discontent among the human beings around you.



THE AUTOMOBILE WILL MAKE US MORE HUMAN

One of the commonest and most disagreeable sights in a big city is that of a strong, brutal human being beating a weak and overworked horse because it refuses to do what it cannot do.

Brutality inflicted upon horses is atrocious. But the bad effect of such unkind treatment of animals on HUMAN CHARACTER is far more serious than the actual physical suffering inflicted. ——

The perfection of the automobile will do much to improve human beings by taking away from their control and from brutal coercion submissive animals.

Everybody knows that the moral standard is raised immediately in a country when slavery is abolished.

In America we have abolished the slavery of human beings, but we still adhere to horse slavery, accompanied by all the worst forms of the old negro slavery. The faithful slave may be beaten and driven to death. The driver MUST BE BRUTALIZED.

Every day, on every street, you may see stupid, muscular boys and men jerking with all their might on the tender mouths of poor horses, only too willing to do their best.

This brutal indifference to the sufferings of animals makes us brutal and indifferent in other directions.

With the advent of the automobile and the disappearance of horses from our cities, horse slavery will be abolished and men, compelled to use their brains in dealing with machinery, will soon become more nearly human than they are at present. The practical abolition of the street-car horse is one great step in advance.

The abolition of the truck horse, carriage horse, cab horse, soon to come, will complete the dream of those modern and highly deserving abolitionists, the automobile inventors and manufacturers.



LET US BE THANKFUL

Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1902.

Let us be thankful first of all for one great right:

The right, when dissatisfied, to SAY that we are dissatisfied, and to try to make things better.

Let us be thankful that every man—with few exceptions—has a holiday to-day.

However bad our national affairs may seem, let us be thankful they are no worse. And above all let us be thankful that we have the power and the constitutional right to change things, just as soon as we become wise enough to use our ballots. ——

Let us be devoutly thankful for the PUBLIC SCHOOLS, for the fact that every child is taught to read and encouraged to think. The nation now declares that a child has a right to food for the mind, as long as the child behaves properly. We are not so far from the day when human decency will declare that every child and every human being has a right to food for the BODY also, as long as they behave, and are ready for honest work. Let us be thankful for the constantly growing recognition of human rights.

The workingmen of America are better paid than they have ever been before. More of them than ever are at work, and the unions which protect them are more powerful than ever—let us be thankful for these facts. The whole nation prospers when the workers of the nation are busy and well paid.

Science has been, and is, making wonderful progress, explaining for us daily the problems of the universe. Every man must be thankful that highly specialized brains are constantly at work piling up knowledge for him.

As a nation we are too big to fear successful attack, and we are, it is to be hoped, too sensible to seek trouble with others. Let us be thankful that all things point to continued national, mental development on peaceful lines, free from the horrible wholesale murders, called war, that have bled and weakened all people through the ages. ——

Each of us individually has reason for thankfulness.

If you can feel that you are honestly trying to do your duty, that is much to be thankful for.

If you are dissatisfied with yourself, you should be thankful for the power of self-condemnation— and thankful especially that you have long and blessed TIME ahead of you to make up for your mistakes and improve your record.

We live in a wonderful age—wonderful in the fact that life and liberty are fairly secure; wonderful in freedom of conscience.

You can believe in Heaven, Hades, Christian Science, or in nothing at all—and as long as you do not interfere with others, no one can imprison you, or question, or burn you at the stake. ——

We should all be especially thankful for the steady awakening of the national mind. We all pursue wealth—and doubtless circumstances compel us to pay too much attention to that line of effort. But we are all THINKING also. There are a thousand times more thinking, reading men and women to-day in America alone than lived on earth half a century ago. Love of knowledge is spreading, and with love of knowledge, love of justice and a sense of fairness will always be found.

Our material prosperity is great. But it is out- balanced by our mental prosperity. We are becoming a nation of THINKING men and women, and since that means real development, we have all reason to be thankful.

THE HARM THAT IS DONE BY OUR FRIENDS

Thought lives through the ages, flies about over the earth, and goes on visiting fresh minds, after the mind that gave it birth has gone back to dust and nothingness.

An Italian wrote words to this effect:

"Man is commanded to forgive his enemies. Nowhere is imposed on him the far more difficult task of forgiving his friends."

Francis Bacon, the philosopher, read in England the words of the Italian and quoted them.

Vincent W. Byars, a very able thinking man of St. Louis, read Bacon's quotation out there, and now, coming to New York, he says to this writer:

"Why don't you make an editorial on that old Italian saying quoted by Bacon?"

Italy—England—St. Louis—New York—thus the idea has hopped about, until to-day you get it in this column. A million of you read it, or at least glance at it; and so, if the idea has any value, it will go hopping on all over the earth's surface long after the steel press that prints this paper shall have crumbled away. ——

How little your ENEMIES can hurt you! How little harm they do, even when they try! You are warned against them and on your guard. The world knows they are your enemies, and discredits what they say.

It is quite easy to forgive our enemies, for they do us comparatively little harm.

But to forgive our friends would be hard indeed if we could realize how much harm they do us. ——

THE DRUNKARD'S FRIENDS

Who makes the drunkard? His enemies? No. The drunkard is made by his friends.

When it is known that he is inclined to drink no enemy is so vicious as to lead him on. No enemy slaps him on the back and begs him to take "just another drink." No enemy laughs down his poor, feeble attempts at reform. No enemy tells him that it will not hurt him "just this time," and that he really must not refuse to be a good fellow "just for once."

The drunkard is MADE a drunkard, is pushed into the last depths of drunkenness, by his friends.

And it is his friends who kick him and leave him and despise him when he has sunk into the mire.

Did ever the drunkard's enemy hurt him as much as the friend has hurt him? ——

AMBITION KILLED BY FRIENDS

A young man starts out to succeed in life. His enemy may lie about him, may call him worthless. He may think he is hurting him. If there is anything in the young man, the enemy's lies and discouraging words only spur him on to greater effort. They do him good.

It is the friend that ruins the young man by false, injudicious, unearned praise.

As artist, poet, writer, clerk, or in any other effort, the young man begins his work.

It is his friends who tell him that he is a splendid success, when he needs to be told that, at best, he has some slight chance of success, and that everything depends on desperate effort.

Look at the young, conceited fool who, instead of struggling on, rails at the world, feels that he is not appreciated. He is a failure—a sad, foolish failure. He has been made a failure, not by the attacks of his enemies, but by the more dangerous praise of his friends. ——

The lonely and friendless often succeed amazingly. "Multum incola fuit anima mea" ("My spirit hath been much alone") said the great Bacon. His mind fed on loneliness, on failure, and even on disgrace.

How much success is due to freedom from that harm which friendship does?

The reader can finish this editorial for himself with hundreds of other arguments. This is enough for a sample.



SHALL WE TAME AND CHAIN THE INVISIBLE MICROBE AS WE NOW CHAIN NIAGARA?

When Solomon was gathering his materials to build the Temple, his, large cedar trunks from Lebanon and his costly materials from everywhere, he used oxen, mules, camels.

With all his wisdom, he little dreamed that the day would come when his descendants, instead of using mules and huge beasts of burden, would heat water and with steam develop a force sufficient to tear his Temple from its foundation.

Still less did he dream that steam would eventually be superseded, as clumsy and primitive, by the invisible force of electricity.

When the thunder roared, the lightning flashed and his conscience troubled him, Solomon, turning away from his thousand wives and his numerous other doubtful associates, put his head under the richly embroidered pillow, worked, perhaps, by Sheba's own fair hands—it did not enter his mind that that lightning could be tamed and put to work.

Man has been gradually controlling and employing the various animals on the earth's surface. He taught the elephant to haul wood and water and to fight his battles. He trained the horse, the dog. He even taught falcons to bring him back birds from beyond the clouds, and otters to catch fish in the bottom of lakes and rivers.

Gradually he has made himself independent of his animal partners.

The rifle made the falcon useless; steam destroyed the importance of the horse and the ox.

But apparently we have only begun using animal life. We must run the whole gamut of the marvels of creation before conquering conditions on this earth. ——

We used to train the biggest dogs to kill wolves. The Government of the United States is now breeding darning-needles to kill mosquitoes.

A certain kind of wasp, with a black and white striped body, spends his time killing house-flies, and this creature could be bred and used to destroy the disease-spreading pests.

Even the invisible insect life can be made most useful to man and to his health.

The latest plan for disposing of city sewage involves the cultivation of microbes, to be employed as disinfectors.

Several towns in Illinois and in Wisconsin have established plants for the purification of sewage by means of microbe life. The collections of organisms invisible to the naked eye are to be kept in great antiseptic tanks, and employed in the purification of the city 's refuse.

Mosquitoes will ultimately be destroyed, undoubtedly, by breeding among them smaller creatures fatal to their existence.

Man, in his conquest and use of animal life, will run the gamut, from the biggest elephant, employed as a public executioner in India, to the invisible microbe, doing a work ten thousand times more important all over the globe.

These infinitesimal microbes, bred and controlled by science, will do regularly and methodically the work which buzzards and vultures have done on land, which sharks and dogfish have done at sea, throughout endless centuries.

To the marvellous workings of nature we cannot possibly give too much thought or too great admiration. Gardens are filled with beautiful flowers, and fields are fertile to-day because hundreds of years ago sea birds were devouring the carcasses of dead fish, acting as nature's scavengers, and building up the great guano fields of South America.

There is a Peruvian millionaire in his big yacht, and there is a rose in full bloom—the millionaire's money, the beauty of the rose, come from those birds that picked up the dead fish five hundred years ago.

It's an interesting world.



THE ELEPHANT THAT WILL NOT MOVE HAS BETTER EXCUSES THAN WE HAVE FOR FOLLY DISPLAYED

This is an editorial which we shall merely suggest, and which each reader will write out for himself.

In the Zoological Garden of New York a poor elephant has stood in chains for years. The animal was thought to be vicious, and was kept fastened tightly to one spot, that it might have no leeway to do damage.

A short time ago its keeper became convinced that the elephant would do no harm and might safely be unchained. The chains were taken off, and the keeper thought with satisfaction that the poor beast would now enjoy freedom and be made happy by the possibility of moving freely about its large inclosure.

The elephant did not move. The chains were gone, it was no longer tied, but it stood, and it still stands, in just the same spot.

The habit of slavery, of monotony, had become too strong. The elephant, though free, stands still, sadly swaying its heavy head, ignorant of the freedom that has come to it.

Men and women and children who see the elephant, and other men who write paragraphs for the newspapers, dilate on the poor animal's "stupidity."

"The elephant has been called the most intelligent of animals," says one writer, "but this elephant, that doesn't know when the chains are off, seems to prove that the elephant can be a good deal of a fool."

How easy it is for us human beings to see the faults in others, our fellows, and the animals below us.

But which one of us can truly say that he is not in exactly the same position as that poor elephant, fixed to one spot by the chains of long ago?

Are we not still standing as a race just as we stood years and centuries ago, ignorant of the freedom that has come to us?

Thousands of splendid men have worked, lived and died to free us from superstition, from credulity, from ignorance, yet still we stand in the same place, and fail to appreciate the freedom that is ours. ——

Millions of us, tied down by foolish superstition, are like that elephant—the chains are off, but we stand still.

The road to peace, happiness and universal progress has been shown us in the teachings of great leaders, but we still stand in the same old place, fighting, hating, cheating, suspecting, harming one another.

Here and there there is a little progress; gradually we begin to appreciate and enjoy the freedom that has been given to us with the striking away of old mental chains. The process is slow.

Look into your own mind. Do you take advantage of all the possibilities that are before you? Do you use your brain to control your existence, acts and habits for your own benefit and the benefit of others?

If not, you ought to sympathize with this poor elephant, and realize that as your brain exceeds his in bulk proportionately, so do you exceed him in the folly that misses opportunity.



LET US BE THANKFUL

You get tired of reading editorials in which one man, spouting from his editorial pulpit, lays down the law for you—without giving you a chance to reply or contradict.

So let us write this editorial together.

There you sit—the reader—in your street car, or perhaps clinging to a strap, and here we sit, impersonal editorial creature, thinking over thankfulness, Thanksgiving Day, and what reasons we have for feeling thankful.

Let us talk as few platitudes as possible, and try to get at a few of the inside workings of human life. ——

You look across the car and hate the fat man who lounges and spreads his feet around so boorishly.

LET US BE THANKFUL THAT WE SO READILY PERCEIVE THE SHORTCOMINGS OF OTHERS.

Much comfort is derived from others' failings. In the quiet evenings we talk of our neighbors' weaknesses and we enjoy them. By contrast we admire ourselves.

LET US BE THANKFUL THAT WE NEVER APPRECIATE OUR OWN LIMITATIONS.

Each man's children are beautiful and promising in his view.

He cannot see the hopeless construction of their foreheads, nor can he read in their eyes the sad absence of "speculation."

Let us be thankful for that. The future depends on the good care awarded to almost worthless specimens now. ——

FOR THE UNIVERSAL INSTINCT OF THANKFULNESS, LET BE DEEPLY THANKFUL.

The thick-lipped negro on the Congo finds a dead hippopotamus, half eaten by wild beasts, and in his woolly brain a dim, misty feeling of THANKFULNESS is born.

The Tartar bandit surprises mild Chinese conducting a tea caravan across the stony desert. He murders the mild Celestials and feels THANKFUL as he contemplates the booty.

A great Trust manager finds ways to add some millions to those which he already has and does not need. In THANKFUL mood he gives two millions or three to education.

As inborn, as instinctive as the beating of the heart in the human being is THANKFULNESS.

Thankfulness is the unconscious acknowledgment of a Higher Power.

It is the indestructible evidence of man's permanent belief in just government of the universe.

It is the most hopeful, the most promising feature of man's character.

For THANKFULNESS itself we should be thankful. ——

If you want to succeed, cultivate a feeling of hopeful thankfulness.

Hopefulness, thankfulness and success are as near akin as light, heat and motion—the same force underlies, makes up the first trio, as it does the second.

If you find it hard to be thankful, read a little of history, and thankfulness will come. Thousands of millions of men have lived and suffered to make your existence here at least bearable. You may not be satisfied, but you have comforts that were not dreamed of by the luckiest a few centuries back. You think the prosperous have too many privileges.

Perhaps they have. But when your great-grandfather was a young man a nobleman could order his lackeys to seize Voltaire the greatest mind in Europe—and beat him almost to death. Voltaire was locked up in the Bastile for complaining.

Thanks to the eternal row that Voltaire kicked up, you can never be treated as he was. So be thankful to Voltaire.

Be thankful to the long line of plucky men and fighters—not forgetting Christopher Columbus—who have gone before you.

Be thankful that you are alive in an interesting age with interesting events happening.

Be thankful also that with thankfulness you combine the feeling of dissatisfaction, of unrest that will push you ahead and give you cause for fresh thankfulness next year. ——

We are thankful to have you for a reader.

We are thankful for the criticisms and friendly comments that you occasionally send.

We hope that you will enjoy your dinner to-day and not regret it to-morrow.



WHAT WILL 999 YEARS MEAN TO THE HUMAN RACE

The street railroad company in the Borough of Brooklyn has just executed some leases to endure 999 years. Leases of property have also been made for the same period, though, of course, a lease of 999 years will be about as binding 999 years from now as would a lease of the great pyramid executed the day after it was finished, if such a lease should be presented at present to the Egyptian Government.

These preposterous leases are interesting because they bring vividly before the human mind the certainty of wonderful and splendid changes in human affairs.

The street railroad leases are especially fascinating to the imaginative mind.

They deal with present conditions and will seem inconceivably primitive hundreds of years before the leases will have ended.

These leases deal with miserable little electric cars crawling slowly over the face of the earth, at either end an underpaid, overworked man, and in the middle a crowd of poor, dissatisfied, ill-housed human beings.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine years from now the human race will not by any means have accomplished its destiny. It will still be struggling on toward the goal of real civilization.

But it will have grown far beyond the savage condition of life that marks the execution of these long leases.

Before these street railroad leases expire Brooklyn and all other cities as they now exist will have disappeared from the earth.

Perfect transportation, underground, overground and through the air, will enable human beings, if they choose, to live as far from their work as does the seagull or the eagle.

It will no longer be necessary to crowd together in miserable tenements, and homes will be scattered. Human beings undoubtedly will dwell in huge, splendidly managed structures, each in the centre of its own park, far from the noise and the brutality of modern city life.

Before the leases expire the combined cities of New York and Brooklyn and Yonkers and Coney Island and Montauk Point will have grown into an enormous, hideous human aggregation of fifty million or more human beings.

Even the city of a hundred millions may be seen.

But as that huge, monstrous city will have grown, so it will have died, as the monsters of former geological epochs grew and died in their turn.

The site of the vanished great city will be covered with gardens, and children in schools will be taught that human beings who once lived in the cliffs in the Far West afterward gathered together in horrible municipal ant-hills in the East, called cities, before they learned how to live comfortably. ——

Before those street railroad leases expire the present temporary mania for money will have run its course.

Once every important man felt that a certain number of slaves must be murdered at his funeral. Sometimes his favorite horse was shot. In scores of millions of cases his wife was burned alive with his corpse. We have outgrown that. Nowadays the great man who dies must leave behind him an accumulation of millions, which means that thousands of men have worked to give him what he did not need. Before these leases shall have expired that form of financial barbarism will have ceased to exist.

It is reasonable to hope that the coming thousand years will have seen the end of industrial feudalism, which has had its birth in our day, and which will run its course as did the military feudalism of the Middle Ages.

What a marvellous picture the world will present one thousand years from now!

The earth will be adequately populated.

Science will have conquered disease almost entirely. Each woman will be the mother of two children. She will not bring five or six into the world in order that two or three may live.

Competition will be replaced by emulation. The intelligent servant of government will work as loyally and enthusiastically for his government and for the people as the boy at college now works for his college football team.

The human mind will have wandered on many leagues in its search for a satisfying religion, getting always nearer to a clear conception of the grandeur of the universe, and further away from the superstition necessary to the moral control of a brutal semi-civilization.

Human beings will have learned that the noblest thing one man can do is to work for others.

Each will gladly contribute all his talent and strength to the welfare of all.

All will gladly recognize, applaud and richly reward the special ability of the individual.

There will be no poverty. Willingness to work will insure a comfortable livelihood. Education will have developed the average human intellect far beyond our conception. Nine-tenths of the human race have been able to read only within the past few years. What will a thousand years of universal education do? ——

The end of the leases of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company will find many of our problems solved.

It will find, however, the real work of man just beginning. The abstract work of the intellect, the proper organization of society as expressed in human passions, the study of the wonderful and beautiful universe outside of our own little planet, will then begin with the conquest of our material conditions.



THE AZORES—A SMALL LOST WORLD IN A UNIVERSE OF WATER

As you cross the Atlantic by the Southern route the "sighting of the Azores" is one incident of your voyage. Just before daybreak the ship is shaking and the passengers roused by the deep tones of the big steam whistle.

One by one shivering forms straggle up from below, like reluctant spirits answering a premature last call. Bare feet in slippers, and shivering forms with overcoats over nightgowns, gradually line the rails.

On the left there appears, apparently, a heavy, dark bank of clouds:

"The Azores!" shouts down from the bridge your yellow-whiskered captain, looking as cheerful and warm as though it were noon.

You watch, shiver and blink as the light grows stronger behind the pinkish clouds in the east. The dark cloud settles into solid land. You see it clearly. Sharply outlined against the sky stands, forty miles long, a mammoth saw with huge teeth, irregular, sharp. The power of old-time volcanoes made all of that land, and those sharp saw-teeth, pointing toward the sky, are the destroyers of long ago, cold and dead now, but telling ominously of the power that lies hidden below.

Between you and the brightening sunrise, suspended in the "crow's nest," half way up the mast, stands the sailor who watches the sea for you through the night. He calls out, and ahead to the left you see a small boat filled with human beings that seem scarcely as big as your finger. Your ship could plough through miles of such small boats— but out there in the ocean, just as well as inside the biggest court-house, LAW rules, and the big ship must turn out for the small fishing boat.

You realize the power and beauty of law, as our governor and sustainer. You see that laws of little men reach out two thousand miles into the sea. You think of the laws of the universe that stretch across the immeasurable distances of time and space, protecting ALL, and insuring ultimate fulfilment of the destinies of all the worlds.

As those fishermen of the Azores work safely, under full protection, in their little lost corner of the great ocean, so we, in our little world, our little insignificant corner of space, work out our tiny problems safely under the splendid protection of Divine Law and wisdom sent to us from some far- off point of which we know nothing.

The light of the rising sun brings out from shore many other small boats, each with its load of men who wave their arms to the steamship and cheer against the sound of the waves and wind. To them that ship is like the fast express that passes the country railroad station, or the comet that whirls round our sun and off again.

Those fishermen feel that THEY are the REAL world; the steamship and outside creation are only half imagined, interesting phenomena. You look down from the deck and the fishermen seem unreal little ornaments of your European excursion. And so the two sets of human beings go their ways—to each nothing is important, save that which each is doing.

There are great planets and suns that roll past us across this cosmic ocean of ether. Our pathetic little round earth looks to them as that fishing-boat of the Azores looks to you. And WE think of those great interstellar travellers as the fisherman in his little boat thinks of the ocean liner—the great star to us is merely an interesting feature of OUR sky. And we actually wonder whether there is any thought on that big, distant sun; any intelligence on the vast ship that ploughs the ocean of limitless space. ——

The high ridge of volcanic peaks and the others near it are made fertile and green by soil gradually developed through the centuries by seeds brought across the ocean by winds and birds.

The tops of the mountains are black lava. Lakes of black water fill some of the quiet craters. Only, here and there, the rising sulphur smoke from rocky fissures tells of heat and power smouldering.

The last great eruption of the volcanoes occurred a little more than two hundred years ago—so the inhabitants laugh if you speak of danger. They forget that two hundred years in the earth's life is as two minutes in the life of a man—and that what a man did two minutes since he may do again.

Fences are built across the fields of thin soil that cover the lava. Each inch of that land thrown up by fire "belongs" to some man. White houses stand at the edges of deep lava canyons running from the mountain tops to the sea's edge canyons made by pouring lava or by the splitting of the mountains under fearful pressure.

Children play about the blocks of lava—and all their lives, no matter where they may go, those children will think of that far-off island as the only real home, and of black lava blocks as the only REAL kind of stone.

From your passing boat you cannot see these children. Their little lives, lost in the far-off sea, seem as unimportant as the lives of the fish that swim below you.

But some child playing there to-day may be like that other island child, Napoleon, and live to make the rest of the world talk about the island that bred him. Or, better still, some one of those children, with a brain made powerful by solitude and noble thought, may have the idea that shall help us all, teach us more and more to think kindly of each other and help each other, instead of passing each other coldly and indifferently as the big ship passes the little, far-off island.



NO NAPOLEONIC CHESS PLAYER ON AN AIR CUSHION ZANGWILL'S IDEA IS FALSE—WHY CHESS PLAYING STUNTS GENIUS

Mr. Zangwill's keen intellect, straining hard for striking pictures and word effects, sees falsely the great general of the future. He says:

"The Napoleon of the future will be an epileptic chess player, carried about the field of battle on an air cushion."

In this condensed, picturesque fashion Mr. Zangwill expresses sententiously a number of mistaken ideas. He thinks that the game of war is like the game of chess, and that the future world conqueror will be a great chess player, using men as pawns and the world as his chess-board.

He observes the curious and interesting historical fact that of the world's great conquerors many, including the two greatest, Napoleon and Alexander, were afflicted with that mysterious disease, epilepsy. He concludes that the great general of the future will probably be a confirmed epileptic.

The ability of a fighting man to-day resides largely, of course, in the brain. The general's MUSCLES no longer count as a fighting factor. His battles are won or lost inside of his SKULL. Mr. Zangwill concludes that the future great general will have a mind developed to an abnormal extent at the expense of the body—he sees in the future world conqueror an abnormal creature, a giant brain perched on a miserable, wasted body, so feeble and delicate that it must be carried about the field of battle on an air cushion to prevent shocks. ——

The quotation from Zangwill which we print above contains only twenty-one words. Rarely have so many errors, so many fundamental yet plausible errors, been crowded into so little space.

The Napoleon of the future, the great conqueror, will NOT be a chess player. The real Napoleon whom we know had no love for chess or any other waste of time, or any other form of self- indulgence.

Chess is no game for a Napoleon, or for any other man who wants to embody real accomplishment in the story of his life.

CHESS IS A WEAK GAME, FOR IT ADMITS ALL KINDS OF RULES AND ALL KINDS OF FOREORDAINED IMPOSSIBILITIES.

The man who makes the world's great success will not be bound by rules. The great men of the world are great because they refuse to ADMIT impossibilities.

The man who plays chess has two knights, and these knights he can only send two squares in one direction and one square in another, or one square in one direction and two squares in the other. His two bishops can only move diagonally across the board, one on the white and one on the black. His castles lumber along on straight lines. His king cannot be touched or taken, and the game ends when the king is in fatal danger. The queen, in the dull game we call chess, can do almost anything.

But Napoleon was really a great man, and the game of life that he played was very different from the chess game.

When the king was in hopeless danger, Napoleon's game had just begun. Others before him had looked upon kings on the board of life as the chess player looks upon the wooden or ivory king before him.

But to Napoleon kings were pawns, to be moved around and made ridiculous. When he felt like it, he made pawns into kings—the descendant of one of his pawn-kings reigns to-day in Sweden.

Napoleon's game deprived the queen of all power—she was less than a pawn. HIS game sent the bishops hopping back and forth, diagonally or at right angles, as he saw fit. He created knights to his heart's content, and he taught them to move as he wanted.

Napoleon was great because there was nothing of the chess player about him. He did not admit of regular, foreordained moves on the chess-board or on the board of life. HE REFUSED TO CONSIDER ANYTHING IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL HE HAD TRIED IT. He tells us himself that he deserved credit for crossing the Alps, not that he accomplished a difficult feat, but because he refused to believe those who declared the feat impossible.

If anybody said "Check" to Napoleon, he kicked over the chess-board and began a new game of his own—that was what surprised the poor, dull old Austrian generals in Italy.

No; the real great man is no chess player, he has no chess player's mind. And do you, Mr. Reader, waste no time at chess, if you have any idea of being WORTH WHILE in a big or a little way. ——

The Napoleon of the future will be no epileptic. That terrible disease has afflicted many of the noblest intellects, and it is undoubtedly a disease brought on, or at least intensified, by great intellectual activity and a lack of co-ordination between the mental and physical operations of the body. But some great men have been great, not because of that terrible disease, but in spite of it. Science will conquer that trouble, as it has conquered others, and the scientist to do this work will be, himself, one of the world's great men. ——

The Napoleon of the future will be no huge-brained dwarf, with feeble body, carried on an air cushion.

It is true that many great men of to-day are relatively small in body. The gigantic muscle, thick legs, broad shoulders and hairy chests of the successful Viking have nothing to do with modern achievement.

But it is also true that to-day, as always, the healthy mind lives in a healthy body, and lives ON a healthy body.

As well expect to find the most perfect fruit on a withered, half-dead tree, as to find the most able brain in a withered, half-dead body. The blood is the life of the brain, and unless a HEALTHY body supplies HEALTHY blood the brain's chance is small.

Napoleon, it's true, was at one time a physical wreck—BUT DON'T FORGET THAT HIS GREATNESS WAS ALSO A WRECK AT THAT TIME.

The GREAT Napoleon operated in a body tireless and powerful enough to remain thirty consecutive hours on horseback. It was a body so powerful that criminal neglect and stupid ignorance of the laws of health were powerless against it for many years.

The Napoleon that went to St. Helena dwelt in a worn-out body, a fat, degenerate perversion of the Napoleon that conquered the world.

The great conqueror of the future, ladies and gentlemen, will be a splendidly original brain, working through a perfectly developed body, AND WORKING FOR THE MASS OF THE PEOPLE, FOR THEIR FARE, NOT FOR THEIR CONQUEST AND OPPRESSION.

All of which is respectfully submitted to our readers for discussion and criticism.



A GIRL'S FACE IN THE GASLIGHT AND AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE WORLD'S WORK

On a corner of Rector street, down near the river, a loud drum was beating. A guitar and a tambourine competed shrilly with the drum's dull booming. Slowly a careless crowd gathered round the Salvation Army workers.

There were bare-headed women, little girls holding little babies in their arms, sailors drunk, and one or two sober, 'longshoremen pleased with the sound of the drum, and a few of the thin, hungry faces that disturb our well-fed happiness.

The man beat his drum, standing erect and proud in his army uniform.

The two thin, nervous young women played on guitar and tambourine with all their force, striving to gather the crowd whom they hoped to make better men and women.

Thirty or forty people gathered—glad to accept any noise and excitement in their dull lives.

The music stopped, and a young girl stepped to the centre of the circle.

She was frightened. Her voice was weak at first. Gradually her thin, pale face grew animated.

Her blue eyes dilated. In dull, routine way, doing her best, earning respectful silence from the night crowd, she told her story:

"I was bad. I tried to be good. But I couldn't do it with my own strength. I asked God to save me. He did save me. He will save you, if you will ask Him."

She spoke with a strong German accent. With all her deep, earnest soul, with all her poor, limited mental force, she longed to help the men and women around. As she spoke she bent her head farther and farther back, until her eyes looked up to the sky. There, with perfect faith, she saw the God whose work she was humbly doing in the muddy streets and flickering gaslight of the riverside.

While she could control her voice and her deep emotion she talked on her one theme—the power of God to help the helpless. But she BELIEVED, and she FELT what she said. Soon the tears ran over from her upturned eyes, and she could speak no more.

Then a man began—thickset, earnest, with a strong Scotch accent.

He talked to the men about him in a rough way that appealed to them. ——

As the crowd stood listening many passed. A few were contemptuous; the majority were indifferent.

If you see these workers you ask perhaps:

"What good do they do?"

That is the question that may be asked of every man that ever lived, and only One can answer it.

The thin, white-faced girl, playing, singing and PREACHING in the dirty street, does this:

She touches the heart of a half-drunken man. Turning from the saloon door he goes home, and takes to his wife and children as much of his wages as is left, a feeling of repentance, good resolutions.

Her tears are answered by the tears of miserable girls and women who sink back into the shadow as they watch her pure face. Through them she helps to undo the horrible, soul-destroying work of brutal civilization. ——

Mysteriously, diversely, the work of the world is done.

The storm, endless in its power, washes down the mountain-tops to fertilize the valley.

The tiny earthworm works in darkness, crumbling up its little patch of earth to make it fit food for plants.

Each does its work.

The mighty intellect with cyclonic force gives to mankind grand, general views of cosmic grandeur, and introduces to minds prepared the "eternal silences," and the vast serene fields of divine law.



THE "CRIMINAL" CLASS DID THIS VIEW OF IT EVER OCCUR TO YOU?

Much interest just now in CRIMINALS.

Much horror aroused by depravity.

Many plans more or less appropriate for making the air pure.

Many good men, politicians, women and bishops, who spent the Summer at the seaside willing now to spend a few days wiping "CRIME" off the earth. ——

What is CRIME? Who are the criminals? Who makes the criminals?

Do criminals viciously and voluntarily arise among us, eager to lead hunted lives, eager to be jailed at intervals, eager to crawl in the dark, dodge policemen, work in stripes and die in shame? Hardly.

Will you kindly and patiently follow the lives, quickly sketched, of a boy and a girl?

THE GIRL

Born poor, born in hard luck, her father, or mother, or both, victims of long hours, poor fare, bad air and little leisure.

As a baby she struggles against fate and manages to live while three or four little brothers and sisters die and go back to kind earth.

She crawls around the halls of a tenement, a good deal in the way. She is hunted here and chased there.

She is cold in Winter, ill-fed in Summer, never well cared for.

She gets a little so-called education. Ill-dressed and ashamed beside the other children, she is glad to escape the education. No one at home can help her on. No one away from home cares about her.

She grows up white, sickly, like a potato sprouting in a cellar. At the corner of a fine street she sees the carriages passing with other girls in warm furs, or in fine, cool Summer dresses.

With a poor shawl around her and with heels run down she peers in at the restaurant window, to see other women leading lives very different from hers.

Steadily she has impressed upon her the fact, absolutely undeniable, that as the world is organized there is no especial place for her—certainly no comfort for her.

She finds work, perhaps. Hours as long as the daylight.

Ten minutes late—half a day's fine.

At the end of the day aching feet, aching back, system ill-fed, not enough earned to live upon honestly—and that prospect stretches ahead farther than her poor eyes can see.