enters our households to do a very large share of our kitchen work, another problem will be hurried toward solution. The most serious question now affecting American life, after that of waste, is help. We are just now in the terrifying crisis. It is growing more and more difficult to secure for our households competent assistance, while the need of good help is greatly increased. It is impossible to build the ideal home simply because we must as a rule admit freely into our houses persons bred in vulgarity, or our wives must do work that stands in the way of higher work, culture, rest, and enjoyment. The advent of a power that can wash our dishes, wash our clothes, do our cooking, churning, sewing, and that without noise or dirt, is to be hailed with acclamations of joy. There is no doubt that we are approaching an entirely new age of homebuilding and housekeeping. Electricity will help us to get rid of the invasion of our homes by a purely menial class. At the same time let us not forget that this menial class will be itself helped to escape from a subject position by the same new power. Smaller homes will be brighter, cheerier, cleaner, and warmer, as well as less expensive. Coal bills and oil or gas bills will be abolished. Fuel and light will be so lessened in cost as to be practically, like education. free.

Those who attended the Columbian Exhibition will remember with special delight the quality of certain foods offered freely to the passing crowds, and that were cooked in ovens where the only power used was a current of electricity. But equally delightful to remember is the fact that, as electricity abolishes superfluous heat and dirt and waste of fuel, it introduces the beautiful. The electric fountains-who will ever forget them? Decorative lighting of our houses and lawns will produce effects beyond our imagination at present to picture. So the useful and the ornamental blend-unite to make our lives better worth living. Word comes that electricity is to be applied to the working of factories in Germany and of dairies in England. Two Belgian scientists have recently patented a method of heating, melting, and refining metals by electricity.

What is to follow this discovery it would be difficult to foresee. But the marvel is that while our professors are saying what is impossible, or pointing out limitations, the impossibles are swept away. The construction company for utilizing Niagara tells us that every step of their way was hindered by new and often astounding discoveries or inventions. They had to go over their work again and again to pick up and incorporate these new discoveries.

There is, however, no outlook more pleasant for us than the effect that will be produced in the way of sanitation and health. When our homes are heated by electricity, says a noted writer, "consumption and many other diseases will wholly disappear not in a day or a single year, but as certainly as yellow fever disappears before a frost. Its uses in the household will be to ventilate it by means of fans, to supply power for pumps, sewing-machines, dumb-waiters, elevators, bells, and cooking apparatus." The idea is not abstruse, nor is it visionary. The removal of stoves and furnaces and gas-pipes, and attendant dust and bad air, will easily revolutionize the sanitary conditions under which we live. Our heating and lighting appliances of the steam age are positive elements of danger. It is almost impossible so to conduct our homes as to avoid unsanitary conditions from coal, steam, and gas. Our worst diseases most prevail in winter months-when our houses are most closed.

One hundred years ago Burke said that America could never be represented in Parliament: "Some of their provinces will receive writs of election in six weeks, some in ten. After election, if ships are promptly ready, it will take them six weeks more to reach London. Meanwhile Parliament has far, far advanced its business-nay, perhaps been dissolved. So that before their arrival they are themselves discharged of duty, and the writs issued are on the way for their successors." This was the age of wind power. Then came steam power. which shortened the passage of the Atlantic from six weeks to six days. Electricity may do even greater wonders than this; yet as a power it belongs not to commerce, but to agri

culture. It is not so much the power that links nations as the power that links farm to farm; that does what, after all, steam cannot do move in all directions: up hill, or down hill, and across lots. Mr. Frank Hawley tells us that the railroads of the country are only waiting for improved accumulators to substitute electricity for steam. And he is confident the change will soon be made.

Clinton, N. Y.

E. P. POWELL.

A CIVIC LEADER OF THE NEW TIME.

THE

I.

HE old apostolic spirit is again abroad among our people-that spirit which made primitive Christianity so great a moral power that, but for the corruption and fall of the Church when overtaken by worldly ambition she sought union with a State pagan to the heart's core, would have soon transformed the world; that spirit which made the Reformation so mighty a moral force ere its adherents took up the sword; that spirit which fired our patriotic fathers and made the American Revolution invincible in spite of the fact that a pitiful handful of poorly armed and scantily clothed patriots were pitted against one of the mightiest powers of the world. Now, whenever this vital moral influence becomes active in a nation a great upward and onward step is sure to follow.

The history of civilization is a struggle toward the light. It is a toilsome struggle marked from time to time by the retrogression of peoples through the failure to be true to their high mission. If there is any truth that the past makes very plain it is that if in the age-long struggle of the people against injustice and oppression a nation or civilization allows its attention to be diverted even in moments of great peril from without, traitors enter the temple of freedom only to betray; while that people which permits itself to slumber under the pleasing delusion that its freedom is secure will surely awaken to find itself bound hand and foot and the Philistines upon it. This is much the condition of the American people to-day. There can be no denying the fact that the reactionary element !, intrenched in municipal, State, and national life; and the forces that are seeking to form the most dangerous and oppressive kind of despotism are becoming as arrogant as was Belshazzar when the Medes and Persians were secretly draining the Euphrates, and as confident as was Xerxes on the eve of the battle of Salamis. And yet, while I would in no wise minify the great evils that so seriously menace free institutions,

I am far from being discouraged, because the schoolmaster has been too long abroad in the land; and when the giant who lives and breathes in millions of homes, and whom we call the people, awakens, he will not be the ignorant, craven serf of other ages. Moreover, the oppression is bearing on almost every class, while above and beyond this is the moral awakening that, though not heralded in the sensational press or proclaimed from the street-corners, is nation-wide in its extent.

He who is in touch with the undercurrent of society knows full well that there are everywhere indications in the gathering together of forces dedicated to social righteousness such as have rarely been seen in our era. The spirit of Thermopyla lives in many times three hundred Americans, and the life and teachings of the great Nazarene are being felt in the soul and are quickening the spiritual energies of tens of thousands of our people, as they have moved and stirred the imagination of man only in crucial moments in history-when the spirit of progress and civilization has nerved itself for against some deadly evil or a giant wrong.

supreme stand

To-day throughout the Republic-in cities, towns, villages, and hamlets-there are young men and women stepping out of the ranks of slothful conventionalism and devoting all that is best and finest in their natures to the service of progress. I doubt if in the last forty years there has been a time when anything like the same number of young Americans have been silently and unostentatiously, but intelligently, seeking to further the principle of the Golden Rule as are at the present. True, they are as yet working at a disadvantage owing to the fact that they are not organized and therefore not in touch with one another; but the fact that they are laboring for social righteousness, and are ready to make great sacrifices to hasten the day of better things, promises well for the near future.

Nor is this all. We have with us to-day many fine scholars in the early flush of manhood's prime who are voluntarily turning their backs on position, wealth, and worldly fame that they may aid in furthering the cause of justice. The lives of these men, like the examples and teachings of the true prophets