nigh ceases, commerce languishes, and "hard times are on the people. Now the waste from and by the drink-traffic alone in these United States amounts at the end of that period to a little more than double the annual earnings of all the people of this country. In consequence, the commercial world finds itself overburdened; nature is exhausted and demands economy and rest. "Now," cry the demagogues, "there is an overproduction of manufactures and the products of the soil. There is no market for goods. We must have new outlets for commerce. Manufacturers are getting rich at the expense of the working man; and we must revise the tariff." Yea, verily. But why fume at the wrecks of the flood, while you leave unvisited and untouched the mighty fountains that produce the floods? It is true that there is no market for the products, and the savings, but why? Is it not simply because the great armies of the poor of the world, who far outnumber the well-to-do, and who need those products and ought to have them, whose physical and moral salvation depends on having them, have wasted and do so waste the products of their own and others' toil, for that which is not bread, that they are no longer able to buy, and in consequence your markets are glutted with goods, and panics. come and "hard times" follow until such time as nature can recuperate the waste? He who wastes his substance in riotous. living must come to want at last.

Make it possible for the toilers of the world to buy by removing the enormous annual waste to them caused by vices, and how the wheels of commerce would spin, and peace and plenty everywhere abound, and over all the weary lands come the benediction of Heaven.

The masses of the world in all lands are very poor. The bulk of the people in our own land are poor. It is not strange that they are so. The so-called petty vices bring them to poverty. There are tens of thousands of families in this country who have spent a fortune in chewing, smoking, and snuffing filthy tobacco, and they have nothing to show for it but disordered nerves, ashes, quids, and stench. A dollar a week

is a low estimate for the cost of tobacco for many families. If saved and deposited every six months at seven per cent. compound interest, it would in fifty years amount to twenty-two thousand, four hundred and twenty-three dollars, and at the end of eighty years there would be a snug fortune of one hundred and eighty-one thousand, seven hundred and seventythree dollars, so that but for these vices they might soon be well-to-do capitalists. In truth, the vices are all wonderfully expensive and ruinous, and if you would win your highest success you must avoid them; you must be master over them; not of one only, but of all of them. See how one of our noted Americans overcame them, and to what eminence it led him.

The late Admiral David G. Farragut, of heroic war memories, at the close of the late civil war in this country, gave this account of the cause of his great naval success and fame. "Would you like to know," said he to a friend, "how I was enabled to serve my country?" "Of course I should," replied his friend. "It was all owing," said the Admiral, "to a resolution that I formed when I was ten years old. My father was sent to New Orleans with the little navy we had, to look after the treason of Burr. I accompanied him as a cabin boy. I had some qualities that I thought made a man of me. I could swear like an old salt; could drink a stiff glass of grog as if I had doubled Cape Horn, and could smoke like a locomotive. I was great at cards, and was fond of gambling in every shape. At the close of dinner one day, my father turned everybody out of the cabin, locked the door, and said to me, David, what do you intend to be?' 'I mean to follow the sea,' I said. 'Follow the sea,' exclaimed father; 'yes, be a poor, miserable, drunken sailor before the mast, kicked and cuffed about the world, and die in some fever hospital in a foreign clime.' 'No, father,' I replied, 'I will tread the quarter-deck and command, as you do.' 'No, David, no boy ever trod the quarter-deck with such principles as you have, and such habits as you exhibit. You will have to change your whole course of life if you ever become a man.' My father left me and went on

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deck. I was stunned by the rebuke and overwhelmed with mortification. A poor, miserable, drunken sailor before the mast, kicked and cuffed about the world, and die in some fever hospital! That's my fate, is it? I'll change my life, and change it at once. I will never utter another oath, never drink a drop of intoxicating liquor, never gamble.'. And, sir, as God is my witness, I have kept these three vows to this hour. Shortly after, I became a Christian, and that act settled my temporal as it settled my moral destiny."

What a wonderful uplift toward the noblest success in life vast multitudes of young men would at once receive, if they would but make and carry out similar resolutions. As vice. makes poor workmen, and as poor workmen reduce and often destroy all profits, business interests require, even if there were no moral considerations, that you should be virtuous in order to succeed! But, believe me, not this world alone, but the universe itself, is set toward the production and perpetuation of the virtuous man.

Doing Things Well.

M. WOOLSEY STRYKER, D.D., LL.D., President Hamilton College.

Τ

morality of carelessness.

HE word well is allied to the word weal. It has the notion of will and of wish. It suggests both an ideal and a purpose. One might write a book upon the imWhoever consents to less than his thorough best is neither shrewd nor good. To do things by halves or thirds, to put only a part of one's self into the given task, whether the tool is a pen or a pick, is to add to the general bulk of unrighteousness.

The old sculptor who said of his carvings, whose backs were to be out of all possible inspection, "but the gods will see," touched this matter to the quick. A result which one passes for his honest best, and which he knows is not that, is a kind of counterfeit. This felony has its reflex penalty in the slow effacing of the capacity to excel. It reacts in the deterioration of those faculties which gain by exactions, and dwindle by indulgences. Skill is wit plus will. To accept conventional estimates, to excuse one's self by averages, to let facility cheat thoroughness, to intermit that stern self-censorship, which both fidelity and farsightedness command, is to be always an apprentice, and never a master.

This adroit shirking when it becomes deliberate, or even chronic, puts a period both to mental and moral growth. Putty will for a while cover a multitude of sins; but, whether men discover the ill doer or no, the sins of superficiality will find the man out and wreak their inward penalty by making his soul shallower.

The genuine man, whether his product is books or boots,

whether he works by the year or by the day, will not willingly sacrifice quality to quantity. He will value the idea that lies in that keen German proverb, "The good is enemy to the best," which is to say that the passable blinds us to the perfect, and that offering a medium result we come to be incapable of the maximum. The so-called "pretty good" thus becomes the very bad.

The men who renounce mediocrity and uplift the average of the world are such as are never complacent with any present performance, and who by the energy of a great ideal first grasp and then tread every rung of the ladder. When a genuine and capable nature apprehends that slovenly performance is positively depraved, and that individuality is only another term for exceptional devotion to some line of effort, there breaks upon him vertical light.

The

Such a vision of what is possible to faithfulness and determination, will, if it is adopted into purpose, exorcise lethargy, indecision, procrastination, and all their fellow devils. little idols of seeming and getting and all the inane pantheon will fall before the right-angled determination to do and never to be satisfied with half doing.

"Heartily know

That the half gods go

When the gods arrive."

Doing well does not mean that we are to pause because we have done as well as another, nor because yet another's best is to us at present inaccessible.

It is not a relative but an absolute well-doing that God and men have a right to require at our hands. However, that is a noble discouragement which gauges its progress up by the topmost rather than midmost competitor. I have always found help in a wise paragraph of Richard C. Trench-" Fit, square, polish thyself. Thy turn will come. Thou wilt not lie in the way. The builders will have need of thee. The wall has more need of thee than thou hast of the wall."