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influence ought to be exerted in other ways." For this reason, and because the Established Church is becoming more and more penetrated with a sense of the impossibility of keeping the Church in organic relation with the Government, disestablishment, though it may be long deferred, will ultimately come. And it will be welcomed alike by the sacramentarian who revolts, as did the leaders of the Oxford Movement, from the control of the Church of God by any group of statesmen, however eminent; by evangelical Churchmen to whom the Church is above all an organized religious experience, and by the Broad Churchmen to whom the Church is a divine influence penetrating society from all sides through spiritual channels. When the Church of England is detached from the Government of England, it will become for the first time a free Church, and after a brief period of readjustment it will secure a spiritual authority which it has not possessed since the Reformation.

In Germany an electoral campaign is now in progress which turns, not upon the question of the policy of the Government in southwestern Africa, but on the great influence which the Clerical party has secured in the National Legislature. There is a very widespread protest against the policy in West and Southwest Africa, which has enormously increased the cost of the conduct of war during the last year.. The Clericals in the Reichstag, who have hitherto been supporters of the Government, joined with the Socialists and defeated the appropriation for which the Emperor asked. The Emperor, who, in spite of some obvious mistakes, is an adroit politician as well as a statesman, has pushed aside this issue, and the campaign turns on the antagonism on the question of clerical rule. The fact that the Clericals have been willing to cast in their lot with the Socialists, whom they regard with abhorrence and terror, is looked upon as an indication of their willingness to work with any party and use any means to secure their own ends. It is not, the Government urges, a political party which it is fighting, but a group of sectarians representing less than one-third of the people of

the Empire, attempting to dictate its internal and external policy. The phrase, "The political tyranny of the Ultramontanes has become intolerable," used by one of the National Liberal leaders lately, expresses what appears to be the sentiment of the German nation as a whole. What is called the "Rouge et Noir" combination-the union of the black and the red-has brought the nation face to face with a situation with which Bismarck was supposed to have dealt finally.

Spain has long been one of the centers of the Ultramontane element in the Roman Catholic Church; a country in which there have been, as in every country, very noble examples of Christian effort and courage among the clergy, but in which there have been developed some of the most reactionary types of thought and policy within the Roman Catholic Church. The fact that the reactionary type has had, on the whole, the predominant influence explains the sharpness of the reaction which has brought into being in Spain, as in Italy, a group of the most radical Socialists and the most uncompromising Anarchists. Here, as in England, the educational question has come to the front, and the pressing necessity of enlarging the work and improving the quality of the public schools is generally felt. Between five and six thousand monks are engaged in the work of teaching Spanish children; and the fact that there are in that country between three and four thousand monastic foundations has put into the hands of the Liberals a very strong argument, if not a positive grievance; for the population of Spain is only about nineteen millions. The present Ministry, under the leadership of the Prime Minister, Dominguez, has adopted the policy of extending the action of the law passed in 1902, which provided for the civil control of religious associations in the general direction taken by the recently adopted French law; the recognition of civil marriage as legal, whether accompanied by a religious ceremony or not, and the extension of municipal control over cemeteries. These are the preliminary steps in a movement for the separation of Church and State in Spain; a measure which, in

the judgment of many of the best men of all parties, will be even more beneficial to the Church than to the State.

The Outlook has given large space to the situation in France, because everything which the French do on a large scale is done dramatically, because of the intrinsic significance and importance to the country of the contest between the French Government and the Vatican, and because the general significance of what is happening in France is part of the larger movement that has embraced all western Europe, with the exception of Austria-Hungary. The account of recent happenings in Paris, prepared for The Outlook by M. Charles Wagner, which appears in another place, is significant as coming from the hand of a man who, although not a Catholic, is one of the most ardently and effectively religious men in the France of to-day. There, as in England and Spain, the immediate occasion of the struggle has been the endeavor to take education out of the hands of ecclesiastics and nationalize it. Beneath all subsidiary issues, and below all the confusion and irritability incident upon so vast a struggle, the French people, with extraordinary unanimity, annulled the Concordat with the Roman Catholic Church and have detached the State from association with all religious bodies. It is not the Roman Catholic Church as a Church that France, Germany, and Spain oppose; it is not the Pope as the spiritual head of a church: it is rather the Vatican, which stands for a political policy and for what remains of the old union of Church and State throughout Europe. Nearly all the great mistakes of the Roman Catholic Church, its defects and disasters, have been due to its attempt to combine the functions of a spiritual society with those of a political organization. When the process which has been going on since before the Reformation is accomplished, and the Roman Catholic Church ceases to be identified with political organizations and to take part in party politics, it will enter upon a stage of influence and power which are likely to surpass anything that it has attained in those periods when its power was almost unassailable. Those who recognize, as

The Outlook does, its immense service to religion and to civilization, and who recognize also the great part which it plays and is to play in the religious and moral life of the modern world, will welcome even revolution, if through revolution the religious energy and power of the Catholic Church can be liberated to do purely religious work. The French people have acted not only for the State but for the Church in annulling the Concordat, in nationalizing education, in putting Church property under the laws of the State as it is in this country. They will make a great mistake if they attempt in any way to control or direct the form and manner of worship. Painful as the experience is for the Catholic Church with its traditions and the reverence with which it regards its places of worship and its religious houses, The Outlook believes, as a vast number of Catholics believe, that any movement which will take the Church finally out of political life, and conserve all its energies for its work, will bring untold blessings to it and to the world.

The Next Step

Several years ago, on a pleasant morning, a number of Americans were seated in a compartment in a train approaching the quaint old town of Nuremberg. Two of them were girls recently graduated from college and in the earlier stages of intense, eager American anxiety for knowledge. There happened to be a young Austrian in the same compartment; when the train drew up at the station of a beautiful little village, suggestive of those walks through the woods which are one of the great resources of Germany, another train came down on the opposite side of the platform and poured out a crowd of people from Nuremberg. One of the American girls, on the qui vive every minute to observe and understand, turned to the young Austrian and said, "What goes on here?" He answered quietly, "Nature."

Both the question and the answer were significant, the one of the prevalent American feeling that general interest is

inexplicable from any other standpoint except that of some kind of action; the other, of the trained capacity of the German quietly to receive and deeply enjoy all forms of life and art within his reach. In Germany, as in many other parts of Europe, recreation, diversion, and pleasure are within the means of the poorest people at almost no expense of time, exertion, or money. Lovely views are made accessible at strategic points for observation; food and drink are to be had at the most moderate cost; the art of enjoyment is fostered and developed, and every arrangement is made to bring beauty and rest to the very doors of the humblest. Few things impress an American who gets out of the beaten highways of travel abroad more deeply than the capacity of people of all classes for simple pleasure; the obvious delight they find in the most inexpensive and humble amusements, their power of relaxation, of surrendering themselves without effort to the quiet, the beauty, and the repose of a stretch of trees or a bit of meadow. At certain hours on a summer day the roads in the Bois de Boulogne are thronged with carriages, and in the season the observer who likes to watch the procession of vehicles and persons goes there to see "the world go by," as he sits in front of the Café de Paris for the same purpose. But the happiest part of that world is not to be found in the moving mass of vehicles of all sorts and kinds, but under the trees, where numberless parties of men, women, and children, coming from the poorer sections of the city, are quietly lunching or playing games, or having an hour of talk in the heat of the day.

On the other hand, few things strike foreigners more forcibly in this country than the great expense of pleasure of all kinds, the distances which people have to go, the cost of transportation, the high price of admission to shows and spectacles, and the comparatively large cost for a very little and very often for very poor food. It is almost impossible to take a little excursion from any of our great cities without making an appreciable break in a five-dollar bill, even if one goes in the most modest way; and the country, as a whole, still remains

uncharted and without paths, so far as access to commanding positions and beautiful views and lovely places of quiet are concerned.

We have in a way conquered the continent as the Romans conquered the Greeks, but the continent has taken its revenge, as the Greeks took their revenge on the Romans, by subjugating us. It has exacted so much toil that it has almost paralyzed our power of receiving pleasure from it. This statement is not inconsistent with the other statements, so often and so truthfully made, that the love of out-of-doors and the art of out-of-door living are steadily gaining ground among Americans. Every form of active, energetic life is steadily making progress; but there is another side of life which is still largely undeveloped. Men live quite as much by what they receive as by what they give, rest comes from repose rather than from action, and enrichment from opening the mind and heart to all the benignant and fruitful influences that flow from earth and sky. It is the power of passive enjoyment that Americans have still to develop, that capacity which lay behind. the young Austrian's answer. In order to have pleasure and to be content, Americans, as a rule, must go where something "goes on." They are not satisfied and content to be with nature; to surrender themselves to the influences of a quiet hour and a secluded place. They are learning, with characteristic American energy, the names of the trees, the shrubs, the flowers, and the birds. One meets them tramping through the woods in every direction with popular handbooks under their arms, intent on being able to name everything in sight; but it remains true of a great many of these excellent people, who are doing an excellent thing if they do it in the right way, that they are not becoming acquainted with nature by this process, any more than they would become acquainted with flowers by learning their botanical names and the scientific method of analyzing them. The ability to name the animals, the trees, and the flowers adds greatly to the pleasure of out-of-door life, but it does not give us access to the heart of

the world. A man must know how to let himself lie fallow, to empty himself, so to speak, of his ambitions and energies, in order that nature may take possession of him, to hear the birds sing for the joy of it, as the lover of Shakespeare reads the play, not for the sake of being able to give an exact scientific description either of the song or of the poem. We have conquered nature; it is time now to win her confidence. she has helped us with her colossal energies, she stands ready to heal us with those deep, vital, tranquillizing currents in which her life flows.

Railway Massacres

As

Last week, in two railway wrecks, sickening in their horror, a hundred persons were killed and many more were injured. During the past fiscal year nearly ten thousand people were killed in American railway accidents and over eighty-six thousand injured. These appalling totals remind us that in regulating transportation there is an elemental governmental duty, more insistent than that of freightrate supervision.

The financiers who control our railways seem to want, first, to get immediate cash returns from a particular property, and only secondly permanently to equip that property. Their spirit of gain has naturally been copied by the actual physical operators of the property. A callousness to the demands of humanity sometimes results, as shown, for instance, by this despatch in the New York Sun concerning last week's fatal accident on the Baltimore and Ohio road:

The Coroner succeeded in getting from Chief Train Despatcher Dent the admission that orders had been given to allow a regular express train to pass by the scene of the wreck after the track had been cleared, before the relief train sent to bring in the dead was allowed to proceed. The relief train was thus delayed thirteen minutes. The object of the Coroner was to show that the railroad had had greater concern for the movement of its trains on schedule time than for bringing in the dead killed on its line.

Our railway disasters may be attributable to (1) the unreasonableness of the hours of work required from railway

employees, and (2) the inadequacy of present safety appliances.

As an example of the first cause, the terrible destruction of life on the Rock Island Railway in Kansas last week was due to a wrong signal given by an eighteen-year-old telegraph operator who had been too long on duty. We frequently hear stories of signalmen on duty for twelve hours, and of engineers under continuous strain even up to sixteen hours, and then with but inadequate rest before their next runs. In one of the reports of the Baltimore and Ohio disaster we read:

Commissioner Clements again questioned the engineer and his fireman, McClelland, closely on the subject of the amount of sleep they had had before beginning the run from Cumberland to Washington. It was brought out that they had both been on duty for. forty-eight hours, with two intervals of four hours each for sleep.

President Roosevelt's humane recommendation in his annual Messages on this subject is now receiving deserved attention in Congress: a bill to limit the hours of railway employees is about Since to be voted on by the Senate. public attention has now been dramatically directed to this reform, one would think that its principle, at least, should be established by a unanimous vote. Certainly the necessity for government regulation of inter-State railways, under the commerce clause of the Constitution, has never been so evident.

But granted that the hours of railway employees' service are to be reasonably limited, there still remains the menacing

and more formidable second cause of railway accidents, the inadequacy of safety appliances. It has been said that block signals, scrupulously followed, are good enough. But they never will be scrupulously followed, even by that road which has just reported over sixteen hundred search tests with not a single failure, the penalty of dismissal attaching to any failure. However admirable these conditions of preparation, the human factor, in actual attention to signals, will remain human, exposed to

sudden ills or sicknesses or frailties incapacitating an engineer or operator from duty. What then? Is a trainload of precious human life always to be at

the mercy of one man? In the Southern Railway disaster a month ago, in which the lamented Samuel Spencer lost his life, the company had furnished its road with the manual telegraph block signal system, but if its signal operators could not guard their own president, what chance have the road's patrons ? In last week's accident on the Baltimore and Ohio the road was also equipped with the block system, but the engineer could not see the light on account of a dense fog.

Though only twenty-two per cent. of our railways are protected by any block signal system, and less than five per cent. by an automatic device, the block system has done much to save life. But it does not go far enough. Its signal and switching appliances may either fall into neglect or those who work them may inadvertently or willfully allow more than one train on a single block. Indeed, a prominent authority declares that this has become a custom on our roads! As long as railway companies give more attention to dividends and increased values of stock than they do to safe operation and the protection of their patrons' lives, just so long will there be indisposition to make use of the latest. engineering discoveries and of the most expensive methods of operation which are independent of the human factor and its inevitable frailties. Such an up-todate method is already in operation on

second train to the block already occupied.

Thus most of our railway accidents are preventable, since they are due to overhours, or to inadequate appliances. Concerning the first cause, Congress, as noted above, is about to act, and concerning the second, Congress has acted. Under a resolution passed by it some time ago the Inter-State Commerce Commission has instituted, we are glad to say, an investigation of safety appliances in general and now particularly as to their working in the most recent disasters. In addition, a resolution has been introduced in Congress calling for an enlargement of the Commission's powers. Those powers should include, as they do in England, that of official investigation of all railway accidents, of adjudgment of responsibility for them, and of authority to order the installation of the best safety appliances. Whether we arrive at these results through the Commission or by the establishment of a special bureau in the Department of Commerce is a matter for debate. But debate ought no longer to be tolerated as to whether Congress has the right to exercise such supervision over American railways as shall make them at least as safe for travelers as the railways of the other civilized countries. of the world.

the Boston and New York City subways. Through Man to God

It should be applied, as far as weather conditions permit, to our trunk lines. The apparatus in question comprises an automatic block system of the type adopted by the Pennsylvania and a number of other railways, but with the addition of a short inclined plane alongside the track at the entrance to the block. This is interlocked by the mechanism which lights the red lamp at the entrance to the block whenever it is occupied by a train. The plane, when raised, touches a lever which depends from the second train, and this lever in turn applies the air-brake, bringing the second train to a standstill. Hence an engineer cannot run past the danger signal.

This device

is reported to be perfectly successful in operation, and is regarded as an absolute protection against the admission of a

In the title of his last volume, "Through Man to God," Dr. George A. Gordon indicates the change in the method of approach to God which distinguishes the new thinking. The Calvinistic theology proceeded in the opposite direction-from God to man. Its startingpoint was a group of a priori assumptions respecting God-as that he is infinite in justice, purity, and truth, that he is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, that he is the absolute and unconditioned Sovereign of the universe. These assumptions being made, the Scripture was sought for proof texts to substantiate them; but this was still from God to man, because the Bible was assumed to be, not the record of man's partial and imperfect experience of God,

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