thing beside education. They had helped earn the wealth acquired by the South previous to the war and the government should have given them land on which to build their homes. The proverb says that money is the root of all evil, but experience teaches that the lack of money is the root of many evils. The public schools should teach the children the lesson of equal rights for all and special privileges to none. Those who enjoy beautiful things should wish others to enjoy them also. We applaud the generosity of Carnegie, who founds libraries (with money robbed from the poor) while the workers in our mines ask in vain that the legislature will grant them three rights: That their coal shall be weighed honestly, that they may buy in the cheapest store, and that provision shall be made to protect them from loss of life or limb.

Rev. E. W. POWELL said that he did not understand why all the sympathy should be expended upon the colored people of the South, he had seen colored people in Chester county living in houses but little better than pig-sties. The condition of some of the colored people around Chndd's Ford is a disgrace to the people of this community.

Rev. JAMES H. ECOB said that the present rage is for industrial education of the colored race. Does this imply that the negro is to be forever a hewer of wood and a drawer of water? The colored people need teachers, preachers, and editors of their own race. We must remember that every human being on this earth is a child of God and we should give each the best we can of everything.

Mrs. CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN said that the colored race represents an earlier stage of human development than the white race, and we have the problem of bridging over thousands of years by education. We owe the help of an older race to a younger, and when we remember that in two hundred and fifty years they, the negroes, have come up to their present condition from a state of primitive savagery, we may hope in a few hundred years more to have worked out our sin toward them.

The time for this discussion having expired, the following paper was read by Rev. James H. Ecob, on

THE PRESENT PHASES OF THE LIQUOR QUESTION.

In a long, hard campaign the strategic point rarely remains fixed. The storm of battle is central now over this region, now over that. The force that expects to win cannot build forts, ensconce itself, and practice with long-range guns; it cannot take the field encumbered with heavy accoutrements and equally heavy tactics. Light equipments, flexible tactics and a banner clutched in the talons of a flying eagle are the signs and emblem of victory. To be intelligent respecting such a campaign one must keep his map before him and his ear open for every battle and rumor of battle.

I am satisfied that all great reforms follow a certain evolutionary process. First there must be an exploring, a thorough exhibition of the nature of the evil. The stupefied public mind and conscience must be assaulted and shocked by an unfolding in its true proportions and colors of the iniquity. There will follow a period of alarm and indignation and a good deal of what Carlyle calls "wind eloquence," accompanied by sporadic and more or less frantic and chiefly futile efforts to do something. Some try one thing, some another. In time all are convinced that they are engaged in a long and complicated struggle.

They must know more. They must re-inforce their moral wrath, their holy enthusiasm, with the more staying qualities of a well-instructed judgment, and the patient endurance of an intelligent conscience.

Accordingly the evil is studied in its various characteristics and relations; in its effects upon the individuals most closely involved, upon society, upon the State.

After a time the little picket-line of reformers hear a sound as of many waters behind them and they look back to see the main army moving up with its invincible equipment of public opinion and social instinct and legal enactment. Some of us have traced this line of evolution in the great anti-slavery agitation, from the first days of fierce exposure and denunciation up to the Fifteenth Amendment.

The same line can be traced in the onward movement of the Temperance reform. We have had our days of exposure and "appalling statistics" and blood-red literature. That community must be exceptionally remote in space or lost in ignorance that has not received, in some form, the knowledge which our various temperance organizations have made as common and abundant as the leaves on the trees. The second stage of the movement is well on its way. The Educational process now going on in our schools will soon have ready its first generation of young men and young women who will know, not simply feel. Society is beginning to move towards a saner life, not from dramatic excitement, or stampede of unreasoned impulse, but from a deep and enlightened sense of self-protection and self regeneration.

Now we find ourselves just entering upon the third stage when we begin, as in the old slavery days, to demand that our government shall free itself from all entangling alliances with the evil and be free to bring the entire legal armament into active service against the evil. This is to-day, in my judgment, the strategic point of our campaign. The reformers are finding themselves re-inforced by a large body of our best citizens who are beginning to feel the incongruity of any complicity whatever of the government with so unquestioned an evil asthe making and sale of intoxicating drinks.

My fellow reformers, let it not seem to you a small result to have fought so long and so hard to get the public mind in sight of a conception which has seemed axiomatic to us from the beginning. As you approach the Rocky Mountains from the plains the loftiest snow-peak first comes into view. It is scarcely distinguishable from the clouds. But that one great peak seems to be joined by invisible lines to others which it slowly lifts into view till the whole great range stands disclosed.

A conviction must have acquired no Hittle substance and pushed itself well up into the heights of morals, before men become conscious of the whole range of governmental ideas which it crowns and dominates. After all, is not this well? Any conviction which asks for enactment into law must give

the very best account of itself. In your household government there are many rules, hints, suggestions, but few laws. When any matter assumes such proportions and urgency as to demand a household law its credentials are subjected to closest scrutiny. So this slowness of the public mind in carrying anything up to that last resort, enactment into law, we may regard as elemental in a wholesome conservatism: a sort of law of gravitation which maintains the solidarity of the mass, and holds by invisible, yet potent influence, us impatient reformers who otherwise might fly off into space and become simply long-haired comets. As it seems to be the order of nature, it must be good for us to be compelled to repress our impetuous moral intuitions, to gulp down our axioms that would be blurted out to unbelieving ears, and go slowly, patiently over the first principles of reform with the great, slow, stupid, yet well-meaning public.

I predict therefore a long period of debate, advance and retreat, senseless detours and aggravating delays at just this point, namely: getting the government entirely disentangled from its present complicity with the evil, then a long pull and a strong pull on the home stretch for a Sixteenth Amendment which will plant the government finally and unalterably upon a basis of righteousness.

Our first duty in these closing movements of the campaign, is to insist that all systems of license shall be cut up by the roots.

We are greatly misunderstood at this point by many good people. They regard license as a restriction, and lay especial stress upon high license. A man's growth in temperance grace is often marked by his advance from his complacent rest in any system of license to a strenuous advocacy of high license. I do not believe it pays to discuss any longer whether license restricts or not I for one do not care. The amount of restriction in the land is so small that its heredity is not worth considering. I maintain that just as much strong drink is now sold as can be sold under any system. However that may be, we must insist that the government shall not be

engaged in a base and destructive traffic by sharing in its profits. It goes without saying that the lawyer whom I retain by my fee is no longer his own man. He is my man. The government with millions of whiskey money in its vaults cannot possibly be a free government. It is whiskey's government.

Every time that subject comes to judgment from the constable of a country village up to the president, every officer and every court is not only bound to consider the legalities involved, but is sure to be influenced by the fact that the interest of a very valuable client is at stake. Go into any little hamlet and touch the license system and instantly the echo runs along the street-the license helps pay our taxes. The State of New York is to-day debauched, its conscience paralzed by the infamous Raines law. No more shrewd and sinister piece of iniquity was ever devised than that same law. "It pays taxes, gentlemen; it pays taxes!" Instantly both church and State are hat in hand bowing obsequiously to his grace, the Devil.

When we see the annual struggle of Congress to push up the appropriations to the very limit of the government's income we can understand the potent influence of those millions of whiskey money. To cut that out of the source of supplies will require a strong hand and an unflinching conscience. Oh, this omnipotent dollar! Dig down to the roots of any huge iniquity and you find them wrapped around the dollar. Pluck the dollar away and at once your iniquity dies at the root. Move the gold mines of South Africa to Australia and how soon would England's army be on the move, singing, "Johnny comes marching home." The Boer is simply an obstruction in the way of the dollar. Remove the dollar and he may plough and reap his native veldt, oppress the Kaffir, tie up the outlander in absurd legislation till the crack of doom; who cares?

The virus of this license dollar works in every nerve and tissue of our government to-day. The judge holds a loaded balance. The legislator cannot estimate right values. The citizen sees double when he reads his tax bill. The anti-tox