our present difficulties is to join in President Lincoln's resolve that this nation, under God, shall preserve its new birth of freedom, that there shall be no slaves or subject colonies under our flag, and that wherever that flag floats it shall "proclaim Liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof."

REV. JAMES H. ECOB related the following significant incident a few weeks before the adjournment of the last session of Congress, some of the elect were invited to a dinner at the White House. It was soon evident that the Cuban question was the main item on the menu. The word passed along the line, "We must have Cuba; we will have Cuba.'' "Well," gentlemen said President McKinley, "what is your program?" The reply was, "We will enact an amendment making very stiff demands; if Cuba accepts, she is practically ours; if she refuses, then we will make her ours." Soon after this the Platt amendment was adopted, and the sequence of events is explained by this story. It is evident that there is a deliberate purpose, backed by a tremendous force, to have that island, whether or no. The press is subservient, and the people are getting used to the idea; by fall the scheme will probably be carried out.

REV. ALEXANDER T. BOWSER, of Wilmington, could agree with the last speaker, that public sentiment has been so adroitly moulded, that regrets for our nation's changed policy have been turned to applause, and our minds are resting in contentment.

MR. HERMAN V. HETZEL, of Philadelphia, said that local reform is well enough, but if we do nothing to check our present national policy the influence will filter down until local self-government will be destroyed. There are two opposing views in regard to governments: one is that the people are able to govern themselves, and the other, that people need to be governed. We learn by experience, as the republics of South America are learning, that it is wiser not to have revolutions; which is far better than for us to go there to keep them quiet. Rome was free until it began to subjugate other nations; the -downfall of liberty in Rome is a signal of danger for us. Peo

ple of enormous wealth realize that they are never safe in a real democracy, and they want to increase the power of the central government. They want a standing army in America, because labor robbed of a fair share of its production, becomes troublesome, and needs to be put down with the strong arm. The common people, so far, have wanted nothing and have got nothing. The present state of affairs exists in Philadelphia. because the people tolerate it. Tammany Hall is anywhere and everywhere that the people are willing to partake of the general unrighteousness. Any man who takes what he does not earn is a part of Tammany Hall.

SIXTH-DAY; AFTERNOON SESSION.

At two o'clock the meeting was again called to order, and after a beautiful solo by Charles Swayne, accompanied on the organ by Miss Elsie Gawthrop, the Presiding Clerk introduced Rev. Charles F. Dole, of Jamaica Plains, Mass., who spoke in reply to the question:

"WHAT CAN BE DONE TO CHECK THE GROWTH OF MILITARISM?"

The following abstract gives but poor idea of his able clear and logical presentation of the subject.

It has been said, he remarked that the military spirit is fostered in many of the hymns and psalms we sing in our churches, in pictures of the great battle-ships that appear in our papers, in the stories of feudal castles that our children read, in the military drill in many of our schools. He had sympathy with those who wished for an intelligent understanding of these matters. Saw no reason why the child should not be allowed to see and know about the implements of war, battleships, etc., any more than that the tourist should cease to visit feudal castles, but it was of utmost importance that the evil, the barbaric side of war, should be made plain to children and youth when making such studies. The best antidote perhaps, to the military drill is that the boys who undergo this training generally get tired and sick of it, and the harm of the pictures and stories may be neutralized, if we lead our

children to see that these things simply mark certain stages in the development of the race.

In order to cultivate the peace principle we need more positive teaching. Let the world at large know more about the victories of arbitration, of the many international disputes that have been settled in this way, even in Asia, and rejoice in the recent adjustment by this method of the difference between Italy and Argentina.

It is cause for rejoicing that there is set up at the Hague, ready for business, a Supreme Court of Arbitration for the world. The ability and practicability of this tribunal is evidenced by the number of nations that have accepted it and are represented therein. We should endeavor to inspire people with confidence that future disagreements between nations will be settled by this tribunal, and that much has been done to counteract the all too prevalent idea that "we never shall be through with war as long as men are men."

Let us keep the matter before the people in a practical, persistent way, and strive to interest men of affairs; it ought not to be hard to convince business men that it is to their interests that the world should keep the peace. The influence of all the great labor organizations is even now against war.

It is difficult to convert the people to a different attitude, while our churches are so ready to find justification for a particular war, though still denouncing war in the abstract. To overcome this those who believe in peace principles must assume an attitude of encouragement and not of doubt. Prophecies as well as prayers have a tendency to realize themselves. The Declaration of Independence was only a vision, but faith and courage made it a reality. Let us transform blame for the errors of the past into hope for the future.

People give plausible reasons why wars should continue. They say that all civilization has come through force, and that on the battle-field our youth are trained to heroism. War marks a certain stage in the evolution of man from the animal upward. The same argument that excuses war would apply to every barbarous custom of the past. As we understand the

process of evolution we are here to help the people of the world outgrow their barbarism.

To-day men are being trained to skill and courage in the various industrial arts, and they hate to spoil their beautiful lives by exposing themselves to the barbarities of war. The experience of the past few years in Cuba and the Philippines, the atrocities in China and South Africa, call upon us to record a vow that if differences arise between us and other nations, we will go to the tribunal at The Hague for settlement, and will not use other means than those of peaceable persuasion. The Monroe doctrine has become a sort of fetich with our people. It was dying a natural death when President Cleveland's unhappy message in regard to the Venezuela controversy set the long train of evil in motion. We would have no right to complain if England, with her great possessions in North America, should obtain by peaceable means, the whole of Venezuela. Even if Germany should without force plant a colony in South America, such a colony would be a menace, not to democratic United States, but to imperial Germany. We have ourselves violated this doctrine by our course in the East. What right have we to demand that our missionaries shall be safe anywhere in China, when we forbid the Chinese to come to our country?

If our nation had sufficient trust in the principles of justice to disband our navy and our army, the action would be hailed with acclaim by all the nations of Europe. We cannot accomplish this yet, but we can set our faces against any further increase of either army or navy.

We should regard the court at The Hague with hope and trust, not with suspicion. If a man had a patent fire extinguisher, and kept it in a closet packed so full of matches and fire-crackers that he could not get to it if a fire should break out, it would do him no good; so while we keep our national closet full of the combustibles of war, our new war. extinguisher will be of little avail.

Last year our women influenced Congress to abolish the sale of beer in the army canteen, and thus showed the power

they have when they make a united effort; but the canteen is an excrescence on the very rim of the military system; let them now attack that system itself. Let all the religious women in America join in a petition to Congress to make a treaty with England that future differences arising between the two countries shall be submitted to arbitration. Let them make a

united protest against the hate, cruelty, lust and falsity (witness the Funstan episode) that go with war. We shall yet get men to realize that the nations of the earth form one vast brotherhood;

"For right is right, since God is God,

And right the day must win ;

To doubt would be disloyalty,
To falter would be sin."

Ex-President Magill, of Swarthmore College, then read the following paper on the same subject, which we publish in full.

THE BEST METHOD TO PREVENT THE GROWTH OF THE MILITARY SPIRIT.

That there has been a sudden growth or development of the military spirit in the world at large, and that the general tendency of the world toward militarism is greater at the present time than at any period in the past can not be substantiated by the facts of history. It is not that the war fever beats with a stronger pulsation throughout the world to-day than ever before, but our own nation, having lived, in a manner, its life apart from the rest of the world, for its first one and a quarter centuries, seems now to have caught the fever, and to have entered into rivalry with what are called the Great Powers for the supremacy, and an extent of empire over land and sea. Our Monroe Doctrine, while seemingly limiting us to this continent, is, in reality, an assumption of control or partial control of vast territories over which we have no possible claim, and, in a way, we are thus placed in a position very nearly like that occupied by the other nations, who have long claimed the name of the Great Powers of the world. While might continues to make right there is no way to check the tendency of these Powers toward self-assertion, monopolizing the posses