who is a woman says of a human body, "It is nothing!"-Olive Schreiner. ONSCIENTIOUSNESS has in many outgrown that stage in which the sense of a compelling power is joined with rectitude of action. The truly honest man, here and there to be found, is not only without thought of legal, religious, I met her on the Umbrian Hills, Her hair unbound, her feet unshod; N supplying the men for the carnage of a battlefield, women have not merely lost actually more blood, and gone through a more acute anguish and weariness, in the months of bearing and in the final agony of childbirth, than has been experienced by the men who cover it; but, in the months of rearing that follow, the women of the race go through a long, patiently endured strain which no knapsacked soldier on his longest march has ever more than equalled; while, even in the matter of death, in all civilized societies, the probability that the average woman will die in childbirth is immeasurably greater than the probability As one whom secret glory fills She walked-alone with God. I met her in the city street; Oh, changed was her aspect With heavy eyes and weary feet She walked alone-with men. "The Lady Poverty,” by Evelyn Underhill that the average male will die in battle. There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children, or be merely potentially a child-bearer, who could look down upon a battlefield covered with slain, but the thought would rise in her, "So many mother's sons! So many young bodies brought into the world to lie there! So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped within! So many hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be! So many baby mouths drawing life at women's breasts;-all this, that men might lie with glazed eyeballs, and swollen faces, and fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed-this, that an acre of ground might be manured with human flesh, that next year's grasses or poppies or karoo bushes may spring up greener and redder, where they have lain, or that the sand of a plain may have the glint of white bones!" And we cry, "Without an inexorable cause, this must not be!" No woman I or social compulsion, when he discharges an equitable claim on him; but he is without thought of selfcompulsion. He does the right thing with a simple feeling of satisfaction in doing it, and is indeed impatient if anything prevents him from having the satisfaction of doing it. -Herbert Spencer. AM homesick. Homesick for the home I never have seen. For the land where I shall look horizontally into the eyes of my fellows. The land where men rise only to lift. The land where equality leaves men to differ as they will. The land where freedom is breathed in the air and courses in the blood. Where there is nothing over a man between him and the sky. Where the obligations of love are sought for as prizes, And where they vary as the moon. I am here by some sad cosmic mistake, HEN men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work, as the color petals out of a fruitful flower; when they are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions are steady, deep, perpetual and vivifying to the soul as is the natural pulse to the body.-John Ruskin. with all its fruits thereof-the fruits of love and liberty.-George D. Herron. HE worst of errors is to believe that any one religion has the monopoly of goodness. For every man, that religion is good which makes him gentle, upright and kind. But to govern mankind is a difficult task. The ideal is very high and E have talked much of the Men! whose boast it is that ye Is true Freedom but to break They are slaves who fear to speak They are slaves who will not choose From the truth they needs must think: “Freedom,” by James Russell Lowell others had hell, if there were some way by which part of the world could escape some form of the blight and peril and misery of disinherited labor, then would our world indeed be lost and damned; but since men have never been able to separate themselves from one another's woes and wrongs, since history is fairly stricken with the lesson that we can not escape brotherhood of some kind, since the whole of life is teaching us that we are hourly choosing between brotherhood in suffering and brotherhood in good, it remains for us to choose the brotherhood of a co-operative world, the earth is very low. Outside the sterile province of philosophy, what we meet at every step is unreason, folly and passion. The wise men of antiquity succeeded in winning to themselves some little authority only by impostures, which gave them a hold upon the imagination, in their lack of physical force. -Ernest Renan. T is a truly sublime spectacle when in the stillness of the night, in an unclouded sky, the stars, like the world's choir, rise and set, and as it were divide existence in to two portions,-the one, belonging to the earthly, is silent in the perfect stillness of night; whilst the other alone comes forth in sublimity, pomp, and majesty. Viewed in this light, the starry heavens truly exercise a moral influence over us; and who can readily stray into the paths of immorality if he has been accustomed to live amidst such thoughts and feelings, and frequently to dwell upon them? How are we entranced by the simple splendors of this wonderful drama of nature!-Wilhelm von Humboldt. Human nature craves novelty.-Pliny. 66 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. 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 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 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, For you love, yet you refrain. I break my heart on your hard unfaith, Yet not for an hour do I wish undone And you were a Virgin Slave. wanted. And now to that same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dum 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. Ꮽ Ꮽ. drudge, in like manner wending; till atIGOTRY has no head and can not 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. 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 Je 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. S man advanced gradually in intellectual power, and was enabled to 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 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. Ο 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 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. 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, 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. They will march, freeze, hunger, suffer sickness, and die from it, or finally come The crest and crowning of all good, And till it comes, we men are slaves, Come, clear the way, then, clear the way: Blind creeds and kings have had their day. Break the dead branches from the path: Star-led to build the world again. 66 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 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, 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 o 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. |