scale, will be likely to succeed. He knows that the natives can be trained to work for hire and he sees them coming hundreds of miles, to Blantyre, to enter the service of the white man. He has proved that some of the world's great staples can be produced, and he is opening plantations. He is proving that he can extirpate, if he cannot reform the slave raider. He is starting civil governments, very imperfect as yet, but still with principle at bottom, and slowly groping their way towards methods, more practical, efficient and just. He is putting steamboats on all navigable rivers, and is building or surveying many railroads pointing towards the heart of the continent. With all this progress, in many lines, there is a certain admixture of blundering, severity, brutality, selfishness and wickedness that unfortunately seems inseparable from all colossal enterprises of world-wide moment. The situation would be hopeless, indeed, if such things were more than incidents, marring the good work but powerless to annul it. If you sum up the good work that is doing, and all the agencies that are doing it, it seems to me, you will not accredit the rum traffic, or any other reprehensible enterprise of white men, with the power to ruin Africa. Good is predominating over evil. The world's sense of justice is righting wrongs and will right others. I do not belittle the terrible wrongs and suffering which the rum traffic and slave raiding are inflicting upon Africa. But to say that these terrible evils can possibly depopulate a continent onethird larger than our own before they are stopped or at least brought under some measure of control, is to indulge in exaggeration. We have every reason to believe from all the evidence that has been collected and from the deductions that have been drawn from this evidence by Dr. Supan, of Germany, and others that the population of Africa is increasing.

The missionary teacher is the great philanthropic factor. He has made some grave mistakes. His interference in the politics of Uganda inflicted untold suffering upon that country. I do not speak here of his religious tenets. What chiefly concerns the world is that he restrict his energies to his great mission as a teacher, and a civilizing agent and

above all that he avoid religious controversies in the field of his work. There must be religious tolerance, and until the civil power can enforce it, the teachers of antagonistic faiths should occupy different fields. Even those who consider missionary work only in its humanizing aspects, must be greatly impressed with the power and importance of missionary endeavor, when they study a host of facts in the recent history of Africa. They see, for instance, in a large part of the Niger basin that, under missionary influence, life and property have become safe, cannibalism has been abolished. and human sacrifices and the killing of twins are no longer practiced.

The missionary has been pre-eminent as an explorer, and he may still facilitate progress by adding to and rectifying our knowledge of Africa. He should cultivate worldly wisdom. He should not try to make Europeans or Americans of the natives. He should not interfere hastily in matters of dress or in native customs that are of no vital importance. The missionaries who are the greatest power, and who are doing the most good, are those who are gifted with the largest practical sense. Their high mission, apart from their religious teachings, is to encourage common education, industrial arts and social morality. They are meeting with defeats and many discouragements but on the whole they are accomplishing much. Those who criticise them because they are not achieving more and who, on general principles, are dissatisfied with the progress making in Africa, and argue that Africa is hopeless, might as well complain because Great Britain, in a century of occupation, has not lifted the people of India to the level of Europe or the United States. If, after many years, a considerable part of the natives of Africa are lifted to the present level of the people of India, a colossal work will have been achieved.

Two hundred years after Columbus, the interior of South America was far better known than that of our own part of the new world. We know far more of inner Africa to-day than was known of inner North America at the beginning of the 17th century. The transformation of human society, the formation

of new strata of social conditions, are not to be measured by thousands of years like geological epochs, but their era of change is to be measured by centuries. Why should any one, only seventy years after freed bondsmen from America had set up a government of their own in Africa, declare the experiment a failure? Even in its present aspects Liberia is not a failure,. in the judgment of men like Büttihofer and many others, who have qualified themselves to speak with authority.

Africa has become a new factor in human endeavor because the world has set itself the task of solving a new problem; that is how civilized countries may avail themselves of regions that were neglected as long as other undeveloped and fairer fields invited progress. The utilization of tropical countries is the great problem and it will be solved in Africa. Enough is now known to show that in a material sense the work will pay, not as similar work has paid in regions naturally more favored, but sufficient to cut a very important figurein the total of wealth and in the opportunities for business enterprise. In its humanitarian aspects the work cannot recede. The hand has been put to the plow. It would be con-trary to modern history and to human nature, and it would be the scandal of the age to abandon the efforts for the uplifting of the African natives.

The slow evolution of Africa from a state of barbarism will not make even and regular progress. Some tribes and someparts of the continent will lag far behind others. We cannot tell what the fruition of centuries will be in respect of the development of the natives. We know that the African in other lands, where he has come into contact with civilization under conditions even moderately favorable, has developed leaders. who are entitled to great respect and is to-day, even rapidly improving his condition. It is the privilege of Afro-Americans to help the work in Africa. It is reasonable to expect that they will embrace the opportunity, and that, through them, Africa shall yet be recompensed, in some measure, for the wrongs of the export slave trade.

New York Sun.

CYRUS C. ADAMS..

MACHINE-MADE MILLENNIUMS.

I.

We are in a period of mechanical and social invention. It is supposed that everything must be run with the crank of an engine or a party. Great factories and great reform movements seem to go hand in hand. Perhaps the actuality of the one suggests the possibility of the other, though the way seems long from cog-wheels to industrial armies. It is an example of the irony of history that factory-made shirts and shoes should be suggestive of factory-made men, or that an industrial mechanism of any sort could for a moment be supposed to furnish hints for a social mechanism. Certain it is, however, that the mechanical idea of government and reform is in the ascendant, and we are taught to look to Congress for the cure of our financial panic or our social ills when each one should be caring for his own pocket-book and mending his own manners. The protection of "infant industries" has ripened into paternalism over full-grown monopolies, and for the correction of that abuse we indulge in schemes for such mechanical methods as the "Single Tax " and the "Industrial Army." One needs but half an eye to detect the selfishness and fallacy that underlie many a proposed reform. The hop-raiser would regulate the tariff to suit both his sale of hops and his purchase of hop-poles, and the purblind temperance reformer longs to see the liquor traffic "regulated," and "the evils arising from it curtailed," if only the revenue from it be at the same time increased, or at least not diminished. Yet it is well to remember that there are worthy reforms and honest reformers, and to know that if one really lives while he lives he must be enlisted somewhere among the world's progressive forces. And thousands are really living whom we thought to be only breathing. It is not many years since political economists perfected their

"dismal science," as Carlyle called it, and settled down to a comfortable self-satisfaction. Soon they discovered that the horny-handed millions of the shops and the mines had taken hold of that science for themselves, and that they were having high sport with the "laissez faire" theory, and with the "supply and demand" theory, and with the "see-saw" doctrine of wages and labor. The schools were astonished to see smiths, farmers, coal-heavers, hod-carriers and factory girls turn political economists, organize parties, go on strikes, complain of over work and under pay, and make the commonwealth miserable by their threats and moans. The economists not of the schools, but the hunger-bitten ones, have at least demonstrated the need of something.

That need is the crying problem. In answer to it there has been, since the days of the French Revolution, no rest from proposed millenniums. Fourier and Saint-Simon, Karl Marx and Lassalle, Henry George and Edward Bellamy are among the more noted names of a host of social reformers. Plans have been proposed ranging all the way from the tamest submission to that sort of social régime in which the man is but a brick in the wall or a cog in the wheel, to the wildest anarchy, where "there is no God and each man is a law unto himself." The success achieved has nowhere been proportionate to the hope entertained. Fourierism alone has had forty trials in the United States, and there have been forty failures. Brook Farm and its cousins have their common lesson for us, as instructive as it is pathetic, if we will but heed it. We have only to go to Grinnell, Iowa, to see the practical failure of the Icarian paradise. Mr. Nordhoff in his "Communistic societies in the United States" speaks of the Icaria after this style: "Alas for the dreams of a dreamer! I turned over the leaves of his pamphlet (Cabet's) while wandering through the present Icaria, on one chilly Sunday in March, with a keen sense of pain at the contrast between the comfort and elegance he so glowingly described and the dreary poverty of the life which the few determined men and women have there chosen to follow, for the sake of principles which they hold both true and valuable."