more surely acknowledged. The Association is one for the extension as well as the advancement of science. A most interesting feature of the general meetings proved to be those evening lectures of Professor Roberts-Austen, of the British Mint, on 'Canada's Metals,' and Professor Milne on Earthquakes and Volcanoes,' which demonstrated the possibility of presenting the most elaborate experiments with success before large general audiences. For instance, the happy device of using reflectors to convey the operations of an electric furnace to the stereopticon and thence upon the screen was a brilliant success, and opens the way for new series of fascinating public lectures in many of the physical sciences. The members of that filial society, the American Association, will no doubt have learned from and profited by the recent British meeting. We look forward to their next session at Boston with the expectation of seeing deeper and more general interest in the Association that most truly represents the scientific interests of America.

Ir public money is to be granted to privately managed institutions, a policy not without its perils, it cannot be expended with more far seeing wisdom than in giving aid to such a body as the Johns Hopkins University. State responsibility in the matter of higher education has been more fully recognized in the West than in the East, but it has lately been emphasized in Pennsylvania by the prompt action of the legislature in relieving with liberal appropriations the financial embarrassment of Lehigh University and the growing pains of the University of Pennsylvania. It remains for the legislature of Maryland seriously to consider its relation to the Johns Hopkins University. Nothing has been more fatal to the development of the resources of that state than its educational policy during the present century. The wise policy that in the last century founded and fostered Washington College and St. John's College and united their administrations in the corporation of the University of Maryland would, if continued, have given the people of Maryland to-day a state system of higher education fully abreast of the times. But from the last years of that century public aid to higher education has been meagre, niggardly, and utterly inadequate to the needs not only of the colleges mentioned, but also of the later foundations, the second University of Maryland and the Maryland Agricultural College. Of late years the highest annual expenditure for state and municipal aid to higher education in that proud state has been about eighteen thousand dollars,

one-third of which was expended in furnishing a free scholarship in St. John's College for each senatorial district of the state. The smallness of this amount would be intelligible if the state institutions and private foundations of Maryland could satisfactorily provide for the needs of her people. But with one exception they resemble the ladies of Cranford in being poor but aristocratic. Fortunately, during the last twenty years the Johns Hopkins University has supplied the deficiency of the state colleges and afforded opportunities unexcelled for the higher and the highest education. But the financial condition of the Johns Hopkins has become a matter of vital interest to Maryland and to all friends of university education. The endowment of the university consists largely of common and preferred stock of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, and the railway is in the hands of a receiver. The losses of the university, it is true, have not been without palliation. The university, by sale to the city of Baltimore of the country estate of its founder, was able to add over a half million dollars to its endowment. With signal generosity a few citizens of Baltimore and other friends of the university recently subscribed a quarter of a million dollars to meet immediate deficits. Thus, though the Johns Hopkins is not immediately menaced, its proper growth is retarded and its future is not secure. And the confidence of the public in the stability of the institution needs to be promptly reassured. The university has claims of the strongest. It affords Marylanders the opportunities of education of the highest character. Through its numerous and liberal scholarships it offers the deserving youth of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas a large measure of virtually free education. In the South, it is perhaps not too much to say, the influence of the Johns Hopkins University is making over on modern lines the whole method and spirit of education. For the whole country it has done a unique work in establishing a comprehensive system of graduate study and in stimulating by its example the institution of graduate departments elsewhere, till to-day they are an integral part of all important colleges. These benefits, to say nothing of others even more widely diffused, should suffice to secure for the Johns Hopkins University a just and liberal assistance from the community-such assistance as will remove all fear from the future and make certain the continuance and increase of its beneficial influence upon the education of Maryland, upon the Union, and, indeed, in an appreciable measure, upon the world at large. And the giving of this assistance, if the benefactions of individuals fail, the legislature of Maryland must seriously consider. but consider likewise, as we have said, in the light

ject so that it could never again be closed. Yet, in truth, we all in this world wear spectaclessome rose-happy, some green-envious, some blue-hopeful. Life, like a many-colored dome, Shelley's poetical line runs, stains the white radiance of eternity. The philosopher tells us that the only absolute certainty is the testimony of consciousness, the absolute truth is "I am,"of which some men, it may be said, are already only too conscious. All else appears to us in half-lights. We see as through a glass darkly; happy indeed is it that our spectacles are not like Mr. Titbottom's. Every man finds his memory laden with the beliefs that he has been forced to discard, and guides his conduct by certainties that have been painfully developed out of doubts. Every day new facets of the problem of life gleam to him, and the mystery of existence mocks him from a still greater distance. What chiefly marks a man as a member of the crowd is his facility of belief. Beyond the traditional wisdom of the race as transmitted in proverbs, the reiterated dicta of his religion, and the plain teachings of a workaday life lies the world of human thought, where the beliefs of the man of the mob are as wandering mists. Amidst the plaudits of the crowd Verdi sits silent, awaiting the verdict of Rossini. Yet even with the trained mind we must at times expect perverted judgments, and be ever ready to make allowance for the personal factor. No man is sane at all times and on all subjects. That is why the skepticism of Pilate is as valid to-day as two thousand years ago, and why we feel that the Roman governor was in a sense wise not to await an answer to his scoffing question. But the broader view finds life, not as an eddying wind, but as an organic growth, of which we can tell the beginning, but the bloom and full fruition of which are but a vision of the future. We may indeed surely hold that the evolution of the human race is accompanied by the evolution in the human consciousness of a co-ordinated series of working truths, imperfect but perfecting. As in the beautifying of a city, though each generation may do little individually, the aggregate effort of many successive generations will render the city beautiful; so the wisdom of life, which we call civilization, in the form of the sciences, inventions, discoveries, methods and means of doing and living and thinking, is an ever-increasing heritage to which each child of the age is born heir and upon which in every rightly ordered state he is permitted and encouraged to enter, and to the development of which he contributes a certain though infinitesimal part. For surely mankind does not hold knowledge as a handful of sand slipping through the fingers. "The heaven and the earth and all that is between them, think ye that We created them in jest?"

The Evils of Our Penal System. Slowly, but carefully and surely, practical philanthropists, seeking better methods of treating crime, are evolving the correct principles that are the basis of correct methods. Happily the time has gone by when in civilized countries the unhappy victims of an evil environment, led into the commission of petty crime, were regarded merely as vermin to be trampled out of existence. Even the Mosaic idea of having condign vengeance dealt upon every offender by the offended community has been superseded by the conception of merciful reformation as the end of punishment. Moses has been done away in Christ. Practical penology has not, however, reached far enough to secure any great reduction in the amount of crime. It is now coming more and more to be believed that civilization has been on the wrong track-that less imprisonment instead of more is what is wanted. It is the growing conviction that jails, instead of being schools of virtue, are truly schools of crime. Seldom indeed is it the case that a man or woman who has made a false step is bettered by incarceration with confirmed criminals. Yet these are precisely the teachers in those schools, and for some slight offence, often merely a first false step, we subject a man to such influences that his descent to perdition is easy.

But we are coming to learn that a criminal is not the only sinner, that "all men have sinned and come short of the glory of God," that a criminal is not a distinct species of the race of man, and that even judges on the bench, though they avoid the law's penalties, may be criminals at heart. In other words, there is ground in truth and good sense for what some people, no better than the others, are pleased to call "sentimental philanthropy," which is in fact a philanthropy based on the recognition of the broad fact that the man who has broken the law is simply a man and a brother. In the spirit in which Christ forgave even flagrant sinners we also should treat the criminal-that is, acting in the Christian spirit of forgiveness and looking to further his reformation. We should remember that it is at least no worse to offend against human law than against Divine, and yet God showers His blessings alike upon the evil and upon the good.

These principles, then, are the fundamentals. the foundation-stones, upon which a correct penal system must be built. And these are not the basis of our present administration of pris

ons.

Neither the barbarous concomitants of confinement in many of the county jails, where men and women, old and young, innocent and guilty, untried and convicted, witnesses and defendants, are huddled together in darkness both physical and moral-neither these nor the