HAT, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain "Natural Enemies" of the French, there are successfully selected, during the French war, say thirty ablebodied men: Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them: she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest under can stand thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red, and shipped away, at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say, only, to the south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And now to that same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending; till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition, and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word "Fire!" is given and they blow the souls out of one another, and in place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their Governors had fallen out; and, instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these Or ever the knightly years were gone And you were a Christian Slave. I saw, I took, I cast you by, I bent and broke your pride. You cursed your gods and died. And a myriad suns have set and shone To her that had been his Slave. The pride I trampled in now my scathe, The old resentment lasts like death, Yet not for an hour do I wish undone And you were a Virgin Slave. "Or Ever the Knightly Years Were Gone," poor blockheads shoot.-Alas, so is it in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands; still as of old," what deviltry soever Kings do, the Greeks must pay the piper!"-In that fiction of the English Smollett, it is true, the final Cessation of War is perhaps prophetically shadowed forth; where the two Natural Enemies, in person, take each a Tobacco-pipe, filled with Brimstone; light the same, and smoke in one another's faces, till the weaker give in: but from such predicted Peace-Era, what blood-filled, trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!-Carlyle. has no and can think, no heart and can not feel. When she moves it is in wrath; when she pauses it is amid ruin. Her prayers are curses, her God is a demon, her communion is death, her vengeance is eternity, her decalogue written in the blood of her victims, and if she stops for a moment in her infernal flight it is upon a kindred rock to whet her vulture fang for a more sanguinary desolation.-Daniel O'Connell. S far back as we know anything about civilization, the cultivation of the soil has been the first and most important industry in any thriving State. It will always be. Herodotus, the father of history, tells the story of the human race in the Valley of the Euphrates de He says that with poor cultivation those who tilled the soil there got a yield of fiftyfold, with fair cultivation one hundredfold, and with good cultivation two hundredfold. That was the garden of the world in its day. Its great cities, Babylon and Nineveh, where are they? Piles of desert sand mark where they stood. In place of the millions that overran the world, there are a few wandering Arabs feeding half-starved sheep and goats. The Promised Land-the Land of Canaan itself to which the Children of Israel were brought up from Egypt, what is it now? A land overflowing with milk and honey? Today it has neither milk nor honey. It is a barren waste of desert, peopled by scattered robber bands. A provision of Providence fertilized the soil of the valley of the Nile by overflowing it every year. From the earliest records that history gives, Egypt has been a land of remarkable crops; and today the land thus fertilized by overflow is yielding more abundantly than ever. It is made clear by every process of logic and by the proof of historic fact that the wealth of a nation, the character of its people, the quality and permanence of its institutions are all dependent upon sound and sufficient agricultural foundation. Not armies or navies or commerce or diversity of manufacture or anything other than the farm is the anchor which will hold through the storms of time that sweep all else away.-James J. Hill. piness of his fellowmen; as from habit, following beneficial experience, his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, extending to men of all races, and finally to the lower animals, so would the standard of his morality rise higher and higher. Looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger. The struggle between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe, and virtue will be triumphant. -Charles Darwin, Keep me humble in every relation of life, not unduly egotistical, nor liable to the serious sin of self-depreciation. In success keep me meek. In sorrow, may my soul be uplifted by the thought that if there were no shadow, there would be no sunshine, and that everything in life must have its antithesis. Grant that I may be a true, loyal friend, a genial companion with the broad honest charity born of an intimate knowledge of my own shortcomings. If I win, crown me with the laurels fitting to be worn by a victor, and if I fall, may it be with my face to the foe, fighting manfully, and falling, fling to the host behind,-play up, play up, and play the game." The Optimist's Prayer," by William J. Robinson. wine, men will trail along, torn from peaceful labor, from their wives, mothers and children-hundreds of thousands of simple-minded, goodnatured men with murderous weapons in their-hands-anywhere they may be driven. HE bells will peal, longhaired men will dress in golden sacks to pray for successful slaughter. And the old story will begin again, the awful customary acts. The editors of the daily Press will begin virulently to stir men up to hatred and manslaughter in the name of patriotism, happy in the receipt of an increased income. Manufacturers, merchants, contractors for military stores, will hurry joyously about their business, in the hope of double receipts. All sorts of Government officials will buzz about, foreseeing a possibility of purloining something more than usual. The military authorities will hurry hither and thither, drawing double pay and rations, and with the expectation of receiving for the slaughter of other men various silly little ornaments which they so highly prize, as ribbons, crosses, orders, and stars. Idle ladies and gentlemen will make a great fuss, entering their names in advance for the Red Cross Society, and ready to bind up the wounds of those whom their husbands and brothers will mutilate; and they will imagine that in so doing they are performing a most Christian work s And, smothering despair within their souls by songs, licentiousness, and They will march, freeze, hunger, suffer sickness, and die from it, or finally come to some place where they will be slain by thousands or kill thousands themselves with no reason;menwhom they have never seen before, and who neither have done nor could do them any mischief. And when the number of sick, wounded and killed becomes so great that there are not hands enough left to pick them up, and when the air is so infected with the putrefying scent of the " food for powder" that even the authorities find it disagreeable, a truce will be made, the wounded will be pickedup anyhow, the sick will be brought in and huddled together in heaps, the killed will be covered with earth and lime, and once more the crowd of deluded men will be led on and on till those who have devised the project, weary of it, or till those who thought to find it profitable receive their spoil. And so once more men will be made savage, fierce and brutal, and love will wane in the world, and the Christianizing of mankind, which has already begun, will lapse for scores and for hundreds of years And so the men who reaped profit from it all will assert that since there has been awar there must needs have been one, and that other wars must follow, and they will again prepare future generations for a continuance of slaughter, depraving them from their birth.-Leo Tolstoy. The crest and crowning of all good, Come, clear the way, then, clear the way: Blind creeds and kings have had their day. Break the dead branches from the path: "Brotherhood,” by Edwin Markham Na sinless and painless world the moral element would be lacking; the goodness would have no more significance in our conscious life than that load of atmosphere which we are always carrying about with us. We are thus brought to a striking conclusion, the essential soundness of which can not be gainsaid. In a happy world there must be pain and sorrow, and in a moral world the knowledge of evil is indispensable. The stern necessity of this has been proved to inhere in the innermost constitution of the human soul. It is part and parcel of the universe To him who is disposed to cavil at the world which God has in such wise created, we may fairly put the question whether the prospect of escape from its ills would ever induce him to put off this human consciousness, and accept some form of existence unknown and inconceivable! The alternative is clear: on the one hand a world with sin and suffering, on the other hand an unthinkable world in which conscious life does not involve contrast. We do not find that evil has been interpolated into the universe from without; we find that, on the contrary, it is an indispensable part of the dramatic whole. God is the creator of evil, and from the eternal scheme of things diabolism is forever excluded. Ormuzd and Ahriman have had their day and perished, along with the doctrine of special creation and other fancies of the untutored mind. From our present standpoint we may fairly ask, what would have been the worth of that primitive innocence portrayed in the myth of the Garden of Eden, had it ever been realized in the life of men? What would have been the moral value or significance of a race of human beings ignorant of sin, and doing beneficent acts with no more consciousness or volition than the deftly contrived machine that picks up raw material at one end, and turns out some finished product at the other? Clearly, for strong and resolute men and women, an Eden would be at best but a fool's paradise.-Fiske. A silence there expectant, meaning, A thousand hearers, forward-leaning, 30 300 DO-NOTHING days may be the busiest ones They are the days in which we absorb; while on the do-much days we try to make others absorb from us whatever we have in overplus: ribbons, wisdom or cheese. If we oftener eased the strain on our eyes and minds, we should be enriched by impressions that in our usual attent and mastering attitude we refuse to heed. Americans ought to have a wholesome laziness preached to them, after three centuries of urging to gain and work, and several patriotic citizens make examples of themselves, for the public benefit, by refraining from toil. -Charles M. Skinner. He saw the graves of heroes sleeping, He saw men's eyes suffused and dim; A triumph great, a nation weeping, Found true expression there in him. Not often in a nation's story, He gave that day our grief and glory (Concluded on next page) OVERN the lips as they were palacedoors, the king within; tranquil and fair and courteous be all words which from that presence win. -Sir Edwin Arnold. 豆 MAN asked to define the essential characteristics of a gentlemanusing the term in its widest sense-would presumably reply, "The will to put himself in the place of others; the horror of forcing others into positions from which he would himself recoil; the power to do what seems to him to be right, without considering what others may say or think."-John Galsworthy. ET me do my work each day; and if the darkened hours of despair overcome me, may I not forget the strength that comforted me in the desolation of other times. May I still remember the bright hours that found me walking over the silent hills of my childhood, or dreaming on the margin of the quiet river, when a light glowed within me, and I promised my early God to have courage amid the tempests of the changing years Spare me from bitterness and from the sharp passions of unguarded moments. May I not forget that poverty and riches are of the spirit. Though the world know me not, may my thoughts and actions be such as shall keep me friendly with myself. Lift my eyes from the earth, and let me not forget the uses of the stars. Forbid that I should judge others, lest I condemn myself. Let me not follow the clamor of the world, but walk calmly in my path. Give me a few friends who will love me for what I am; and keep ever burning before my vagrant steps the kindly light of hope. And though age and infirmity overtake me, and I come not within sight of the castle of my dreams, teach me still to be thankful for life, and for time's olden memories that are good and sweet; and may the evening's twilight find me gentle still. Max Ehrmann. EN will have, and must have, their pleasures. Social reformers and temperance agitators could not make a greater mistake than by following the example of the Puritans and tabuing all pleasures. They ought to distinguish between those that have a tendency to excess and vice, and those that are harmless and ennobling, encouraging the latter in every possible way. And first among those that should be encouraged is music, because it is always ennobling, and can be enjoyed simultaneously by the greatest number. Its effect is well described in Margaret Fuller's private journal: 'I felt raised above all care, all pain, all fear, and every taint of vulgarity was washed out of the world." That is precisely wherein the moral power of music lies; for vulgarity is the twin sister of vice. 66 -Henry T. Finck. Brief, so brief—the words were falling From some Homeric yesterday. No impulse this, no actor speaking The man, the place, were God's own The words are our inheritance. A pause, a hush, a wonder growing; by Harrison D. Mason EADING is to the mind what exerone, health is preserved, strengthened and invigorated: by the other, virtue (which is the health of the mind) is kept alive, cherished and confirmed.-Addison. 30 30 is Reaven, and the lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life and the lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship's sake that ye do them. Therefore, I bid you not dwell in hell, but in heavenupon earth, which is a part of heaven and forsooth no foul part. -William Morris. IVE me the that has been spent in war, and I will clothe every man, woman and child in an attire of which kings and queens would be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to the gospel of peace. -Charles Sumner. |