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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
With the old world to the grave,
I was a King in Babylon

And you were a Christian Slave.

I saw, I took, I cast you by,

I bent and broke your pride.
You loved me well, or I heard them lie,
But your longing was denied.
Surely I knew that by and by

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 can stand under thirty stone avoirdupoiss 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

You cursed your gods and died.

And a myriad suns have set and shone
Since then upon the grave
Decreed by the King in Babylon

To her that had been his Slave.

The pride I trampled in now my scathe,
For it tramples me again.

The old resentment lasts like death,
For you love, yet you refrain.

I break my heart on your hard unfaith,
And I break my heart in vain.

Yet not for an hour do I wish undone
The deed beyond the grave,
When I was a King in Babylon

And you were a Virgin Slave.
"Or Ever the Knightly Years Were Gone,”
by William Ernest Henley

66

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.

wanted. And now to that same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dum-IGOTRY has no head and can not drudge, 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

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.

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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

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.

desert sand mark where they stood. In OH!

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.

S man advanced gradually in intel

trace the more remote consequences of his actions; as he acquired sufficient knowledge to reject baneful customs and superstitions; as he regarded more and more, not only the welfare, but the hap

-Charles Darwin.

H! Unseen Power that rules and controls the destinies of the children of earth: teach me the symphony of life so that my nature may be in tune with Thine.

Reveal to me the joy of being loving, self-sacrificing and charitable. Teach me to know and play life's game with courage, fortitude and confidence.

Endow me with wisdom to guard my tongue and temper, and learn with patience the art of ruling my own life for its highest good, with due regard for the privacy, rights and limitations of other lives o

Help me to strive for the highest legitimate reward of merit, ambition, and opportunity in my activities, ever ready to extend a kindly helping hand to those who need encouragement and succor in the struggle.

Enable me to give a smile instead of a frown, a cheerful, kindly word instead of harshness and bitterness.

Make me sympathetic in sorrow, realizing that there are hidden woes in every life no matter how exalted or lowly.

If in life's battle I am wounded or tottering, pour into my wounds the balm of hope, and imbue me with courage undaunted to arise and continue the strife.

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.

O peal,

HE bells will 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,

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The crest and crowning of all good,
Life's final star, is Brotherhood;
For it will bring again to earth
Her long-lost Poesy and Mirth:
Will send new light on every face,
A kingly power upon the race.

And till it comes, we men are slaves,
And travel downward to the dust of graves.

Come, clear the way, then, clear the way: Blind creeds and kings have had their day.

Break the dead branches from the path:
Our hope is in the aftermath-
Our hope is in heroic men,

Star-led to build the world again.
To this event the ages ran:
Make way for Brotherhood—make way
for Man!

"Brotherhood,” by Edwin Markham

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

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,thesick 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 oft 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.

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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.

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,
And then a voice clear-pitched and
tense;

A thousand hearers, forward-leaning,
Were in the thrall of eloquence.

We are thus brought to a striking con-
clusion, the essential soundness of which
can not be gain-
said. In a happy
world there must
be pain and sor-
row, and in a moral
world the knowl-
edge of evil is in-
dispensable. The
stern necessity of
this has been
proved to inhere in
the innermost con-
stitution of the
human soul. It is
part and parcel of
the universe s To
him who is dis-
posed to cavil at
the world which

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,

Such words supreme, such manhood
fine;

He gave that day our grief and glory
The dignity of things divine.
(Concluded on next page)

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.

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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.

doors, the king within; tranquil and fair and courteous be all words which from that presence win.

-Sir Edwin Arnold.

We do not find that evil has been inter-OVERN the lips as they were palacepolated 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

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.

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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 pos

Brief, so brief-the words were falling Ere men had time to note and weigh; As if again the gods were calling

From some Homeric yesterday.

No impulse this, no actor speaking

Of thoughts which came by happy chance;

The man, the place, were God's own seeking;

The words are our inheritance.

A pause, a hush, a wonder growing;
A prophet's vision, understood;
In that strange spell of his bestowing,
They dreamed,with him,of Brotherhood.
"Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg,"

self. 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.

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by Harrison D. Mason

sible 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

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IVE me the money 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.

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