t and Parliament. At last the law declared the soil of England made man free. The great mercial nation joined European powers to susthe traffic in slaves on the high seas. At imse cost the slaves of the West Indies were pured and emancipated.

the contest with African slavery men learned etest the slavery of factories and mines. Revolt nst the bloody lash and suffocating slave-ship pelled men to investigate the stories of torture 'oppression in the factories.

Enlightened employers, factory inspectors, hune statesmen, gifted sons of toil, writers of poetry 1 fiction, saved the heart of England from petrition and kept pity alive. The Earl of Shaftesry is a type of the Christian humanitarian. He ave his life to help the insane, the miner, the facry girl, the chimney-sweep, the unfortunate of very kind. To carry his measures he was comelled to educate the ruling classes in justice and in a knowledge of contemporary England.

John Howard and Elizabeth Fry touched with healing power the most hopeless and abandoned classes and forwarded prison reform. The dungeon was changed from a fiendish purgatory to a school of reform. The insane have been removed from the crowd of criminals and treated in hospitals for the sick. The debtor is liberated. Youth and children have been given, though tardily, a chance to learn to read.

The High Church Movement. Startled by the inroads of scepticism and secularism, certain Oxford

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vegetables. He is entirely dependent on the market, and must pay cash for all he eats or wears. A few "belated industries," like plain sewing, are carried on at home, but these are apt to be the most exposed to the evils of sweating. The modern organization of industry has divided the breadwinners into two camps, managers and wage-earners. The division aggravates, if it does not cause, class distinctions and hostilities. The harsher features of the system seem to be yielding to organization, restrictive legislation and enlightened philanthropy, but the contrasts between rich and poor are absolutely greater than ever before.

MUNICIPAL DEVELOPMENT.—Towns are machinemade. Troops of laborers gather about the steamengine and build or rent homes near the great factory. Cities are the ganglia of the network of railroads, the points where communication is broken and renewed, where freight and passengers are redistributed. All modern countries witness the rapid growth of large towns. The extension of cities is a curious study. The choice building-sites by lake, park or forest are taken up by successful managers, bankers, merchants and professional people. The less desirable lots, on low damp ground, distant from woods and water, are left to wage-earners. The rejected portions are laid out in narrow lots, many of them fronting on alleys, and the number of children is usually in inverse ratio of space occupied. The worst parts come to be called the slums. The managing and operative classes are separated in the shop and isolated in residence. Their separ

ation accentuates the causes of suspicion, bitterness, envy and misunderstanding. The city comes to be a huge aggregation of villages, each with distinct and antagonistic ideals. Communication becomes difficult. The very fact that the wealthy approve a measure, and that it is advocated by the " great dailies," is frequently enough to defeat it at the polls.

The following description of the situation about the Bermondsey Settlement might be applied to some portions of the largest American cities.

"All that we are, for the present, striving for is that poorer London should come to have the same advantages as provincial towns of moderate size. The population which our work affects in Bermondsey, Rotherhithe and the river side parishes, is not much less than 150,000. Contrast it with

provincial towns of that size. There wealth and poverty are neighbors. The rich worship with the poor; their wealth builds and sustains churches, in which their families work. Institutions-educational, medical and charitable-spring up from the generosity of wealthy and enlightened citizens. Generation after generation, their families contribute to the administration of public affairs and philanthropic undertakings the service which only education, leisure, riches and highly-trained Christian character can give. And hence the solidarity, the esprit de corps, the local pride which such towns display. How different is South London, with its churches starved because members and money have removed, almost entirely unblessed by the

benefactions of the rich, with scarcely any young people, of education and leisure, to minister to the people, and with that spirit of distrust and defiance steadily growing, of which Independent Labor Parties and the like phenomena are the manifestation. This state of things is of concern not only to these poorer districts, or to London, but to the whole country, for London now leads the labor movement, and those who are now forming the thought of the industrial classes of England have grown up where churches are weakest, where wealth is least in evidence as the servant of the common weal, where sorely needed redemptive ministries languish and fail because the laborers are too few to carry them on."

EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS.-Schools in Great Britain and America have developed social and class consciousness. Reading habits are universal. The newspapers pour a flood of detached items upon the bewildered mind. The printed page and the illustrated journal advertize the delights of our civilization, and set before the starved denizen of the tenements visions of balls, feasts and operas. Nothing is hidden. All is laid bare. All is laid bare. Impressions are made on millions of men at the same moment. are reasoning and debating about the same speech or bill throughout the nation. The group of laborers, resting at noon under a bridge, are discussing the same subjects as senators and fine ladies.

All

DEMOCRATIC FEELING.-The seeds sown by the War for Independence and by the French Revolution have germinated and brought forth fruit. The