and shoot the precious metal in every direction from a thirteen-inch gun-inflict if necessary the gold standard on the monsters of the deep.

When, then, it becomes necessary to irrigate the arid lands in order to give the people work and food, this is assuredly the thing to do; but there may be a reasonable doubt if that time has yet arrived. There is no lack of agricultural or of manufactured products. Productive land lies uncultivated all around us, and we have no use for it. The trouble is somewhere else and deeper. It lies in the monopoly of the tools of labor. I mean all kinds of labor, including transportation as well as production. If the present private monopolistic system is allowed to exist, to irrigate the arid lands would be at best but a temporary measure of relief. In a few years the people would be as helpless as ever. We may as well fight the battle for human rights here and now as to postpone the evil day.

The burning question of the hour is how to secure for the laborer a just return for his toil-how to render him an equitable share in the products of his hand and brain. If the man who earns seven pairs of shoes a day receives only wages enough to buy one pair, the question is how to order things so that he may secure the other six pairs or their equivalent. This is the problem of justice which it is the duty of government to solve, and, until it is solved, all other questions sink into comparative insignificance.

The solution of this question will involve the solution of others. It includes the problem of the unemployed. It is not my purpose to enter upon a discussion of the question in detail. It is sufficient for the present to state it and point out its supreme importance. One of the objects of the Constitution is to establish justice. According to the Declaration of Independence, if a government fails in its high duties it is the right of the people to overturn it. We should be patient, long-suffering, reasonable. Every peaceful means should be exhausted to secure equitable relations between man and man. We may employ palliatives

to allay our anguish for a time. Eventually the government that does not establish justice must be overturned. Heaven never witnesses a diviner struggle than that of men trying to secure for themselves and their posterity the blessings of life, liberty, and happiness.

ROBERT E. BISBEE.

East Pepperell, Mass.

PATIENCE AND EDUCATION THE DEMANDS OF THE HOUR.

I am entirely in sympathy with your noble purposes, and am, indeed, doing just what you are; that is, I am doing my best. But the more I study the question of life the more settled I am becoming in the conclusion that there is really no short cut or hurry-up road to righteousness, or right relation, which I understand to mean the same thing. I have entirely abandoned the hope once strong within me of compelling people to live scientific lives because a "law had been passed."

Of course, every consideration of "wisdom and humanity, of expediency and simple justice, alike call for a governmental policy which shall substitute an army of wealthcreators for a large standing army of destruction"; and when considerations of wisdom shall direct our governmental policy, all that will be done. On our present plane we lack just one element necessary to carry out your ideal and mine-that is, an ideal of social justice-and it is very important and fundamental; its name is wisdom. We are not yet a democracy. It is assumed that we are and that we have a government of the people; but you and every one of us who thinks knows full well that our Government is, indeed, a government of a very select few-not because of any special venality in the select few, but because we are as yet in that developmental stage of our national life where only a very small percentage of the people take any

part in the affairs of government. One-half of the race, the women, are yet declared politically and socially unequal, and both men and women accept this as being divinely ordained.

Then, under our elementary system of partizan politics, only a very few men really have anything to do with the selection of the officials who are to express our ideals of a righteous social order. That again is not due to the malevolence of "corrupt politicians," as is so commonly and flippantly charged; it is due to the indifference, or rather the undeveloped state of mind that both the politicians and the people are yet in.

From these and similar reflections, I am slowly learning that the moral universe is subject to law as well as the material; that God has not gone off on a vacation and left the affairs of the race to run themselves in a sort of hit-or-miss, catch-as-catch-can way as appears to you and me; but that, according to His processes, justice is to be wrought out of what appears to us to be little short of confusion and chaos. We are learning the lesson of life in the only way and the only place that it can be learned; that is, in the university of experience. I am a student in this school, and daily I am learning to be more loving, more patient, and to have faith that the divine purpose is going steadily forward and that justice rules. God's law is never suspended, not even for a single instant, no matter what the revised statutes say.

Charles Ferguson, in his new book, "The Religion of Democracy," has stated a great truth that we shall do well to consider, and stated it very tersely: "Europe and America are sick with the nightmare of their dreams. They have dreamed of Democracy, and in their dreams have achieved liberty-but only in their dreams, not otherwise." And again he says that when the people love justice they will have justice.

We are learning Democracy. It is our only hope; and the best we can do, after all, as I believe, is to continue

faithful to the truth as each one shall see it. In the words of the little Sunday-school song

"Let our light shine;

Toledo, Ohio.

You in your little corner

And I in mine."

SAMUEL M. JONES.

TOPICS OF THE TIMES.

By B. O. FLower.

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER YESTERDAY AND TO-DAY.

I. TWO INAUGURATIONS.

Few more striking contrasts are to be found in modern history than that afforded by the inauguration of President Jefferson, in the spring of 1801, and that of President McKinley, exactly one hundred years later. Externals, however, count for little save as they represent or are symptomatic of internal organic or fundamental changes; and if the contrast presented indicated nothing beyond the changed condition of a nation which in population and wealth had grown with marvelous rapidity during one hundred years, there would be no cause for apprehension. If with the growth of the Republic her rulers have revered as a holy thing the ark of the covenant; if they have been true to the ideal of freedom; if they have cherished the fundamental principles of human right and justice that differentiated the Republic from the imperial governments of the Old World; if they have adhered to the examples and principles of the fathers in their abhorrence of a war of subjugation, of criminal aggression, and of injustice to the weak; if they have kept inviolate the faith pledged by the Republic in her infancy; if the rights of the people have been faithfully guarded from unjust aggressions on the part of class interests, from the tyranny of corporate wealth or personal rule; if the first consideration of the rulers has been that of securing equal justice for all and the protection of the toilers from the spoliation of the strong-then the changes presented by the two inaugurations need give the friends of free government little cause for alarm.

Unhappily such is far from the case. Indeed, all these indications of the lowering of national life are so palpably in evidence that the change from the supremacy of the spiritual or ethical ideal to that of materialistic commer