ine which renders the public conscience immune against the virus of the dollar must be potent indeed! Yet, just this, fellow Reformers, is our task. Though a very great task it is not hopeless. There is growing up in the public mind an appreciation of the economic value of a man. It may be that in the end just this omnipotent dollar way prove our ally. A sober man is a wealth-producer, a money getter. A drunken man is a wealth-destroyer, a debt maker. This fact is beginning to creep into the consciousness of our captains of industry. The great railroad and steamship corporations, the great industrial combinations, are saying, "We have no use for the addled brain and unsteady hand of the drinking man," More and more as the interests of men move together in these vast aggregations, fortunes flowing into a common fund, will it be said, "We cannot have these enormous interests endangered or "queered," or delayed by this stupid, brutal business of strong drink." It is more than hinted in very high quarters that a sober, orderly, trustworthy, industrious citizen has a market value far beyond the foul license dollar. When great industrial plants are joining the churches and schools in saying: "We do not want your saloons near us, they interfere with our business," we may hope that even a Congressman will perceive that a license dollar is not worth fifty cents even in the market. When that conviction does finally get seated in the speaker's chair at Washington, you and I, fellow reformers, may turn these strenuous Longwood Meetings into an innocuous strawberry festival.

But this question of the complicity of government with evil runs deeper than the dollar. The market, weighty and persuasive as it is, must bow to moral supremecy. A permanent and profitable market is simply one of the fruits of moral sovereignty. The government is not simply the expression of the people's will, it is the expression of the people's ideal when they are at their best. So, the government is not a mere creature and servant, but a leader and prophet of the people. When in some high mood you and I catch glimpses of a great truth and shape such into an expression of power and beauty,

that truth is not our creature, our subject.

It takes command of us. It shines like a star, at the height of consciousness. It is an ideal. So government dominates the people who created it. It stands for the highest and best in the people. We know that to us individually no calamity can equal that of the perversion or quenching of our ideals. "If the light in thee becomes darkness how great is that darkness." And no calamity can befall a people like the lowering of the standards of government. In that fall, "you and I and all fall down.”

The government has been truly called a "huge individual." It is as though each citizen in his noblest mood had plucked his highest thought and placed it in the hand of God, saying, "Out of that which is best in all of us make us a king to rule over us." What, therefore, this great individual, the government, does stirs us, shapes us, inspires us with something of the authority and potency of the divine. We say that government is in the Divine order. No question therefore can press us with such an imperative, or find us at such a depth as this. What is my government doing? The greater the being the more significant the act. When Jupiter nods all the Gods make obeisance. Such is the subtle, pervasive and well nigh resistless influence of the government. Need I say now that the instinct of good citizenship is to hold the government to its task of the highest and noblest action? Need it be said that an act of injustice or baseness by this great individual, the government, is to a similar act of a single citizen, as seventy millions to one? This great soul, the composite of seventy millions of citizen souls at their best, must not be suffered to do a trivial or base, or unrighteous act. The man who betrays the government into such an act, let him be Anathema.

We have seen the wholesale debauchment of the public conscience by the complicity of the government with slavery That fall was atoned for by such a price as staggered humanity. To-day the complicity of the government with strong drink is puzzling and enfeebling the conscience of the nation respecting a low and bestial form of self-indulgence. Alas, the vul

garity of it, the shame of it, the filth of it! To see a United States license blazoned in every groggery and dive! And even now a burning question is, shall the government turn bartender and peddle out beer to its army of soldier boys? Attorney General delivering solemn opinions, Congress debating, captains, majors, colonels, generals, rushing into print with appeals for the canteen!

Heaven pity us when the highest in us is no higher than that! When the light in us has run so low do you wonder that the Supreme Court sheds darkness rather than light?

Fellow reformers, the Twentieth Century finds our temperance movement in this stage of its evolution. It is up against the government at every point. The preliminary work of exposition and education have gone before. Now we must hold the country to the last and crowning task. All complicity of government with the great evil must come to a perpetual end. Its treasury must be purged of blood money. Its courts and legislatures set free from the subtle temptations of bribes and tax-budgets. Then, when our house of government is swept and garnished, it will be the easy and normal thing to do, to take to ourselves the sovereign spirit of moral authority whose ancient "Thou shalt not" defines and limits our personal and National relations to this, and all evil, which is simple, unconditional Prohibition.

A collection was taken by the finance committee, and then the following testimony was read concerning

TEMPERANCE.

We recognize the evil of intemperance, considered broadly, of manifold form and as one of the most formidable stumbling blocks to human progress. The most obvious and perhaps most injurious form thereof is the use of and traffic in intoxicating drinks. This has become with us a national vice. We are a rum-ridden people. By this curse we are not only degrading ourselves, but under the sanction of law we are spreading the diabolical contagion in our newly conquered islands of the sea, hence we must individually and collectively, by precept, by example, and by the faithful discharge of our

political duties, according to our best light, labor to remove this blot on our civilization. We believe that the fundamental remedy is educational. We must train up a new race by instilling in the minds of our little children as an overmastering sentiment the idea that a high self-control is the pride and. glory of manhood, and that in the avoidance of all hurtful indulgences of every kind, is true heroism, and worthy of most honor amongst men, that it is better to rule one's spirit than to take a city.

After a lively interchange of views by Rev. E. W. Powell, Herman V. Hetzel, and Charles H. Pennypacker, this testimony was unanimously adopted.

A song by Miss Paynter, of Philadelphia, followed and afterwards Mr. Allen C. Hinckley sang Paul Lawrence Dunbar's "Corn Song." The meeting then adjourned until after

noon.

SEVENTH-DAY AFTERNOON.

At the opening of the afternoon session a testimony sup plementary to the peace testimony of the day before, making a special plea to mothers concerning the education of their children, was objected to by some because it seemed to imply that children should not read stories bearing upon the wars that have taken place in their country's history, and it was therefore laid upon the table until next year.

The following resolution was then adopted:

Resolved, That the Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends in session at Longwood, Pa., sends greeting to the National League of Colored People to be held in Philadelphia in August. It expresses its sincere sympathy with the objects of the League and pledges earnest co-operation in every way within its power.

The following testimony, offered by Mr. Hinckley, was adopted without debate.

IMPERIALISM.

We desire to renew our expression of loyalty to the democratic ideal, and to express our conviction that that policy will be disastrous which seeks to create for a free republic un

der a written constitution, dependencies to be governed on different principles from those which apply at home. We believe the United States should stand for a government of consent everywhere, and should respect the evolution of all peoples toward self-government. We therefore regret the imperialistic tendencies of the hour, and would help to turn the thought of the nation to the Declaration of Independence as the political expression of the Golden Rule.

Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, of New York, was then introduced and held the undivided attention of her audience for three-quarters of an hour while she presented some new phases of

THE LABOR QUESTION.

We give a synopsis of her address :—

Labor is a social function, not a private and personal affair. Work is a form of applied energy. Among the lower animals, those only are workers that live together in an apparently organized association-as the beaver, the bee, the ant. The animal that lives alone does not work. When we wish to emphasize any one's industry we compare it to the activity of those animals that live in communities, we say, "As busy as a bee," or " he worked like a beaver." Men work for a common interest, animated by a common purpose, and the work is done for one another. It is a process performed in the interest of other people, as well as for ourselves. The human being that lives alone does little work.

The lower forms of animal life act only in response to immediate stimulus; they move from the promptings of hunger, the impulse of fear, or other animal instinct. The worker is governed by an idea, a memory; he thinks of the harvest that follows seedtime, and looks for the result of his labors in the fruits that are to come. He goes forward under pressure of the nerve force stored in his own brain, and under guidance of the concepts therein.

The first work of the human race was done by woman; not to gratify her personal desires, but for her child, by the mother. It was of the giving, not of the getting instinct.