December 8, 1888 Vol. IV, No. 23Whole No. 101

THE STANDARD — page 1 — Vol. IV, No. 23 (No. 101), Saturday, December 8, 1888

THE STANDARD

NO. 101—VOL. IV, NO. 23. | NEW YORK, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1888. | PRICE FIVE CENTS

p. 1, col. 1 Subscribers of the “Chicago Enquirer” will receive “The Standard” until the expiration of their terms of subscription to that paper.

CAN TARIFF REFORM WIN?

Can the democratic party ever carry this country on the issue of tariff reform? In last week’s STANDARD, after a hasty review of the conduct of the recent campaign, I expressed doubt as to the proper answer to this query. To my mind it seems reasonably certain that the party can never win on this issue if it reluctantly presents tariff reduction as a choice of evils and attacks a “condition” while refusing to consider the “theory” that seeks to discover and remedy the condition. It is absolutely certain that no campaign in behalf of an enlarged free list and reduced duties can be successfully conducted by men bound to the protective policy by personal prejudice or pecuniary interest.

I cannot believe, however, that, with all its capacity for blundering, the democratic party will repeat the errors of the last campaign. Despite the president’s cautious initiative, and notwithstanding the silly efforts of the national committee to belittle or conceal the issue, in the congressional debate and in popular discussion the party was then committed to an assault on the policy of protection. It cannot abandon that position if it would. The attempt to do so would alienate or silence nearly all the men of brains and character who still adhere to it. Furthermore, no attempt of the kind, however supported, could really deceive anybody, and least of all those whom the leaders desired to conciliate. The democratic party must therefore go into the next campaign as the advocate of what it calls tariff reform—that is some measure of tariff reduction. Unquestionably there will be a determined effort by so-called conservative men in its ranks to prevent it from going further.

On that issue, which of the two parties is likely to prove the stronger? There is, I think, no reason to doubt that the majority of those still adhering to the republican party are, and will remain, protectionists. It is true that they are victims of a superstition having no foundation in facts, but that only renders the case more difficult. What effect would argument have in inducing a believer in ghosts to enter a grave yard at midnight? And, en passant, what would we think of a man who began such an argument by admitting that he, also, believes in ghosts?

On the other hand, the aggregation of voters now known as the democratic party is not so nearly a unit against the protective policy as the votes cast for Cleveland might seem to indicate. The “solid south,” for instance, is not held to its allegiance to the democratic party because of any economic views whatever. So long as the fear remains that republican supremacy at Washington may mean negro domination in the southern states, the white people of these states will stand by the democratic party whether it favors a prohibitory tariff or absolute free trade. Should this be the case, the economic questions that divide the northern people will work like division in the south, and some southern states will probably array themselves on the side of protection. Do the figures of the late election indicate where the electoral votes are to be found that will make up for the loss thus incurred?

Again, it is easy to see that the democratic party cannot afford to again commit the conduct of a tariff reform campaign to a committee of protectionists, but it is not so easy to see how it will shake off the control of the men who have dominated its national machine for from eight to twelve years. These men are fond of power and accustomed to its exercise, and some of them are closely allied with monopolists who have the strongest of reasons for desiring that no great party shall be committed to any radical popular movement. Despite this, new men may be brought to the front, out will not the deposition of the acknowledged party leaders in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland and West Virginia jeopardize democratic success in those states? The man who has any real knowledge of the power exercised by protectionists over that party in the states named must have faith of the quality that removes mountains to enable him to confidently answer this query in the affirmative. A Marylander or a West Virginian might reply that such a change offered the party its only chance in these states, since they would go republican with absolute certainty if the present bosses retain their grip on the local party machinery.

This is not encouraging, but it is what Whitelaw Reid once called “frozen truth.” If tariff reform as a mere fiscal policy, appealing only to the cool judgment of men and awakening no enthusiasm, is to be the issue in the next campaign, I frankly confess that it seems to me the prospect for the democratic party is most dismal. It is threatened with the loss of electoral votes in several states, and has no reasonable prospect of gaining any other votes to make good the loss. Again, it cannot enter the next campaign proclaiming that “it is a condition which confronts us—not a theory.” The republican party will take care of that. If there is any one thing that friend and foe can alike trust a republican congress to dispose of that thing is a surplus. Furthermore, the republicans know very well how to revise the tariff so as to reduce the federal revenues without impairing its protective features. If tariff revision is all that is wanted, Mr. McKinley can give us all we want of it. This is so plain that democrats are already beginning to express a fear that the republicans will steal their thunder. If they call inane chatter about a five per cent reduction thunder, they are certainly likely to lose it, though I doubt if the republicans are such fools as to steal it.

Of one thing, however, the democrats cannot be deprived. We shall certainly face “a condition” four years hence, and it may be a very unpleasant one. The vicious system under which our manufacturers are carried on has apparently received a new lease of life. We have already a manufacturing plant capable of supplying a demand twice as large as that

p. 2, col. 2 afforded under existing circumstances by our home market. One of two things must therefore take place. Either competition, stimulated somewhat by the result of the election, will cause glutted markets followed by depression and possibly by panic, or else the development of trusts will go on more rapidly than ever before. Meanwhile the wage earners and working farmers will find that what ever else may have happened they, at least, are no better off.

If the democratic party attempts to face this situation and take advantage of it, it must consider its cause and propose a remedy—that is it must advance a theory. And it must not only advance a theory but believe in it, proclaim it and fight for it. It must assail with wrath and scorn the impudent pretense that a tariff on goods advances the wages of labor or assures the farmer better returns. It must expose the stupid “balance of trade” fallacy and show men that if England sends us goods we must send her the products of American labor in return, and that if we do not it is the English people not ours that are cheated. In short the democratic party will have to throw over the miserable platform of 1884, tumble the constructors of the abortion overboard with it, and reaffirm its old time faith in a tariff for revenue only so admirably summarized in its platform of 1876.

Will this enable it to win? I doubt it. But it will at least put it on the road to victory. It will be the exponent and defender of a sound principle; but can it interest enough people in that principle to enable it to make good its losses? Of course it can demonstrate to workingmen that they are no better off because of the tariff, but that merely proves a negative, and cannot excite zeal or enthusiasm. Laboring men are ready to admit that now, but they ask, “How will tariff reform help us when trade almost free does not bring wages in England up to our own meager standard?” Where will the most orthodox democrat find in his tariff reform philosophy an answer to that question? Yet it is a proper question that can be answered, and the party that obtains power at the hands of the American people for any length of time must find an answer to it. I see few, if any, indications that the democratic party is even trying to prepare itself to give that answer.

The democratic party may, however, see its way to a temporary success without undergoing the operation for cataract. The overthrow of the protective system involves the destruction of the worst monopolies that now oppress our people. This thought may widen the party’s purpose and sympathies and enable it to arouse the popular enthusiasm necessary to a successful assault on insolent monopoly, now intrenched behind the ignorance, prejudice and venality of its own victims. There is a growing feeling of alarm and discontent among the people. Corporaations managed solely in the interest of private greed not only enjoy public franchises but scarcely conceal their control over legislation. The growth of trusts causes a feeling of apprehension that is not allayed by arguments showing that the trust is a natural outgrowth of the tendency to combine in the interest of more economical production. Such arguments fall flat on those who see or feel that any advantages thus assured go to the few and that the many have not only no security that they will derive from them any benefit, but no assurance that they will not in the end be subjected to extortion. Workingmen are filled with discontent that becomes more hopeless as they see that the agencies they have devised for their own protection are failing to accomplish what was expected of them.

In the face of all this, monopoly is becoming bolder and more self-assertive. Most newspapers, even while pretending to attack it serve its purpose by affecting an extreme solicitude for the maintenance of the rights of property and of vested interests. The courts incline in the same direction. The court of appeals in this state has just decided that if a band of bribed officials shall give away the chief thoroughfare of a metropolis to a syndidate of scoundrels, the act, though conceived in corruption and tainted throughout with fraud, becomes sacred and irrevocable if the original receivers of the stolen franchise will but pledge it for debt. Neither the state of New York, whose sovereign power has been perverted to aiding rascality, nor the municipality that has been robbed have any power to undo the villainy perpetrated against them. It is not for me, a layman, to say that this is not law, but it ought not to be law, and no such damnable doctrine will remain law if the people ever wake up to a conception of their own powers to make and unmake, not only laws, but constitutions and courts of last resort.

Can the democratic party, brought into a mere skirmish with monopoly in front of the outpost of protection, be aroused and stimulated to declare war against the monster? Has it courage to fight the people’s battles as they ought to be fought, and as they must be fought if the “promise and petency^sic” of such a fight are to be realized? No half-hearted championship and no half-way measures will answer in such an exigency. The party that champions the cause of the people against monopoly must have heart as well as head. It must not only see the wrong and devise the remedy, but it must hate the wrong and fight it to the death. It cannot run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. It cannot pose as the foe of monopoiy and recognize among its leaders such monopolists as William H. Barnum, Smith Weed, Ex-Senator Camden of West Virginia and Senators Payne of Ohio, Gorman of Maryland, Brown of Georgia and Hearst of California.

Above all it must be honest and courageous, ever ready to encounter defeat rather than sacrifice principle. It must abandon the risky game of selecting a number of states having the necessary number electoral votes^sic, and then building a platform with a view to meeting the supposed ideas or prejudices of those constituencies, and depend on building up everywhere a body of adherents who will stand by its principles. Such a party

p. 2, col. 3 would find no cause for despair in the admission of new territories, but would rather see in them new fields to conquer. The democratic party thus organized and inspired might come to justify its name and deserve success. It can never arouse popular enthusiasm for a mere intellectual opinion concerning the proper percentage of a tariff tax, but as the foe of protected monopolies and all other monopolies, it can make itself the agency of a wronged people, and find in their battle shouts a “thunder” that its opponents, wedded to monopoly, will not try to steal.

The democratic party has within it men capable of leading in such a cause. In the store house of its past it has weapons fitted for the new warfare if they are are^sic fashioned to our times. In its platforms of long ago, and in the utterance of its great leaders will be found declarations of principle and assertions of the rights of the people that would startle its leaders of to-day if they now, for the first time, found utterance. Many of these declarations of principle are good for all time provided those now championing them are as much abreast of their own times as Jefferson was abreast of his. The situation in which the people of New York are placed by the recent decision of the court of appeals and the exigency in which the American people will shortly be placed when it becomes apparent to all that their government must own the railroads or the railroads will own the government, can only be met by the application of the doctrine concerning corporations laid down in the democratic platform of 1836, but that doctrine cannot be applied without disregarding the democratic prejudice of that day against internal improvements by the federal government. Again a revival of the salutary Jacksonian hatred of a national bank would, in the light of experience, find to-day an application that would run counter to “Old Bullion’s” detestation of all paper money. In short, whatever was true and permanent in the old democratic principles can only be effectively applied now by those capable of learning the lessons of experience and of harmonizing with the the^sic environment of the present. Under such conditions the really great declarations of democratic principles in the past will be all the easier of application because they have back of them the authority of age and of venerated names.

Is the democratic party capable of playing the role here sketched out for it. If it is it may sweep the country in the congressional elections two years hence, and recover the presidency in 1892. Even should it fail in either or both it will by that time have undergone a regeneration that will make it the party of the future, sure of a long lease of power extending far into the twentieth century. Should it fail to embrace the opportunity now open to it, despite its cat like tenacity of life, it will go to pieces, and a new party largely made up of those now composing it will take its place. Far sighted democrats must surely see this, and it seems to me that in the democratic societies and clubs they have at hand the machinery by which the transformation may be wrought. Whether or not this shall be done is for them and not for outsiders to say.

We single tax men, to whom free trade seems but a simple step toward normal economic conditions, can afford to wait and watch the process of democratic realignment with keen interest, not unrelieved by a slight sense of amusement at the shivering terror with which they stand hesitating before their plunge into the stream of progress.

Meanwhile we must not neglect our own work of education and tentative organization. Whether the democratic party shall experience a new birth preparing it for the great work of the immediate future, or whether it shall die and make room for a braver and more virile successor, is for it to say. Those of us who feel so inclined may encourage it in choosing the right if we see fit, but we cannot decide for it the momentous question. We must, however, go on mustering the army of single tax free traders that will, to use an old western phrase, blaze the way along which the democratic party or its successor must march to its final assault on that last stronghold of monopoly—the monopoly of land.

WM. T. CROASDALE.

A CLUB HOUSE.

CONCENTRATE ON ONE STATE.

STRAWS WHICH SHOW THE WIND.

If those who use their capital and energies would look into this matter, merchants, professional men, as well as wage earners, all of them would put over their thresholds the motto: “Tax Land Values Only.”—[Deer Park, N. Y., Citizen.

If objection may justly be made against men who combine to advance prices of articles which may be produced by any one who has the requisite skill, how much more justly may we complain that coal is the subject of such conspiracy? That material was placed in the earth by the Creator for the use of man; the supply may be exhausted finally; the right of the owners is not the right of the manufacturer, but of a mere accidental possessor. These men have contrived to get hold of a part of the heritage of the human race; and if we want to discover the soundness of the title, we may estimate what respect would be paid to the title if the mine owners should resolve to close the mines for good and all. Would not the state in such a case have a clear right to interfere? Would it not compel continuation of a supply for the people? And if the state has this right, which unquestionably it has, why has it not also the lesser right to forbid diminution of the supply with an intent to rob the public?—[Philadelphia Textile Record.

It is not the labor question simply^sic the question of the distribution of the products of labor? We see rich idlers, money exploiters, railroad monopolists, machinery monopolists, landlords, gamblers, cornerers, loafers and others, wearing the clothes labor makes, eating the food labor raises, riding on cars and ships industry fashions, warming their bodies with fires that toil built, sipping wines that work made, and all this time they do not make, build, fashion, raise or produce in return.—[Baltimore Critic.

After showing, in answer to its own question, “Who pays the taxes?” that under the present tax system all taxes are shifted to the consumer or tenant, the Memphis Avalanche propounds this significant query: Does it not follow, then, that in any scheme for levying taxes, the desires of tenants and of those who live in their own homes are to be considered, rather than those who rent to others and who own property which they will not improve?

Ten acres of fair land can be bought for $50. If it be put in cultivation, fenced and improved the land value remains $50, whilst the improvement value may be many times the land value. Now, why should the state tax this improvement value? Is not the tax put upon it a penalty, or fine, levied upon labor? If you lay a fine on labor don’t you to that extent enslave the laborer^sic.—[Houston, Tex., Echo.

The political reform which is needed is to so frame the laws as to leave the largest possible share of the wealth which one’s labor produces for the producer. To this we must^sic eliminate monopolies and speculation and place taxation, not on labor or production, but on those things which now make fortunes without labor—rents. To free labor we must abolish landlordism, which is most easily and thoroughly done by taking economic rents for public uses and abolishing all other direct and indirect taxation.—[Council Grove, Kan., Anti Monopolist^sic.

One of the principal objections to the government appropriating big sums of money for the Galveston harbor is, that every dollar that Uncle Sam sends there enhances the value of that gigantic wharf monopolies’^sic franchise one hundred cents, and who hasn’t heard of and felt the effects of that corporation’s grasp on the commerce of the state?—[Dallas, Tex., Southern Mercury.

The single tax principle appears to be gaining a firm foot hold in the northwest. More than [1,500?] names, which include leading business men of Minneapolis, have been secured in that city to a petition to the Minnesota legislature for the submission of a land tax amendment of the constitution to the people. A strong league has been formed, which is spreading the Henry George agitation over the state. In Dakota the single tax advocates are strong and active, and an energetic movement is under way to have the principle incorporated in the constitution of any new state that may be admitted to the Union.—[Paterson Guardian.

If we cannot make poor people retain money in their pockets by reducing the tariff, let us advocate and try to get the state legislature to take the taxes off of personal property. Tax nothing but land.—[[Mascoutah?], Ill., Herald.

The land question is in the air. Cases like this (Iowa) eviction will serve to stimulate land reform. Land monopoly is the growing curse of humanity, and that this is coming to be realized is argued from the encouraging reports of the single tax leagues in America, and the agitation of the land question in England and Germany.—[Milwaukee Review.

The Manistee, Mich., [Broadaxe?], labor paper, believes that the days of the Knights of Labor are numbered but it advises the enemies of the working people not to waste their strength in exultation and says: Though this order may die, God is not dead! The cause of humanity will go on, and upon the ruins of the Knights of Labor will arise a newer and better organization of the labor forces than ever lived before. It will embrace not only the wage workers or ditch diggers, but will embrace the farmer, the merchant, the lawyer, the editor, the mechanic, the laborer—all of God’s creatures who are being robbed by monopoly and greed. Upon its banners will be inscribed, Free Land, Free Trade and Free Men.

To tax one man for the benefit of another is an outrage, an injustice and a legal crime.—[Cleveland Plaindealer.

WHAT WE SHOULD DO.

E. J. Perego, Wichita Falls, Tex., Nov. 25th.—Why is it that so many talk of disappointment and defeat? I voted for Grover Cleveland, but not to suffer disappointment or acknowledge defeat if he were not elected. I belong to no party, but when the big wagon came along I simply climbed on and rode. I think the single tax cause far advanced on its journey and I also think by the time our next presidential election comes around there will be a single tax candidate in the field, leading millions, carrying a banner whose folds when unrolled by the passing breeze will show to the world in plain unvarnished terms, “Free land, free trade, free men.”

I belong to the Farmers’ alliance of Texas, whose declaration of purposes is founded upon political economy and Christianity. With such an organization as this building up all over the United States, would it not be worth some consideration for single tax advocates to try and devise some means to introduce their doctrine into every alliance in the United States. It will require a fixed purpose and money, simply from the fact that most of the members of the alliance are limited in means. A large portion of them are tenant farmers and their great object is to live off their scanty earnings after the landlord has taken his share. But they know there is something wrong and have joined the alliance hoping to better their condition. But the leading members are continually appealing to their pockets for means to perfect some great co-operating scheme. They have no money to co-operate on, however. Not one out of twenty, I dare say, read their own paper, viz: the Southern Mercury. They feel too poor to subscribe for it. What can we do? There is hardly an alliance in Texas in which some good member can not be found to introduce the subject and see that every member is supplied with proper reading matter. Three-fourths of the farmers will indorse the single tax when it is fully explained to them—I speak from experience—but as it is, three-fourths of them never heard of such a thing as the single tax. The field is now open, the harvest is ready; I am one of the laborers but have no tools to work with. Who will furnish implements to gather in such a great crop that has sprung up all over the land? Always count on me as one to help bear the “Cross of the new crusade” and teach the new conscience which is springing up all over the world.

J. L. Babcock, Erie, Pa.—It is certainly encouraging to see so much enthusiasm displayed by the single tax men from all parts of the country, which shows that a living principle cannot be smothered even under adverse circumstances. And it is my opinion that the first thing that is necessary to success is the Australian system of voting, as it will enable those that are yet timid on the subject of the single tax to go the polls^sic and vote without fear of being blacklisted. Therefore it is policy to push the election reform measure to the front as much as possible, at the same time keeping the single tax idea fairly in view.

J. M. Porter, Clinton, Ill.—I think the deliberate judgment of all fair minded and honest men of all parties will be that the safety of our country demands a radical change in our election laws. We, as single tax men and free trade, should remember that it is through the ballot box that the single tax and free traders must come. Then let us work hard for electoral reform. I have a friend who is a member of the Illinois legislature who will, to the extent of his ability, push this cause along.

Vindicator, Los Angeles county hospital, Los Angeles, Cal.—I have been suffering from painful injuries received by a dangerous fall I had some five weeks ago and have therefore not been able to do what I would have liked to do in extending the circulation of THE STANDARD. We need ballot reform badly here. The adoption of the new charter, which gives a new lease of life to all forms of monopoly, was effected by employers marshaling their men and “voting them” by the solid dozen—workingmen who fully understood the import of the proposed charter and were secretly opposed to it, but whose only alternative to voting as their employers directed was the loss of their jobs. The same is true of the general election. These cold facts prove the rottenness of our politics. We must push ahead for purer politics and we can do this and at the same time work for the adoption of the single tax by every where organizing clubs and exciting discussion. Arrangements should be made for a course of lectures at short intervals. Thus, with a constant and general distribution of tracts and the unceasing work of individuals, we may mold a public sentiment in support of our cause.

F. S. Stewart, Le Mars, Iowa, Nov. 27.—I would suggest that single tax men all over the Union write their congressmen urging the passage of an act adopting the Australian system of voting at all congressional elections. Clause 1 of Section IV of the constitution permits the passage of such a law by congress, and its adoption for these elections will eventually lead to its use for all elections. The clause of the constitution referred to reads: “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to place of choosing senators.” The present, for many obvious reasons, is a particularly favorable time to press this matter upon the attention of congress.

THE RAGAMUFFINS AND THE Y. M. C. A.

MINNESOTA SINGLE TAX MEN FALL IN.

Not So Bad as He Used to Be.

Boston Herald.

Whatever opinion may be entertained concerning the soundness of Mr. Henry George’s economic opinions, it must be conceded that he is one of the most honest and courageous of social reformers. As compared with many social agitators, he is conservative to a degree in the methods he proposes for the accomplished of desired results^sic, and, what, is more^sic, he has never yielded his ground for the purpose of gaining popularity among the fanatical reformers. His hold on a section of the English people is stronger than on his American following, for the reason that with them the result of a defective system of land ownership is much more apparent.

A Correction.

Mr. Edward Barker is president of the Pawtucket, R. I., single tax club and not Mr. Robert Grieve, as, through an editorial blunder, our correspondent was made to state in his report in last week’s STANDARD of the situation in Rhode Island.

The Alpha Club at Norfolk.

NORFOLK, Va.—On Saturday, December 1, was held the first meeting of the Alpha club for the propagation of the single tax theory. Professor Newton Fitz is president of this club and Edward K. Robertson secretary.

The Electoral System in Australia.

James Ryan, president Land nationalization league of Lithgow, New South Wales, writes: “Under our system of voting bribery can scarcely be regarded as a factor in elections.”

p. 3, col. 3

THE SEA OF OBLIVION.

The great election of 1888 is a thing of the past. The battle has been fought and lost. The victors are spreading themselves on every hand like green bay trees. As the ebullient enthusiasms and exaltations cool down once more into the old dumb hope we look around and perceive that business has been neglected. This or that important temporality has been swallowed in the chaos of the campaign. The burden of life must be shouldered again. Disappointment is drowned in deferred drudgery. Resentment melts in the warmth of renewed affiliations. Our erstwhile foe is a brother again. The amenities of war seal the lips of dissatisfaction and put a truce upon all the bickerings and backbitings incident to a campaign of reason. It is the period of forbearance and forgiveness.

For my part I can congratulate the republicans upon a victory in which as a party they can take the highest pride. Their masterly campaignery, their unwavering loyalty to superstition, their zeal and audacity stand in marked contrast to the pusillanimity, hypocrisy and treachery of the party they opposed.

I hope I will not be accused of wishing to prolong the agony when I beg the favor of a parting shot at one of the successful host.

Among the republicans prominent in the campaign there was only one I believe who had ever posed as a radical reformer—one only that had ever been particularly obtrusive as a champion of ideal liberty. All others had behind them a life long record of conservatism—had been identified for years with the class of men who embody that stationary or retrograde spirit which always resists progress. Only one of them, so far as my knowledge goes, ever laid claim to an intelligence keen enough to detect faults in the existing social state and broad enough to feel the possibility of a higher one.

I refer to Robert Ingersoll.

This man has strutted through the world as the high priest of human progress. Usages, precedents, authorities were mockeries to him. “He left all superstition far below him.” Synods, parliaments and party machines were thought to be mere empty empirical fool devices—transient as the clouds from his high soaring point of view. That such exiguous trifles could retard the flight of a mind like his would have been considered a tremendous joke a few years ago. Who would have believed that this indomitable slayer of mud gods, this professional iconoclast would kneel at last before the pagan-serpent of protection?

Such, however, was the spectacle presented to our wondering eyes this fall. This doughty encomiast of men who “spoke” their “honest thought;” this unsparing judge, wont to brand preachers of old ideas as “hypocrites or fools;” wont to bury under mountains of obloquy the oppressors of men in all ages and to wreath with choicest chaplets of rhetoric the name of whosoever had tried, in his day, to uplift his fellowman and broaden the conception of human rights—this same colonel who has so often exclaimed, “Liberty is my religion!” follows in his old age the party which holds that man’s natural condition is poverty, beggary and dependence—that he must be protected; taxed out of the mire which is his natural element and held in the state of civilization to which protection raises him by perennial tariff walls. Who so loud as Colonel Ingersoll in denunciation of the time-servers, “flatterers and crawlers,” who, seeing the truth in their day, lacked the courage to give it voice. Said he not of Agassiz: “He preferred the applause of Boston while he lived, to the reverence of a world after he was dead.” I have heard him say “civilization is a slow and painful growth.” Slow as it is his own defection this year shows how difficult it is for men to keep pace with it.

But stop, Robert hath a scheme for the saving of his intellectual and moral bacon. If you saw the N. Y. World of November 18th, you must have read Ingersoll’s interview on the subject of “Robert Elsmere.” In the course of that interview he depicts the poverty of the masses of mankind all over the world in the most emotional terms and states the cause of it all in these words:

The poor man, willing to work, eager to maintain his independence, knows that there is something higher than charity, that is to say, justice. He finds that many years before he was born his country was divided out between certain successful robbers, flatterers, cringers and crawlers, and that in consequence of such division, not only himself but a large majority of his fellow men are tenants, renters occupying the surface of the earth only at the pleasure of others. He finds, too, that these people who have done nothing, and who do nothing, have everything, and that those who do everything have but little.

After that who shall say Robert was ignorant—that his life lapped over upon an age whose ideas were beyond him! Save his bacon he may by dint of inaudible newspaper interview mutterings in piping times of peace, but the opportunity to stamp his individuality upon the destiny of his race will scarcely visit him again.

Brooding upon this subject until a late hour a night or two since, I fell into a sleep vexed with absurd confusions of incongruous dreams. In the end I found myself in what appeared at first to be a vast cemetery in the midst of which lay a dark sheet of water. The place was crowded with monumental devices and memorials of every description. Some were lowly little headstones just cropping above the ground. Others more pretentious thrust their high towers into the clouds. I noticed that the black tide of the lake already mentioned was steadily rising, engulfing as it rose multitudes of the monuments high and low, and as I gazed something within me seemed to say, that is the sea of oblivion. The import of the whole scene then flashed upon me and I set about to examine the monuments more closely. Some were visible far out in the lake, built it would seem upon promontories against which the hungry tide pressed in vain. Others nearer the shore were immersed, all but their tops which were gradually disappearing like the [hands?] of a drowning multitude clutching at the air or waving dumb farewell. One of these latter seemed by its color to have been made of brass and something in the contour of the head smote me with a thrill of recognition. “That is the monument of Robert G. Ingersoll,” said a voice beside me, “a popular politician ten years ago.” Glad of an interpreter to explain the extraordinary exhibition, I turned to him and asked, “Why have none of them set their monuments upon that high mountain?” pointing to a lofty cliff jutting sheer and precipitous high over all.

“That is the mountain of truth,” my mysterious guide made answer, “and some of those pillars you see yonder rising above the flood are built upon its spurs, but the man whose cenotaph is to crown the apex of the mountain itself is still in life.”

“His name?” I demanded eagerly. At this moment our attention was diverted by a gurgling sound coming from the water, and we turned just in time to see the Ingersoll memorial go down with a gulp in the Stygian pool. A grim visaged raven who had also witnessed the disaster from his perch near the shore shook his feathers and croaked aloud, “What’s the matter with Harrison?” At this strangely inharmonious though somewhat pointed ejaculation I awoke.

FRANK SULLIVAN.

New York.

p. 3, col. 4

A PSALM OF THANKSGIVING.

According to the previously published programme of the coal mine owners of the Monongahela region the miners in those parts were shut out of the mines on the 1st inst., and will not be permitted to earn a living at their trade until the further pleasure of the owners of the coal deposits. The miners have held a convention at Monongahela city and have found themselves utterly helpless.

1. For the productiveness of mines, of coal, iron, silver, gold, lead and all minerals,
   O give thanks unto the Lord.

The Commercial Bulletin publishes a table showing how the market value of the shares of Boston copper mining companies has advanced in the last twelve months as the direct result of the conspiracy that has raised the price of copper nearly seventy per cent. The total advance in value for the companies included in the table is about $23,000,000. In the case of one company the shares of stock were originally given as a bonus to the buyers of bonds and are now selling at almost three times their par value, the advance for twelve months being $4,800,000 for the entire capital stock. In the case of another, whose share capital at par is $2,500,000, the advance in twelve months has been $10,500,000.

1. For all our banks, savings banks, trust companies and financial institutions.
   O give thanks unto the Lord.

The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western and the Delaware and Hudson companies have agreed to limit their output of coal during the present month to seventy per cent of their capacity. The Jersey Central and Lehigh Valley will also reduce production.

A dispatch from Mount Carmel, Pa., says that 2,000 men and boys were thrown out of work in that district on the 1st of December by the suspension of the Union coal company and the Reading coal and iron company’s collieries.

1. For the abundance and cheapness of light and fuel,
   O give thanks unto the Lord.

The Atlantic and Pacific railroad company has reduced the wages of employes receiving over $50 a month 10 per cent, and the men on the California division have given notice that they wil strike^sic unless the old wages are restored.

1. For our wide-spreading, smooth-running railroads,
   O give thanks unto the Lord.

The boodle holders are coming up to headquarters these days bringing an accounting of their stewardship. Every train from the back districts has its apologetic and embarassed^sic faces, for the party managers, the committees which raised the money in the various losing causes, want to know the reason why, and in many cases they need assurances that the money has been really spent according to orders. In case of victory no explanations are ever asked. One man who came up to town to-day and who had been accused of not using the democratic funds intrusted to him, brought a pocketful of affidavits from the various township workers swearing that each had received a certain sum and had expended it—rather a unique exhibit for a court of law, eh?—[Gloucester, N. J., Cor. N. Y. World.

1. For an honest judiciary,
   O give thanks unto the Lord.

The blast furnace employes of the North Chicago rolling mill company at South Chicago have been notified of a fifteen to twenty per cent reduction in wages.

1. For the increase of our cattle,
   O give thanks unto the Lord.

There were, for various reasons, 2,670 men on strike during the month of November. The number of strikes for the month were forty-five.

1. For the abundance and cheapness of good clothing,
   O give thanks unto the Lord.

The Knickerbocker colliery of Shenandoah, Pa., employing over 800 men and boys, closed down for the winter last Saturday. This colliery is owned by the Philadelphia and Reading coal and iron company, which will continue to sell coal at large profits, while the men and boys will launch upon the much more difficult business undertaking of getting a living for the winter without wages.

1. For congress and all our legislatures,
   O give thanks unto the Lord.

The Bast colliery of Ashland stopped operations on Friday last for an indefinite period. This colliery is also owned by the Reading company.

1. For constitutional government,
   O give thanks unto the Lord.

(1)These exhortations are not our own. They are taken from the Mail and Express of Thanksgiving eve, and the manner of distributing them between news items is also copied from that most pious paper.

What, Colonel Sheppard?

Toledo Commercial (rep).

There are external evidences going to show that Elliott F. Sheppard, the gospel editor of the New York Mail and Express, is an ass.

THE SOUTH THE PLACE TO BEGIN AT.

THE NEW DEMOCRACY.

Fair minded democrats who want tariff and transportation reforms should from this time on refuse to be yoked with Sam Randall and such. If these reforms are worth anything they are worth fighting for, and the sooner the wolves in sheep’s clothing are left behind the better will the harvest be.—[Mapleton, Iowa, Home Advocate.

Among the “diversified industries” whose establishment in this country has been contemporaneous with a system of tariff bounties and high taxes the tramp industry has an established place. “Tramps,’”strikes,” “lockouts,” “boycotts” and “trusts” are the hideous brood that are gathered under the wings of protection. They are the natural offspring of a system that sweeps a stipulated part of the earnings of labor into the hands favored monopolies^sic under cover of the power of taxation.—[Philadelphia Record.

The democracy have everything to gain from keeping up the tariff agitation. Indeed, they can make progress in no other direction. They must bend their steps steadfastly in the direction of removing all the purely protection features from the tariff laws, leaving trade as free as the necessities of the government will permit, or they will be swamped—as they deserve—at each recurring election. And this step must not be left to be taken a few months before the next presidential election.—[Detroit Evening News.

There are those who think, or affect to think, that the battle was lost to us on account of the tariff issue. If that be true, it were better so; for brave and honest men, who fight for a cause, can afford to be beaten, sure that truth will rise again, and they with it.—[Louisville Courier-Journal.

If a democratic convention were to be held to-day to nominate a candidate for president Grover Cleveland would be selected with substantial unanimity, and the platform would declare emphatically for tariff reform.—[Indianapolis Sentinel.

The democratic party has in tariff reform a raison d’etre which it has not had for twenty-eight years and if it sacrifices this one element of attraction and cohesion it will soon “be lost to sight,” and also “to memory dear.”—[Kansas City Star.

With a more thorough discussion of the tariff question there is not the slightest doubt that a large majority of the voters of Ohio will express themselves favorable to the democratic position on that question. The good work begun should and will be carried to completion.—[Cleveland, O., Plain Dealer.

Should the democrats occupy this coming four years, as every consideration of common sense and patriotism prompts them, in maintaining an active free trade propaganda, the American tariff will assuredly go down before them. Then where will our tariff-pampered industries be?—[Toronto Globe, (liberal).

The Social Question and The Bible.

JERSEY CITY.—In reading “Progress and Poverty” and thinking on the question treated in that book I thought I would see what the bible said on the subject. I would that every reader of the bible had a copy of “Progress and Poverty,” but although they have not I feel sure that all your readers have bibles, and for their consideration I would commend the following passages. The numbers refer to chapters, verses are put in parentheses:

Genesis, 1, 2, 13, 47 (13 to 26). Exodus, 19 (4 to 6), 20 (12), 22 (21 to 24). Leviticus, [20?] ([23?] and 24), 25, 26 (14 to 46). Numbers, 26 (52 to 56), 32, 33 (50 to 56), 34, 35, 36. Joshua, 13 to 22, 23 (14 to 16). I Samuel, 8. [Ecclesiates?], 3 (13), 5 ([5?] to 9). Isaiah, 3 (13 to 15), 5 ([7?] to 9). Jeremiah, 32. Ezekial^sic, 34, 36 (11 to [19?]), 45, 46 (16 to 18), 47 (13 to 23), 48. Amos, 5 ([8?] to 15), 8 (4 to 10), 9 (15). Malachi, 3 (5). Micah, 2, 3. Matthew, 18 (1 to 14), 25 (31 to 46). James, 5 (1 to 20).

R. CAMPBELL.

In the Twenty-sixth Ward, Brooklyn.

NEW YORK, Dec. 4.—A well attended meeting of the single tax society, Twenty-sixth ward, Brooklyn, was held on Saturday, December 1, at Liberty hall, East New York avenue, between Stone and Rockaway avenues. The programme of the evening contained duetts, songs, recitations and reading of “Progress and Poverty.” A very enjoyable evening was spent.

The next meeting will be held on Saturday, December 8, at 8.30 p. m., at the same place. Short addresses on the subject of the single tax will be delivered, interspersed with music, singing and recitations.

Friends of the movement, and especially those living in the neighborhood, are cordially invited to join in the work.

MAX O. NEWMAN, secretary,
2120 Dean street.

p. 3, col. 6

ELECTORAL REFORM.

Further and more persistent efforts in behalf of ballot reform, particularly in the doubtful states,” must inevitably follow the exposure of corrupt election practices.—Boston Post (dem).

There come from many states, and from the newspapers and representatives of both parties, positive demands for some such reform as the adoption of what is known as the Australian system. Wherever this system has been explained or tried it has been indorsed by all who favor honest elections.—[Pittsburg Chronicle Telegraph (rep).

Strike down [this?] buying of votes and money will lose its power to make results in this manner. This can only be done by not only allowing secrecy in the depositing of the ballot, but by compelling it. No maudlin sentimentality about the “liberty” of showing the ballot to a friend “for consultation” before depositing it must be allowed to make election day a time for bribery.—[Detroit Evening News (ind).

Owing to the almost universal public demand, emanating from democrats and republicans alike, it is understood that an electoral reform law will be presented to the incoming legislature at an early day. And if the republican majority will draw their bill with due care and circumspection, it is altogether likely Governor [Hill?] will sign it.—[Albany Press and Knickerbocker [(ind)?].

In my rapid run through New Jersey one thing has been demonstrated beyond a doubt: The floating vote—the purchasable vote of this state—holds the balance of power. This is true of the state as a whole, and I fear of every county in the state. If there be any exceptions it is in the counties that contain large cities. Strange as [it may?] seem, the city voters are proportionately more honest than the country ones. Not five per cent of the voters of Hudson county are for sale, while in Cape May county thirty per cent go to the polls to see what they can make there. I use these figures advisedly after seeing Chairman Quay’s own canvass books and talking with the men who buy votes and admit it.—[Glouchester, N. J., correspondent New York World.

Ballot reform will greatly reduce the inducements to corruption. Under a secret ballot the corruptionist will not know whether the vote he buys is delivered or not, and he will be much less anxious to give money to voters.—[New York Press (rep).

The one reform demanded by this hour, above every other, is a law protecting the ballot box from bribery and intimidation.—[Grand Rapids, Mich., Leader (labor).

Give us the Australian system of voting, and election frauds will be checked.—[Mascoutah, Ill., Herald (dem).

The true method to avoid election frauds is to enact a law making the state or its subdivisions furnish the ballots, and the balloting absolutely secret, as in the Australian system, which makes it impossible for a vote buyer to know whether or not a vote seller keeps his promise; and as both are liars and cheats, the traffic will come to an end from lack of confidence.—[Toledo Blade (rep.)

In an interview concerning corruption at elections, Judge Gresham is reported to have said: “It is the Pharisees who are doing this. It is men of prominence and respectability who raise these large sums of money knowing the use that they will be put to, men who deal openly in corruption one day and go to church the next.”

The Biddeford Journal, a republican paper in Blaine’s state of Maine, calls upon the next legislature to enact a law making the ballot secret; and the Portland Press, another republican paper in the same republican state, urgently seconds the motion.

On one subject at least the best men of both parties are agreed. It is admitted that the use of money in elections is an abuse so great and so rapidly growing that, if something be not done to check it, it will soon threaten the very existence of republican institutions. The Australian system, by making the ballot absolutely secret, destroys the worst abuses of money in politics. It also, by requiring ballots to be furnished by the state, does away with the necessity for large campaign funds, and prohibits the enormous assessments now levied upon candidates for alleged election “expenses.” There would be no reason why, in connection with this, each party committee should not be required, at the end of a campaign, to furnish and publish an itemized account of receipts and expenditures.—[St. Paul Pioneer Press (rep).

We believe that the great mass of the people, republicans as well as democrats, are in favor of honest elections, and in our opinion a law should be framed solely with a view to get an honest expression of the majority, and therefore, that in framing the law all temptations to gain a party advantage should be sternly resisted. Indiana elections have become the scandal of the nation, for no other reason, in our belief, than that the election laws afford opportunities for the tricksters and scoundrels in both parties to corrupt voters who are willing to be corrupted.—[Evansville, Ind., Courier (dem.)

Our present election methods are rude, crude, and little less than disgraceful, not to speak of the opportunities and actualities of fraud. They should be reformed altogether.—[Indianapolis Journal (rep).

Under our present election law it cannot be said that a man can cast a secret ballot if his fellowman desires to control his vote. The intention of the ballot is therefore wrongfully set aside. What is called the Australian plan is thought by many to be about the nearest right yet introduced.—[Richmond, Ind., Democrat (dem).

Now What Do the Six Hundred Men Who Marched and Roared for Protection Think of It?

At its meeting on last Sunday the Central labor union considered the recent combination of the carpet manufacturers. Here is what the New York Tribune, which ought to know, said about what occurred, together with some other:

It was stated that the pool had kept its factories running on one-half or three-quarter time, and closed the Bigelow mills at Clinton, Mass., thereby throwing [3,000?] hands out of work. The Sanford mills in New Amsterdam were also closed. At a meeting of the pool in Philadelphia it was resolved to advance the price of ingrain carpets two and a half cents a yard for the winter and next spring to advance the price two cents more. At a meeting of the pool in this city it was agreed to advance the price of Brussels tapestry and velvet carpets two and a half and seven and a half cents a yard, and to cut the production and cost from ten to fifteen per cent.

On November 12, E. S. Higgins posted [in?] his carpet factory, Eleventh avenue and Fifty-third street, a notice that a reduction of wages would at once take place. A committee of the Carpet workers’ Local [Assembly?] No. [126?] called on Mr. Higgins and demanded that he live up to his agreement with the local assembly not to cut wages. The reduction did not go into force at that time, but on last Saturday a notice was posted saying that a reduction of from ten to fifteen per cent would take place in the wages of the employes to begin on December 17. It is said that if the local takes this reduction quietly another reduction will be made next spring, but the general impression is that there will be a big fight. The National executive board of carpet workers will come together in Philadelphia next week to consider the ways and means of counteracting the pool.

Something Worth Hearing.

The subject “Free Trade versus Tariff Protection,” will be discussed, December 18, in the great hall, Cooper union, by Mr. Thomas G. Shearman and Professor Van Buren Denslow.

THE STANDARD.

HENRY GEORGE, Editor and Proprietor.

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9, 1888^sic.

THE STANDARD is forwarded to subscribers by the early morning mails each Thursday. Subscribers who do not receive the paper promptly will confer a favor by communicating with the publisher.

THE STANDARD advocates the abolition of all taxes upon industry and the products of industry, and the taking, by taxation upon land values irrespective of improvements, of the annual rental value of all those various forms of natural opportunities embraced under the general term, Land.

We hold that to tax labor or its products is to discourage industry.

We hold that to tax land values to their full amount will render it impossible for any man to exact from others a price for the privilege of using those bounties of nature in which all living men have an equal right of use; that it will compel every individual controlling natural opportunities to either utilize them by the employment of labor, or abandon them to others; that it will thus provide opportunities of work for all men and secure to each the full reward of his labor; and that as a result involuntary poverty will be abolished, and the greed, intemperance and vice that spring from poverty and the dread of poverty will be swept away.

WHO WILL BE THE LOSER?

A correspondent of the Springfield Republican has ventured to rebuke that respectable periodical for careless statements about the single tax. It had said the single tax would be especially burdensome to New England farmers and small land holders who have houses built upon their land; and to disprove this the correspondent went over the tax list of of his own town, Oxford, and pointed out individual farmers and small land owners whose taxes would be less if the single tax were substituted for present forms of taxation. As similar proof is abundant in every town and city of the Union, local investigation anywhere would make it plain that the Republican’s Oxford correspondent had the paper in a corner. But it is an exceedingly frigid day when that paper cannot get out of a corner, or at least make believe to get out; and the temperature is not yet low in Springfield.

“The question,” says the Republican, “is not one of reducing, but of shifting taxes.” True. No advocate of the single tax will waste time disputing that. The single tax would not be apt to reduce taxation except in communities where present taxes are greater than land values. In such places taxation must be reduced, necessarily; but they are so few in settled parts of the country that the question is essentially one of shifting, and not of reduction. The Springfield Republican is to be congratulated on its apprehension of even so little relating to the subject, for this is a qualification opponents of the single tax seldom bring to its discussion. But if taxes are to be shifted, upon whom will they fall? or, using the Republican’s language in its reference to the farms and home owners of Oxford, “Upon whom should be visited the burden unloaded from the farms or homes noted?” And this is the answer it gives:

Here is a quiet New England farming village which now pays taxes upon the principle of he who is best able pays most—his ability being gauged by his real and personal possessions. It is proposed to shift the burden—not lighten it—by the taxation of land values. One man’s gain in that case means another’s loss. Who are the losers? Manifestly the farmers whose buildings and other property have less value proportionately than their land. Here again are two adjoining lots in a village or city of equal size and value, but upon one stands a costly mansion, and on the other the humble home of a workingman. The present system would measure the several abilities of these two owners to pay taxes largely by the two houses and other possessions aside from the lots. The George scheme would equalize the burden by lifting from the wealthy owner and adding to that of the poor man.

Yes, one man’s gain means another’s loss. But is it the laborer, whether village farmer or city workingman, who would lose, and the monopolist who would gain, by exempting labor from taxation and shifting all taxes to monopoly? There are papers in which such stuff as an affirmative suggestion might be excused; but its appearance in one which pretends to an acquaintance with political economy should cover that paper with shame. When labor is taxed, laborers must lose and monopolists gain; and when monopoly is taxed, monopolists must lose and laborers gain. This is too plain for argument. The only escape from its application to the single tax is that land value is not monopoly value, and the Springfield Re-

p. 4, col. 2 publican will not seriously make that point.

That farmers whose buildings and other property have less value than their land, will pay higher taxes than now, to equalize the lower taxes paid by farmers and others whose buildings and other property are worth more than their land, is true enough; provided all improvements be understood by “buildings,” and all the taxpayers consume as well as all they accumulate, be understood by “other property.” Buildings are not the only part of real estate that would be exempt under the single tax; but also fences, drainage, clearings, and, in short, all improvements produced by human labor. Nor are chattels like furniture and machinery, which take years to consume, the only part of personal property that would be exempt; but also such as are consumed in a few months, like clothing, or in a few hours or days, like food. And how many farmers are there whose buildings and other property thus considered, are not worth more than their land? Manifestly none. There are “farmers” who own whole counties which other men farm for them, and “farmers” whose farms lie near large cities where they command suburban prices but are taxed at agricultural rates, whose land values are greater than all the other values they own; but among the real farmers of any “quiet New England farming village,” wherever in the whole country that village may be, there are none of whom this is true. To the farmer, therefore, the single tax would bring a large reduction of taxation, whoever else might be the loser.

An “humble home of the workingman” by the side of a “costly mansion,” is the basis of an objection which was laughed out of court long ago by the workingman himself. The “workingman,” as all of that class well know, is very lucky if he have a home at all, humble or otherwise, and when he has one it is not found by the side of a costly mansion. It is true, however, that under the single tax taxes on land values would be so high that it would not pay to keep valuable land out of its best use, and the poor workingman, with his humble home on a forty thousand dollar lot, would be compelled to pay just as much tax as his neighbor with the mansion. But would this be shifting a tax burden from the latter to the former, as the Republican claims?

That in such a case it would take less from the owner of the mansion and more from the owner of the “humble home,” no one denies. But the reduction to the former would be on property which he had produced or title to which he could trace to the producer, while the increase to the latter would be on the value of the privilege of exclusive occupancy which he enjoyed by license from the community. Thus the rights of the two before the law would be equalized. Each would pay the same for his exclusive license, and each would be at liberty to labor and enjoy the full fruits of his labor without any deduction on pretense of public necessities.

It has been stated already that the improvements and personal property of farmers greatly exceed in value the value of their land, and that the single tax would absolutely reduce their taxes. The same is true of city workingmen who might happen to own a lot. Their land tax would slightly increase; but not much, for the difference between the present rate of tax and the full annual value is slight, and beyond the full annual value the single tax cannot go. In compensation for that slight increase, all taxation on their houses and furniture, their clothing, food, comforts and luxuries, would be abolished. The rich man would also enjoy these exemptions, but he would pay higher taxes on his land; not higher in proportion to its value, but absolutely higher on account of its greater value. This would equalize the burdens of taxation, but certainly not “by lifting from the wealthy owner and adding to that of the poor man.”

But not many city workingmen own lots. Most of them pay rent for their homes. How would they be affected by the single tax? The Springfield Republican needs to be advised of a principle of taxation so elementary as that a tax on houses increases house rent, while a tax on land value does not increase, but tends rather to decrease, land rent. The single tax then would reduce rent to workingmen by making houses cheaper, and reduce it still more by making land cheaper. This would not be adding to the tax burden of the poor man, especially as the same system would lessen the price of everything he bought by abolishing the tax which, with accumulated profits upon it, he must now pay whenever he trades.

To the city workingmen, therefore, as well as to the farmer, the single tax would bring a large reduction of taxation. Upon whom then would the burden be shifted? Obviously upon the owners of specially valuable land. Upon the owners of land the value of which exceeds all their other values. Upon the owners of city lots, mines, quarries, factory sites. In a word, upon the monopolist as a monopolist.

It is not in the mere saving of taxes, however, that the benefits of the single tax lie. Its advantages over the present system operate in two directions.

First, By abolishing taxation on products of labor it cheapens products with-out reducing the wages of producers. But when products are cheaper they are in greater demand; and as greater demand for products involves greater de-

p. 4, col. 3 mand for labor, wages must actually increase.

Second, By imposing all taxes on land values, the burden on the owners of valuable land is such that no one can profitably own land without using it. If he uses it, demand for labor is increased and labor tends to a higher, while products tend to a lower, price. If he neither uses the land nor pays the tax, he can no longer claim exclusive occupancy, and the land is free—it can be taken without purchase. There is so much land held for speculation in every community that the latter course would be adopted to such an extent as to materially depress the value of all land. No one would care merely to own land when there was no profit in mere ownership, and every one would limit his holding to what he could most profitably use. This would make great quantities of land, now unused but monopolized, free even of taxation; and whoever would go upon land might do so without emigrating, and without purchase price or tax.

The importance of this result is expressly recognized by the Republican. In closing its reply to its Oxford correspondent, it describes the single tax as a system which “in theory fences off the surface of the earth and charges upon all alike a toll for entrance thereon, regard-less of the capacity of each in digging up a living or the results of the labor of each in such digging.” Of course the single tax does nothing of the kind. On the contrary its supreme object is practically to abolish the toll which men who have already fenced off the surface of the earth are charging all new comers. But to recognize the wrongfulness of a system that “fences off the surface of the earth” and charges toll for entrance thereon is to, make a great advance^sic in our direction; and if the Republican will keep on thinking until it understands that what we propose is to abolish taxation on both capacity to dig and the results of the digging, and simply to tax the toll, it will not again give countenance to so absurd an error as that the single tax would shift the burden of taxation from the rich to the poor.

LOUIS F. POST.

FARMING OUT GOVERNMENT.

The court of appeals, while conceding the constitutionality of the law repealing the charter of the late Jacob Sharp’s Broadway railroad company, decides that property acquired by the corporation during its life cannot be taken by the public, but must be distributed, primarily to the mortgagees and other creditors of the company, and secondarily to the stockholders. It is hard to understand how the decision could have been different. A corporation being an artificial person, its dissolution is legally analagous^sic to the death of a natural person, and leaves to creditors and representatives all property possessed at the time. This principle the court of appeals has applied to the defunct Broadway railroad company.

If the property of that corporation had consisted only of tracks, cars, horses, stables, and so forth, there would have been nothing remarkable in the decision, nor is it likely that the court would have taken the trouble to hand down a voluminous opinion in support of a conclusion so simple and obvious. But what gives importance to the case is the fact that the Broadway railroad company, between its incorporation and the repeal of its charter, acquired a franchise—a mere intangible and invisible, but exclusive right—to run street cars along Broadway in the city of New York. This franchise the court holds to be private property, like tracks, cars, horses and stables, and like them entitled to every legal protection against a taking without due process of law. And inasmuch as the company, during its life as a corporation, mortgaged its property, including this franchise, the court decides that the franchise has passed beyond public control and must be perpetuated for the benefit of the mortgagees. Of course the mortgage in this case is but incidental. The principle under which the mortgagees are protected would apply with equal force to preserve the franchise to the stockholders if there were no mortgage. So it appears that when the people surrender to a private corporation the right to use a public highway for a public purpose the surrender is irrevocable, and the right assumes all the characteristics of private property.

It is not worth while to find fault with this law as law. But the absurdity of such a condition should direct general attention to the greater absurdity, of which the result of this case is but a logical outcome, of enfranchising private concerns with public rights.

A proposition to farm out the construction and control of city streets or country roads would no longer be listened to, so plain is it even to the narrowest comprehension, that highways are essentially public institutions. But while with streets and roads ownership of the way and ownership of the vehicle are naturally distinct, railroad lines are a peculiar kind of highway in which ownership of both way and vehicle is necessarily blended. This requires the public to own the vehicle as well as the highway, or private interests to own the highway as well as the vehicle. The latter policy has been adopted chiefly because a just opposition to the extension of government functions into fields of private enterprise has innocently played into the hands of railroad monopolists, who, by arguing against the establishment of municipal, state and national railroad systems as tending to paternalism in government, have acquired franchises for public highways, which it is now decided cannot be re-

p. 4, col. 4 sumed by the people but are to be perpetually enjoyed for private profit.

The mere fact that this kind of property is a franchise—that it is a part of sovereign power which, before it can exist as a private right, must be severed from the body of sovereign power—should determine the impropriety of the policy. While it is undesirable that the state should “go into business,” it has no right to delegate any of its functions; and when public convenience requires, as in the case of railroads, that it shall either delegate its functions as to highways or assume new functions, the latter evil is by far the least.

The spectacle of a thoroughfare like Broadway being subjected, so far as the principal mode of travel upon it is concerned, to private ownership in perpetuity, ought to be a warning even to the most conservative against any further farming out of the powers of government.

ST. LUKE’S CHURCH IN HUDSON STREET.

THE STANDARD prints this week a letter from Everett P. Wheeler, criticising some remarks recently made by me in its columns about St. Luke’s church in Hudson street.

I am obliged to Mr. Wheeler for setting me right as to the facts; and I sincerely regret that I should have misstated them. My understanding was that the church was about to abandon its work in the neighborhood where it was founded and establish itself afresh in a new location. I am glad to hear that it proposes to erect on its old site “a new church with all the facilities for parish work, industrial shool^sic, reading room, Sunday school, dispensary, and the like.” And I beg Mr. Wheeler to believe that in what I said, under a misapprehension of the facts, I intended no specific reproach to St. Luke’s. The action of that church seemed to me to afford a striking illustration of the evils of a system whose evils I am anxious to expose in the most striking manner possible. That was all. If the church had sold its land in Hudson street, or had rented it out on building leases, it would have done nothing that it had not a perfect right to do. I am not foolish enough to expect or ask that St. Luke’s church, any more than any other land owner, should abandon property to which the law gives it a legal title. Even were every member of the congregation satisfied of the iniquity of the system of private property in land, such an abandonment would be unjustifiable. For it would do nothing toward curing the evil or lessening the sin. The evil is a social evil; the sin is a social sin. And the sin of society must be abandoned by society before the social evil resulting from it can be cured.

But, as I intended no specific reproach to the church, if it had acted as I thought it had, so I must decline to accord it any special credit now that I have been corrected as to the facts. It is still, to the extent at least of the value of its land, a state supported church. And curiously enough, Mr. Wheeler founds his argument in favor of St. Luke’s on the plea that it is a state church—that it is doing, on behalf of the state, work that the state has recognized its own obligation to perform.

To feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to nurse the sick, to teach children how to earn a living, to teach people to be honest, true and helpful, and to love their neighbors as themselves—these are all very creditable things to do. And though I think Mr. Wheeler makes a pretty enthusiastic claim when he says St. Luke’s has done them all, still I think him and his fellow church members worthy of praise for having even tried to do them. I used to live near St. Luke’s when I was a boy, and I notice that somehow there seems to be more poverty in that neigh-borhood than there was thirty years ago—perhaps the children who have been taught how to earn a living haven’t been very successful in doing it. But how all this can be called adding to the common stock of wealth, which is a material thing, unproducible save by the exertion of labor in moving raw material and tools about, I utterly fail to see. And I am equally unable to find in all this praiseworthy benevolence any reason why the church should be exempted from taxes on its property. The weight of taxes on other citizens of New York is heavier because St. Luke’s property is untaxed. In other words, the congregation of St. Luke’s compel their fellow citizens to contribute, nolens,volens, to St. Luke’s charities. Is this just? Will any amount of good deeds on the congregation’s part make it just?

And anything more repugnant to the theory of the single tax than the setting apart, free of tax, of a piece of land for the use or support of a church or other private corporation, I cannot well conceive. Why should I be deprived of a portion of my heritage in the earth, that Mr. Wheeler and his friends may worship God after their own peculiar fashion^sic. If they want to worship, let them worship. I claim no right to hinder them. If they want a house to worship in, let them build or buy a house. It will be the product of their own labor in some form or other and therefore indefeasibly their own. But right to nse the land^sic on which the house is built is mine as much as theirs. If they want to use it, let them pay, year by year, its rental value into the common purse, that I may have my share. For them to claim exclusive own-ership of it, would be a robbery of me. For me to grant them exclusive ownership would be a robbery of unborn children. And the object of the single tax

p. 4, col. 5 on land values is to do away with just such robbery.

“And thus the church will continue to teach the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood or man^sic.” Will it? Has it ever taught them? Is it fatherly in God to send a child into this world without the right to live here, save by the purchased permission of some eider son? If so, then the church indeed teaches the fatherhood of God; and shame on the earthly parent who would imitate such fatherhood! Is it brotherly to seize a younger child’s inheritance and make him pay tribute for the privilege of living? If so, then the church does teach the brotherhood of man; and a pretty brotherhood it is! But if by fatherhood is meant that fatherhood that Christ described—that tender thoughtfulness that provides equally for all the children, and by brotherhood that true fraternal love that scorns to take advantage of a brother, then the church teaches neither the one nor the other. Christ taught them. But he has been dead these many years. And it is because the church fails to teach them—because it points to a cruel, relentless being, dooming men to misery here below, while mocking them with phantom promises of happiness hereafter, and proclaims, Behold your Father;—because it mocks God’s poor with idle pratings about a brotherhood that it knows full well has no existence—because it seeks, by bestowing alms, to avoid doing justice, and treats those whom it idly calls its brothers as foundlings cast upon its charity;—it is because of these things that the church of to-day is a scorning and a mockery to thousands, and to thousands, and to tens of thousands more. The church shudders at the blasphemies of men like Ingersoll. It is the blasphemies of the church itself that have made them possible.

I remember—I can never forget it—one evening, some eighteen months ago, when a minister of Christ who really believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and was thrust forth for his belief, uttered, before an immense audience in Chickering hall, the words of Christ’s prayer, Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. And as the whole assemblage, grasping, like a single man, the full meaning of that tremendous petition, sprang to their feet, with cheers, and waving of handerchiefs^sic, and weeping of women, in a sudden tumult of surprise and joy, I realized, as I had never before, what the strength of Christianity might be, and what its weakness is. For, in spite of Christian teachers, men believe in Christ, and now, as eighteen centuries ago, the common people hear Him gladly. But I don’t think the common people throng to St. Luke’s so eagerly but what there is at least standing room for a few more.

T. L. M’CREADY.

The Textile Record instructs the new congress and administration in a tone that rings with the sharpness and authority of a court house bell. First of all, the internal revenue taxes must be abolished. The chief reason for this is that their abolition “will rule free trade agitation out of politics for a good while to come.” That is an excellent reason from the protection point of view, for nothing can be more disastrous to protection than free trade agitation. Error is always in danger when truth agitates. After the internal revenue bureau is overthrown the tariff must be revised. But not in the lines of any measure recently presented. Randall’s conciliation bill and the senate makeshift, no less than the Mills bill, must be thrown aside. “Both were framed upon the assumption, now shown to be false, that the nation longed for lower duties and greater freedom of raw materials,” says the Record. There is not a little assumption in assuming that the electoral vote of Indiana, secured by the purchase of “floaters in blocks of five” with protected “fat,” and that of New York secured by a dicker with Hill’s saloon contingent, speak the sentiment of the nation against “lower duties and greater freedom of raw materials;” but that is the way the Record looks at it, and its constituency having paid its money the Record is entitled to its choice. How then must the tariff be revised? Nothing shall go upon the free list but articles not produced at home. Upon articles grown or made in this country the duty must not be lowered, and upon some, tin plate, for example, it must be increased sufficiently to permit profitable production here. Tea and coffee are not mentioned, but no doubt sufficient duty to exclude the pauper pro-duct would encourage domestic cultivation, and since it is only a question of duty, why not? The woolen schedule must be made to give full protection from the sheep to the cloth and check “the destructive influx of foreign fibres and fabrics,” which, by the way, would also check the efflux of the native products with which we now pay for these foreign fibres and fabrics. The silk schedule must be fixed to overcome the “hurtful consequences” of the recent tariff reform decision in favor of protectionist John Wanamaker. And, in short, as “a great victory has been won” for protection the “duty remaining is to reap its fruits fully.”

It is quite natural that men who have had fat fried out of them in a victorious struggle for more fat should be somewhat peremptory in their demands. But what answer can the republicans make? Are they not fully committed to the precise scheme suggested and partly outlined by the Record? From the president-elect to the most insignificant “spellbinder” the ex-

p. 4, col. 6 clusion of foreign products from our shores was declared to be the republican policy.

Chicago has another anarchist scare on hand. The police are in possession of the usual reliable information. A committee of six anarchists have the revolution in charge. It is only within a few days that the names of these men were discovered by the police. It is a credit to the police to have discovered them at all, for their identity is held sacredly secret and is unknown to the anarchists themselves. They work individually, and not as a body, and have done so for a year; and the revolutionary blow is to be struck in 1890 under cover of a general eight hour strike, though it is suspected that it may occur as early as next July, on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the fall of the Bastile. Whatever truth there may be in these sensational police reports, the fact that such reports can gain general credence should be a warning. Conspiracies like these could neither exist nor be supposed to exist if there were not actual injustice to generate them. To ascertain the injustice, understand its cause, comprehend the remedy, and remove the wrong, is the first duty of good citizens; and neither policemen nor hangmen can prevent the disaster or repair the damage which is certain to follow the neglect of that duty.

Ohio is blessed with a legislative committee which is trying to invent a plan to increase state revenues without adding to the burden of taxation. It is at the same time cursed with a proposition urgently pressed to do this by means of indireet taxes^sic. That is to say, it is proposed to increase the revenues, not without adding to the burden of taxation, but without appearing to add to them. The already overtaxed farmers, merchants and industrial classes generally, are to be taxed still more, but in such a way as to make them pay the tax without knowing it. This is the way Mr. Bedell, who has just removed to Sing Sing animo manendi, taxed his employers. They were quite content until they found it out, but then they made it unpleasant for Bedell; and just so will it be with the tax ridden people of Ohio when they learn the trick. Now everybody knows that the value of Ohio land far exceeds the need of revenue which that state has. And everybody who has taken the pains to do a little simple but clear and honest thinking on the subject, knows that by taxing these land values and abolishing other taxes, all necessary revenues might be raised and all state tax burdens on the industrial classes removed. The only real objection to this plan is that it would diminish the power of monopoly.

It is announced by the Ohio press that Henry George is to appear before the legislative committee there in January next, to advocate the single tax; so after all, the effort to befool the committee into a recommendation of indirect taxa-tion may not work as smoothly as its authors hope for.

MEN AND THINGS.

It is significant of the force with which the world moves, that the leader of the tory party in England openly acknowledges the justice of the claim of women to the suffrage. This is what he said in his recent speech at Edinburgh:

I earnestly hope the day is not far distant when women also will bear their share in voting for members in the political world and in determining the policy of the country. I can conceive no argument by which they are excluded. It is obvious they are abundantly as fit as many who now possess suffrage, by knowledge, [by?] training, and by character, and their influence is likely to weigh in a direction which, in an age so material as ours, is exceedingly valuable, namely, in the direction of morality and religion.

It is hardly to be supposed that the marquis of Salisbury, in thus advocating the enfranchisement of women, is actuated by any very strong convictions of right and wrong. Tory politicians are not apt to advocate reforms merely because they happen to be ethically just. The marquis seeks votes rather than an approving conscience. But it is a hopeful sign that he should have learned that votes are to be attracted by a promise, even though it be but a vague promise, to redress a long standing and crying wrong.

It will be in just such a way as this that the emancipation of industry will be hastened by the politicians who, in their inmost hearts, would much rather oppose it. When once party leaders come to understand that a policy of radical reform will command votes, while one of continued oppression will alienate them, they will become enthusiastic reformers. They sacrifice their money to purchase votes; they will sacrifice their prejudices even more readily.

The Syracuse Journal announces the completion of the geologic exploration of the Onondaga valley, and speaks with enthusiasm of the immense deposits of salt that have been found. In one place a solid bed of rock salt, forty-five feet thick, was found at a depth of 1,200 feet; and throughout the entire valley wells have been sunk with good results.

Here is a splendid protectionist argument for an increase of the salt duties. It would be a shame if such magnificent opportunities right here within our own borders should be left unutilized. And how can they be utilized unless those wicked, wicked English paupers can be prevented from deluging us with pauper salt. Common sense people might say that if the English paupers will give us salt in return for the product of less labor than would be required to dig our own salt, we would be fools not to let them do it. But then common sense people are not protectionists. Far otherwise.

Last week came the announcement that the carpet manufacturers had come to an agreement to raise the prices of carpets. Assigned cause, excessive cost of raw material, caused by tariff rates.

This week we have the news that after December 17 wages in carpet factories are to be reduced to ten to fifteen per cent. Cause assigned, none. Cause that might be assigned, the wage workers can’t help themselves.

The carpet mill hands were asked to vote for protection a month ago on the ground that it secured them steady employment at high wages. The farmers were asked to vote for protection on the ground that by submitting to heavy taxes on their carpets and other things, they would foster a well paid class of working people who would buy some of their grain and other products at a little less than English prices.

What do the carpet mill hands and the farmers think of protection now?

The annual report of the secretary of the interior draws attention to the possibility of redeeming, if not all, at least a very large portion of the western desert lands by a comprehensive system of irrigation. The present desert land law, which was expected to accomplish this end, has proved an almost total failure. It provides that no person shall be permitted to enter more than a single square mile. But as it costs well nigh as much to secure the water for a single square mile as for fifty, the effect of this limitation has been to hinder improvements except in the rare cases when a number of entry men have taken up contiguous tracts. The secretary advises, therefore, that the government assume charge of the entire irrigation system, constructing reservoirs in suitable valleys and gorges along the mountain streams, and providing the necessary aqueducts and canals for distribution. This plan received the quasi sanction of congress at its last session, when $100,000 was appropriated for preliminary surveys and investigations. Mr. Vilas’s report recommends the appropriation of further sums for the same purpose.

If the people’s money must be spent, it is, of course, better that it should be spent in some such way as this, on public works of permanent utility, than squandered in the building of dynamite cruisers and other weapons of destruction. But in truth there is no good reason why it should be spent for either purpose. This country needs more arable land quite as little as it needs more ships of war. There is plenty, and to spare, of fertile virgin soil. All the wheat growers of the United States might be colonized in Dakota without overcrowding. Our whole sixty-five millions could find super-abandant^sic room east of the Mississippi, with ample occupation for their productive energies. It isn’t more land we need, but simply permission to use what land we have.

Suppose we spend a score of millions of dollars on Rocky mountain reservoirs, and make every acre of desert land capable of blossoming like the rose. Who will be the gainers? Not the American people, but the lucky few who will hasten to get possession of the land as soon as the improvements become a certainty, that they may tax the American people for the privilege of using it. For the citizens of this republic, under present social conditions, to spend the public money in improving the national domain would be about a sensible as^sic for a tenant to build a

p. 5, col. 2 palace on his landlord’s land the year his lease expired.

And in another portion of Secretary Vilas’s report we have a fresh instance of the entaglements^sic into which our iniquitous system of land monopoly is forever leading us. The secretary is troubled over the Indian problem. There are nearly 250,000 Indians on the various reservations, and something must be done about them. There is no time to civilize them by degrees, spreading the educational process over several successive generations. The rough civilization of the border is lapping round them on every side, and between border civilization and Indian savagery there is constant friction. And so Mr. Vilas would civilize the Indians at one grand coup, by taking away all their children and educating them in public schools. “Let but the present generation of Indian youth,” he tells us, “be universally instructed according to their capacity, as already demonstrated, and the Indian question is settled, because there will be no Indians when the generation of youth becomes the generation of manhood.” Since the great Mussulman wave rolled across northern Africa and extinguished Christianity in a single generation, no scheme of conversion more comprehensive than this, has been proposed.

There is room enough and to spare for the Indians, just as there was room enough and to spare for the herds of buffalo that gave the Indians food. There is room enough if we would but let them use it, and time enough for the problem of their civilization to be worked out in a natural and peaceful way. But the landlords want their land, and the settlers, thrust beyond the border by landlords’ monopoly, want their land; and so Secretary Vilas can see no resource save to civilize them in a single generation, allot them lands in severalty, and bid them take care of themselves as best they can. There will be an unhappy lot of Indians a generation hence if the secretary’s scheme is carried out. And there will be an unhappy lot of Indians if it isn’t. So what are we going to do about it?

The report of the director of the mint shows that during the year ending June 30 last there has been coined $28,364,170 in gold, and $32,718,673 silver dollars. The gold coinage cost its face value; but on the silver dollars the mint made a profit of no less than $8,407,922, so that each silver dollar cost the government only a fraction over seventy-four cents. This is very satisfactory, and makes one regret that more silver dollars could not have been coined. A silver dollar, as every one knows, will buy just as much of anything as a gold dollar—it will even buy the gold dollar itself; and if we can use, as a vehicle of exchange, silver dollars that cost only seventy-four cents each, just as well as gold dollars that cost one hundred cents each, why, manifestly, the more silver dollars we make, and the fewer gold ones, the better off we shall be. Any man can nnderstand^sic that, who has sense enough not to pay $2 a bushel for wheat when he can just as well get it for $1.00.

But there is another kind of dollars that people prefer to either the 100-cent gold kind, or the 74-cent silver kind; and that is the paper kind, that cost, practically, nothing at all. They can buy just as much with a paper dollar as with a gold or silver one, and the paper dollar is much the handiest and safest to carry round. And so it happens that when men present their bills to the United States for payment, they object to taking either gold dollars, or silver dollars, but clamor for the paper dollars that they love, and will not be satisfied unless they get them.

This being the case, it may be asked why the United States doesn’t coin more dollars of paper and fewer dollars of gold and silver. It is well to save twenty-six cents on the cost of a silver dollar, but it is certainly better to save 100 cents on the paper dollar. Why don’t they do it? The answer to this question is the school-girl’s answer to any question that perplexes her: Because. There isn’t any reason. It’s just “because.”

What the United States does is this: It buys seventy-four cents worth of silver, and coins it into a dollar. Then it buries that dollar in the ground and makes a paper dollar to represent it. This is a special kind of paper dollar, with a legend on it certifying that it is only equal to a silver dollar, and not to a gold dollar; but as any banker will give a gold dollar for it, and as no one man in a thousand would want to get a gold dollar for it, that doesn’t make much difference. Then the United States pays out the paper dollar, buys some more silver, makes more silver dollars, buries them under ground, makes more paper dollars, and so on. All the silver dollars coined last year are buried. All the silver dollars coined the year before are buried. All the silver dollars coined the year before that are buried. Once a year they go down into the holes and count the silver dollars. Generally they find them all right, and then they come out and say the currency is sound. Sometimes they move the silver dollars from one hole to another. When they do that it happens sometimes that some of the dollars get stolen. In that way they get into circulation. But save for that, the dollars stay in the ground from one year’s end to another. What use the silver dollars are to anybody, why they should be coined, why the people of the United States should be taxed forty cents a head every year to pay for them, are things that nobody can ever hope to find out.

The treasury of the United States held, on July 1, 1888, in gold dollars, silver dollars and bullion, $594,533,172—nearly $10 for every man, woman and child in the country. It does not propose to use this treasure. On the contrary, it expressly proposes not to use it—just to keep it lying there. The merchant or banker who should undertake to run his business in such a manner would have a brief career, indeed.

The Rev. Samuel Maude, vicar of Needham Market, in the kingdom of Great Britain, is a clergyman who believes that

p. 5, col. 3 children—that is, children of the lower classes, of course—should submit themselves to all their governors, teachers, spiritual pastors, and masters, and order themselves lowly and reverently to all their betters, as per the catechism instructed. One morning lately Mr. Maude met a common little boy of his parish, near school time, and ordered him to go to school. The little boy insolently rereplied, “I don’t go to your school now;” whereupon the reverend gentleman “seized hold of him, shook him, and wrung his ears. The boy caught hold of the palings, but Mr. Maude pulled him away by putting his knee in his back, and dragged him into the school room.”

A generation ago this might have been thought rather a delicate attention on Maude’s part than otherwise; but things are different now, and the boy’s mother impudently summoned Mr. Maude before the petty sessions, where another clergyman presided. They had to find Maude guilty—there was no help for it. So they fined him sixpence. And then the reverend magistrate addressed the boy’s mother in this fashion:

I think it is monstrous hard that clergymen are to be dictated and dominated over in this way. It is simply abominable that for holding up our little finger we are to be brought before the magistrate for assault.

The reverend Mr. Mande^sic ought to leave England and come to this country. The Pennsylvania coal region is evidently his proper field.

A Long island jury has decided that it is no crime to “course” rabbits. To “course” rabbits is to capture a lot of those animals, take them to some convenient place where a party of young men and women of leisure are congregated to witness the sport, and turn them loose, one at a time, to be pursued and killed by a dog in the most delightfully interesting and exciting manner. For doing this, at their “coursing” grounds on Long island, certain young men were ruthlessly dragged away from their horrified and outraged companions of both sexes, by officers of the Society for the prevention of cruelty to animals; but upon trial they were acquitted. In all probability the jury was right, but even if there be no law against it, what sort of people are they who enjoy sport of that kind?

A writer in the Press gives some information about the earnings of the people who make their livings as domestic servants in wealthy households. A cook, we learn, receives from $25 to $40 per month, of course with board and lodging added. These are not chefs, by any means, nor even cordons bleux^sic, but just simply the ordinary cooks of quite ordinary rich folks—Press editors and that class of people. A coachman varies from $35 to $50, the latter sum probably securing the services of a genuine imported article, with the full flavor of Belgravia in his manners, conversation and style of driving. Butlers are another well paid class of wage earners, their salaries ranging from $40 to $60 a month. How much would be paid for a silver haired butler, warranted to have been in the family service for fifty years, with a tremulous voice and a slightly bulbous nose and that charming habit of taking little liberties which distinguished the old and attached servitor, the Press man doesn’t tell us. Probably that kind of a butler is to be had only on private terms, and is not quoted at the intelligence office. On the other hand, nurse girls are plentiful and in slow demand at $8 a month. But then the nurse maid can’t throw much aristocratic style into her profession, except, perhaps, by flirting with the policeman. So long as she wears the regulation cap and apron one nurse maid is about as impressive as any other.

Strange, Passing Strange.

New York Sun.

Our Own Evarts is wearing a new silk hat. It is supposed that he won it by the late election.

Somebody Get a Gimlet.

London Echo.

An inventive American from the Missouri region has taken out a patent at Washington for “stilts for horses.” It is to revolutionize plowing round on the hillsides, for, however steep the ascent may be, this genius thinks that the animal will be enabled to perform its task in comfort, when its legs are enabled by art to stand upon a level. The patent has really been granted to him and it is said that he is considering further momentous discoveries of equal assistance to mankind.

A Bad Place For Reporters.

Apropos of the Whitechapel murders, tho^sic London correspondent of the New York Sun says:

The Methodist Times plaintively apologizes to its readers for an insufficient report of a certain teachers’ meeting, on the ground that its reporter, sent to attend the proceedings, was twice arrested as the Whitechapel murderer and did not get there.

Irresistible Legions Meet.

Chicago Tribune.

Two large processions encountered each other on the public highway near Indianapolis.

“Let us pass,” said the leader of one, “we are the man that first nominated Harrison for president.”

“We have the right of way,” haughtily remarked the leader of the other procession. “We are the man that went to school with him when we were a boy.”

And the shock of the collision shook the earth and broke all the windows for miles around.

How the School Pays.

Texas Siftings.

Two teachers of languages were discussing matters and things relative to their profession.

“Do your pupils pay up regularly on the first of each month?” asked one of them.

“No, they do not,” was the reply. “I often have to wait for weeks and weeks before I get my pay, and sometimes I don’t get it all. You can’t well dun the parents for the money.”

“Why don’t you do as I do? I always get my money regularly.”

“How do you manage it?”

“It is very simple. For instance, I am teaching a boy French, and on the first day of the month his folks don’t pay the money for the lesson. In that event I give the boy the following sentence to translate and write out at home: ’I have no money. The month is up. Hast thou got any money? Have not thy parents got money? I need money very much. Why hast thou not brought the money this morning? Did thy father not give thee any money? Has he no money in the pocketbook of his uncle’s great aunt?” That fetches them. Next morning you bet that boy brings the money.”

p. 5, col. 4

THE ETERNAL CITY.

The extract printed below is from chapter XXXI of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

The lands of Italy which had been originally divided among the families of free and indigent proprietors were insensibly purchased or usurped by the avarice of the nobles; and in the age which preceded the fall of the republic, was computed that^sic only two thousand citizens were possessed of an independent substance. Yet as long as the people bestowed, by their suffrages, the honors of the state, the command of the legions, and the administration of wealthy provinces, their conscious pride alleviated, in some measure, the hardship of poverty; and their wants were seasonably supplied by the ambitious liberality of the candidates who aspired to secure a venal majority in the thirty-five tribes, or the one hundred and ninety-three centuries of Rome. But when the prodigal commons had imprudently alienated not only the use, but the inheritance of power, they sunk, under the reign of the Cæsars, into a vile and wretched populace, which must in a few generations have been totally extinguished if it had not been continually recruited by the manumission of slaves and the influx of strangers. . . .

Yet the name of that city was still pronounced with respect: the frequent and capricious tumults of its inhabitants were indulged with impunity; and the successors of Constantine, instead of crushing the last remains of the democracy by the strong arm of military power, embraced the wild policy of Augustus, and studied to relieve the poverty and to amuse the idleness of an innumerable people. I. For the convenience of the lazy plebeians, the monthly distribution of corn were converted into a daily allowance of bread; a great number of ovens were constructed and maintained at the public expense; and at the appointed hour each citizen, who was furnished with a ticket, ascended the flight of steps which had been assigned to his peculiar quarter or division, and received, either as a gift or at a very low price, a loaf of bread of the weight of three pounds for the use of his family. II. The forest of Lucania, whose acorns fattened large droves of wild hogs, afforded, as a species of tribute, a plentiful supply of cheap and wholesome meat. During five months of the year a regular allowance of bacon was distributed to the poorer citizens. . . .

The stupendous aqueducts, so justly celebrated by the praises of Augustus himself, replenished the thermae, or baths, which had been constructed in every part of the city with imperial magnificence. The baths of Antoninus Caracalla, which were open at stated hours for the indiscriminate use of the senators and the people, contained above 1,600 seats of marble; and more than 3,000 were reckoned in the baths of Diocletian. The walls of the lofty apartments were covered with curious mosaics that imitated the art of the pencil in the elegance of design and and the variety of colors. The Egyptian granite was beautifully encrusted with the precious green marble of Numidia; the perpetual stream of hot water was poured into the capacious basins, through so many wide mouths of bright and massy silver; and the meanest Roman could purchase with a small copper coin, the daily enjoyment of a scene of pomp and luxury, which might excite the envy of the kings of Asia. From these stately palaces issued a swarm of dirty, ragged plebeians, withwithout shoes and without a mantle; who loitered away whole days in the street or Forum, to hear news and to hold disputes; who dissipated in extravagant gaming the miserable pittance of their wives and children; and spent the hours of the night in obscure taverns and brothels in the indulgence of gross and vulgar sensuality.

But the most lively and splendid amusement of the idle multitude depended on the frequent exhibition of public games and spectacles. The piety of Christian princes had suppressed the inhuman combats of gladiators; but the Roman people still considered the circus as their home, their temple, and the seat of the republic. The impatient crowd rushed at the dawn of day to secure their places, and there were many who passed a sleepless and anxious night in the adjoining porticoes. From the morning to the evening, careless of the sun or of the rain, the spectators, who sometimes amounted to the number of four hundred thousand, remained in eager attention, their eyes fixed on the horses and charioteers, their minds agitated with hope and fear for the success of the colors which they espoused, and the happiness of Rome appeared to hang on the event of a race^sic.”

Readers of THE STANDARD would do well to compare with this the history of our own people for Thanksgiving day as written in the daily papers of Friday, November 30.

It is estimated that 20,000 of our free people ate the bread of charity at public tables in this city last Thursday. This is without counting the 14,000 criminals and inmates of public institutions. Tens of thousands more yelled themselves hoarse, as if the fate of nations was in the balance, at the games and the race tracks where horses or men were struggling in the modern “circus”—this being the amusement which the nineteenth century has given to the people as a substitute for the games of skill and strength and the sports in which the people themselves once took part.

Only the day before Thanksgiving the estimable mayor of the city proposed to lay the foundation stones of a contemptible modern imitation of the “baths of Caracalla” by building a public hot bath in one of the crowded districts.

In splendid churches eloquent preachers told their listeners that everybody was well to do and tickled their ears with well turned periods, bringing to mind a group such as might have been seen in the baths of Rome, where the rising poet or dramatist pictured the glories of Roman citizenship to the applauding circle who reclined about him on the marble seats.

From the “candidate” who gave in advance to the people of Rome part of their prospective spoils in order to get their votes, down to the most degraded of the Roman citizens, are they not types of the men of our day and our own country? Is not the question merely one of degree? And was the degree always lower then than it is now?

W. B. SCOTT.

What the Solid Business Men Will Do.

On November 15 the Toledo Blade remarked that “business is booming since the election and that the republican victory is appreciated by the solid business of the country.”

In another recent issue, the Blade makes a bitter complaint against the coal monopoly under the caption: “Crush the Coal Trust.” The Blade complains that the price of coal is already exorbitantly high and that the proposed stoppage of

p. 5, col. 5 mining in the Monongahela region which will throw 6,000 miners out of employment, is for the purpose of forcing prices still higher. But what better evidence could be found that “the solid business men” who own all the coal in that part of the world, do keenly appreciate protection’s victory? The solid business men are to be congratulated upon the splendid posibilities^sic of the victory and there is no doubt that they will make the most of them. And those miners and coal consumers who voted for protection should be felicitated that they are getting what they voted for in good big chunks and they need have no fear that they will not continue to get their full share of the victory. But what consolation can be offered the coal miners and consumers who are having the fruits of the victory thrust upon them against their will?

It needs no inspired prophet to predict the results of the recent election. The solid business men who bought and paid for Harrison’s election make no secret of their programme. They triumphantly claim that the home market justly belongs to them and they frankly and confidently demand a sufficiently high tariff to secure to them their own, while the republican party, which will assume control of the government after the 4th of March next, is anxiously awaiting the opportunity to make the programme of the solid business men the law of the land. Though there is scarcely a doubt that the monopolists, or, more politely, the solid business men, will get possession of the home market—there is no doubting what they will do with it when they do get possession of it. They will make money out of it and they will make it in one or both of two ways—by lowering wages directly or by lowering them indirectly by increasing the price of their products. The republican victory means, in short, harder times for all but the monopolists.

Among the first sufferers will be the poor, deluded, sentimental farmer. As the tariff is increased and the price of imports go up, to the same extent the price which the American farmer can get for his meats and breadstuffs abroad, and consequently the home price, must decline. As imports are cut off, in like proportion must exports be diminished and the farmer will have to depend more and more on the home market which he will find to be the private poverty of the already powerful meat^sic and flour trusts. Nevertheless, “the country” will grow in wealth during the coming four years precisely in the same way that it has increased in wealth during the last twenty-five, only a little more so.

P. V. JONES.

The Army of the Rear.

This is the way in which some of Her Majesty’s subjects sing the praises of the jubilee year:

Henry Lawson in the Sydney, Australia, Bulletin.

I listened through the music and the sounds of revelry, And all the hollow noises of that year of jubilee; I heard beyond the cheering, and beyond the trumpets’ blare, The steady tramp of thousands that were marching in the rear. Tramp! tramp! tramp! They seem to shake the air, Those never-ceasing footsteps of the Outcasts in the Rear.

I heard defiance ringing from the men of rags and dirt, I heard wan women singing that sad “Song of the Shirt,” And o’er the sounds of menace, and the moanings of despair, I heard the steady tramping of their feet along the rear! Tramp! tramp! tramp! Vibrating in the air— They’re swelling fast, those footsteps of the Army of the Rear!

I hate the wrongs I read about, I hate the wrongs I see! The tramping of that army sounds as music unto me— A music that is terrible, that frights the anxious air, Is beaten from the weary feet that tramp along the rear. Tramp! tramp! tramp! In dogged, grim despair— They have a goal, these footsteps of the Army of the Rear!

I looked upon the nobles, with a lineage so old; I looked upon their mansions, on their acres and their gold; I saw their women radiant, with diamonds in their hair, And then I joined the Army of the Outcasts in the rear! Tramp! tramp! tramp! We’ll show what Want can dare, My brothers and my sisters of the Army of the Rear!

I looked upon the mass of poor, in filthy alleys pent; And on the rich men’s Edens, that are built on grinding rent; I looked o’er London’s miles of slums, I saw the horrors there. And swore to die a soldier of the Army of the Rear! Tramp! tramp! tramp! I’ve sworn to do and dare, I’ve sworn to die a soldier of the Army of the Rear!

“They’re brutes,” so say the wealthy, “and by steel must be dismayed”— Be brutes among us, nobles? They are brutes that ye have made; We want what God hath given us, we want our earthly share; And that is why we’re marching—and we’ll march beyond the rear! Tramp! tramp! tramp! Awake, and have a care, Ye proud and haughty spurners of the wretches in the Rear.

We’ll nurse our wrongs to strengthen us, our hate that it may grow, For, outcast from Society, Society’s our foe! Beware! who grind our human bones and human flesh—beware! There’s menace in the marching of the Army of the Rear. Tramp! tramp! tramp! There’s danger in despair, There’s danger in the marching of the Army the Rear^sic.

The wealthy care not for our wants, nor for the pangs we feel; Our hands have clutched in vain for bread, and now they clutch for steel! Come, men of rags and hunger come! come, men of want and care! There’s room still in the vanguard of the Army of the Rear! Tramp! tramp! tramp! There’s work for heroes there, There’s glory in the vanguard of the Army of the Rear!

One Citizen of Germany.

The Emperor William is having a private railway carriage built for his own use at a cost of £7,000. It is fifty feet in length, and contains dining room, study, bedroom, dressing room, and bath.

p. 5, col. 6

SOCIETY NOTES.

In spite of its homely and prosaic qualities, there is no doubt that Thanksgiving Day is, after the Fourth of July, the greatest American festival. Christmas is dearer to those whose hearts are stirred by its deep religious significance; old Knickerbockers cling to the traditions of New Year’s; and Washington’s birthday is a half-hearted kind of affair, having no special form of celebration. Thanksgiving Day takes in all sorts and conditions of men, and provides good cheer for both the needy and the wealthy throughout the land.—[N. Y. Sun.

A commercial traveler named Salisbury died last Saturday from an overdose of morphine which he administered to himself. He had a room in a boarding house in West Forty-fifth street, and was found unconscious on his bed with the empty bottle near at hand. The physicians at Roosevelt hospital, where he was taken, could not do anything for him. He left two letters behind him, one of which, addressed to Mrs. Dr. A. W. Truman, De Ruyter, N. Y., was as follows: “Dear Sister—I hope you will forgive me for this terrible act of mine. Lack of money, ill health, and loss of position drive me to the deed, so I must try the realities of the other world. I have kindly asked my lodge in Brooklyn to bury me in their plot, if they have one, and I hope they will. I think it better than to send me to you. Break the news carefully to our dear old mother in Detroit, Mich. Tell her not to grieve for me, for I hope I shall be better off in the world to come. I hope you will forgive me, and may God bless you all. Good by. From your brother, E. O. Salisbury.” He was about fifty years old, good looking, and said to be a well spoken man. Six cents and a watch chain were all his effects outside of the clothing he had on.

A very well satisfied audience filled the Metropolitan opera house on the opening night—satisfied with themselves, for of the box occupants, at least, it may be said that “all were rich and some were beautiful,” with their surroundings, and with the musical treat that Mr. Stanton had provided for them. Everyone was so interested in looking for friends, noting the changes in the boxes and commenting upon the beauty of the debutantes and the jewels or gowns of the elegantes, that the better half of the audience were blissfully unconscious whether Wagner, Meyerbeer or Gilbert and Sullivan was responsible for the concord of sweet sounds that met the ear. On Friday evening there was less excitement. People had shaken down to their places, were less absorbed in themselves and in each other, and disposed to listen understandingly to the familiar strains of “Lohengrin.”—[N. Y. Sun.

A little girl about eight years old stood on the corner of Broadway and Murray street, New York, on Friday morning, holding under her arm a large package of advertising cards, which she was distributing to passers-by. She was clad in a thin brown calico dress, covered by a threadbare cloak, and on her head was a small straw hat. A World reporter, asked the girl why she had selected such an occupation.

“’Cause I want a new warm cloak,” she replied, “and I didn’t quite have money enough.”

“Why don’t your father buy you a coat?”

“Ain’t got any father. You see I go to school, and as yesterday and to-day is holidays I thought I’d try to get the [$2?] more for my cloak. I’ve saved $6 and it’s goin’ to cost $8. My sister Annie works for Mr. W——, and I asked him to let me work to-day and tomorrow. When he found I wanted a cloak he said that when I gave away these cards, one by one, he would give me $2.”

Mr. Robert Garrett’s miniature game preserve at Uplands, his beautiful country seat in Baltimore county, is still kept stocked. It occupies the western part of Uplands, and is in the middle of a tract of land originally known as Hunting ridge. The property is one of the most beautiful places to be found in the county. He has it well stocked with small game which he and his friends can shoot at their leisure. The English pheasants which he imported are the specialty of the place and he has taken care to have the keeper trap and cage the 100 or so of these birds which were not killed during the shooting season. A number of watch dogs and the game keeper with a double-barreled shotgun are the guard against poachers.

The Birmingham, Ala., Sentinel says: “It is a truth and a sad truth, of which an abundance of evidence can be furnished by citizens of this city, if it becomes a necessity, that honest laboring men have been put in the chain gang in this city and county for no other crime than that of being penniless and homeless—men who had spent their little all in paying their expenses to this city, and who, on their arrival, found that no work could be procured, and being without means or money were seized and imprisoned.

The dinner table is the most important one to lay. The cloth should be white. In the center of the table on a mat set the fruit, flowers and bonbons. All in cut glass, silver or china dishes. Place the goblets about a span from the edge of the table, and around these place the wine glasses. Then set a plate at each place. Next arrange three forks on the left and two knifes^sic on the right of each plate place, the soup spoon and napkin also on the right, and before each plate place a salt cellar. No dishes should be placed on the table. On a small side table should be an extra supply of spoons, knives, forks, finger bowls, cracked ice, olives, sugar, cheese and celery. The carving should be done in the pantry. Everything but the wine is served to the left. The order of dinner is: Oysters, soup, fish, meat, game or entrees, salad, dessert, crackers and cheese, fruit, candies and coffee. Brown bread should be passed with the fish and salad.—[Mail and Express.

A middle aged woman and two children sleep every night in an old stable on First street, with no bed to sleep on and only an old blanket thrown over them. The woman says that she would gladly work if she could find employment. She does not like to be separated from her children.—[Parkersburg, W. Va., Journal.

The annual Charity ball, in which all good New Yorkers are interested, is announced to take place at the Metropolitan on the 8th of January. Mrs. William Astor has consented to open the ball, and very probably the coming vice president and Mrs. Morton will be present. A large number of tickets have been sold before they are even printed, and the demand for boxes is greater than ever before.

The Truthseeker says that a Dr. Lewis ascertained that out of two thousand fallen women in New York and Brooklyn, over eleven hundred, who before entering their present life had tried to live by work, earned not more than $3 a week.

Onward.

Each age has had its battle, And each its vict’ry won; Each from the grasp of custom Some precious right hath wrung.

’Tis ours to-day to struggle For freedom, full and fair; That each, of God’s own bounties, Shall have his right and share.

That none may starve mid plenty; That he who makes shall keep; And he that buildeth ever, ’Neath his own roof shall sleep.

Toward the final triumph Of right a step we take; The twisted chain of error, Link after link we break.

What if we miss the harvest? ’Tis ours to sow the seed; ’Tis not the prize which honors, ’Tis doing of the deed.

W. C. WOOD, M. D.

A DEVIL’S PASSAGE.

Louise Stockton in the December Atlantic.

. . . . When Pedro Espinosa was taken by a guard of soldiers to his cell in the dungeon of the prison, and there fastened to a ring in the wall by a chain upon his right ankle, he regarded neither day nor night. He sat upon the wooden stool rigid with rage. He had not planned the mad dash for liberty which he had just made, but the failure was none the less bitter. For one intoxicating moment he had felt himself free, and now he was in chains. He sat like one made of stone, moving neither hand nor foot. His fingers were clenched together, his head was thrown back, his lips were parted, and his breath came in long, irregular movements, as though he was in pain. One leg was drawn into a right angle; the other was pushed back until the knee was almost in a straight line with his body. Yet, constrained and stiff as was his position, he took no notice of it. His rich clothing was torn and soiled, and the wound in his shoulder bled profusely. The traitor Rodriguez had given him the wound, but this Pedro could have forgiven him. Now and then he whispered, “For life!” but he did not comprehend what was meant by the words. He was still a young man, and had commanded his own days, and he did not yet know that the logic of life is failure, and not success. True, conspirators fail and are betrayed, but Espinosa had not expected it to be true for him. It seemed to him that the world into which he had been born had opened and showed itself to be hell. He now knew that Rodriguez had been paid the price of his treachery, and was governor of the fortress, but he did not know that his safe-keeping was the condition on which the post was held. Still less did Espinosa understand the dread with which Rodriguez now regarded him. For well did that traitor know that although, if need be, he might conciliate the king, the vengeance of Espinosa waited only on his freedom. Yet a man’s life is worth nothing, if another may seize and hold it. This had Pedro often said, thinking of the sufferings of others. In his cell was he himself proving it.

After a time being worn out, he fell asleep, still sitting upon the wooden stool. His head sank upon his breast, his hands gently parted, and he heard and knew nothing so that neither the king nor Rodriguez was happier than he. But when he awoke, he did not know where he was and it was perfectly dark. His back ached, his wound smarted, and he arose to stretch his limbs; then his right foot was suddenly jerked back as though a strong hand had clutched it, and he fell prone on his face. He remembered that he was chained.

He wondered if it were night or day, as he arose to his knees and groped for the stool on which he had been sitting. He was very hungry, and as he listened to the guard walking steadily on his way, he wondered what meal the man had eaten last—whether it was dinner or supper. It could hardly be breakfast, for certainly the cell was not so dark when his chain was riveted. Then he remembered that one of the soldiers had held a torch. As he sat there in pain and starving, he thought of a ball at the palace where he had danced a few nights before he was taken, and he wondered if any one were dancing then, and if there were still light and music in the world. Ah! at that very moment—for it was just past midnight—the palace was ablaze with gayety, and Pedro’s partners were merrily dancing, and to them it seemed as if the world was all brightness and sweet sounds. If any one in the palace knew what it was to waken in a dungeon, he put the thought from him, for fear it might happen again.

Then, after a time Espinosa moved his foot to the left; it struck something cold; he put out his hand to see what it was, and found a jug of water and a loaf of bread. So he knew some one had entered his cell while he slept, and he thanked the man for not arousing him. This made him remember his mother, and how often, since he was grown, he had watched her come into his room at night, tenderly and softly, meaning not to awaken him, but only to pray a moment by his bedside. God rest her sweet soul in paradise! It was well she was safely there, and not here.

How stiff his arm was, but how little need he had of it! So the hours went by, and he sometimes slept and sometimes watched; but it was late in the day, although he did not know it, when the tardy light shone in through the small high window of the cell. It was then he saw that just a foot or so away from him was a bed of straw, and on a table stood a candle, and flint and steel. His cell was a little irregular in shape, thus:

[Diagram: plan of Espinosa’s cell, an irregular L-shaped outline drawn in dotted lines, with lettered points. Labels: “MOAT.” (above, along the top wall); “C” (top right corner, outside); “D” (inside the top right corner); “B” (to the right, outside the lower step of the wall); “A” (inside, at the bottom of the inner wall).]

Weeks after this, when he had become accustomed to the few sounds that reached him, and could localize them, he knew that he was in the tower of the prison, just where it jutted into the moat, and that the sentry’s walk was along the northern and western walls. The water was off to the north. By the shadows he found that his window was on a level with the ground, and more than once he saw the guard stop and look down into the cell. So he knew that he was watched. It made him smile to think what a forlorn and monotonous spectacle he must present. He wondered if the guard were discontented, and if it ought not to make him happier to see how much worse off a prisoner could be than even the prisoner’s guard. But he doubted p. 6, col. 2 whether sentinels were any more likely than other people to be philosophers.

Once every day an officer and a blacksmith entered his cell; the latter tried his fetters, and once added some additional links, making the chain about six feet long, so that Pedro could enjoy a little more motion and greater ease in lying down. Neither of these men ever spoke, nor did they answer his questions; so after a time he never cared to speak, and lived in total silence. He lay down very often, because he was greedy of sleep, and in his dreams he was always escaping. One day he was upon his bed, and, as was natural, stared steadily at the wall, thinking of what he should do were he once free. For this poor fellow had no materials, even had he had the knowledge, for writing a history of the world; and had there been spiders or flies, they would not have interested him. He would only have pitied them. There were snails near the window, but he detested them, and dreaded their possible approach to him. So he could only think, and his thoughts burst prison walls and flew out into the world.

One memorable day the sunshine was doubtless brilliant and the sky cloudless, because his cell was unusually light and everything very distinct, so that he saw several cracks and breaks in the masonry which before had escaped his notice. As his eye traveled on its short journeys, he fancied that on the western wall, opposite the foot of his bed, there were some lines made with regularity, as if they were drawn there. He started as though he had heard a voice, and crept over on his knees toward the spot. He went in this way because he could reach farther, as he thus added the length of his leg to that of the chain.

The lines had not deceived him. They were drawn with intention, and they were a plan of his room. But there was another line that he could not understand, and long did he ponder on it. In the night, as he lay awake, it became plain to him, and he sat up on his bed, and gave a great cry that startled the sentry so that he brought the officer of the guard; and they listened at the window, but for nothing, as Pedro was now silent, and lay like a stone, although his brain was on fire.

Look again at the diagram. The line which had caused his agitation ran from A to B and thence to C—the moat.

And this was the meaning which dawned upon him: His own room was plain to him, and also the sentinels’ walk around it, and he perceived that the square marked at the northeastern corner must be the guard house. East of his prison there was, he knew, a paved court yard, north of it the water. What then was the line starting in the southeastern corner of his cell, and which, making an angle, ended in the moat? What should it be but a subterranean passage to freedom?

The thought almost crazed him, and he began to tug at his chains, as if by pulling he could get them apart, but he only tore and wounded his hands. When the day came, he examined his fetters as the blacksmith never dreamed of doing, but vainly. The work was excellent, and not a link would give. So he sat and glared at the corner of his cell where the passage began; it was as impossible to him as the open gate of the fortress. He crawled toward it; he stretched out his arms; and then he drew himself all into a heap on the floor, and cried, sobbing like a child.

When the officer and the blacksmith came, Pedro regarded them with profound scorn. Their precaution was so childish; yet when they were gone he swore to himself that they should not prevail against him in the end. He stood up, and grasping the ring with both hands, while he braced his foot against the wall, he pulled long and steadily. After a while a small piece of plaster fell on the floor. So every day Pedro pulled at the ring, and he loosened little by little the plaster, and then the stone; he put back the plaster as well as he could, and repaired the breach with bread, so that the blacksmith never perceived the work he was doing. The plaster and crumbled stone which he could not replace he put under his bed; as he felt the lumps his bruised body thrilled with expectation.

In less than a month he had pulled the ring from the wall, and the moment it was out he flew across the room, and fell on his hands and knees to examine the ground. The spot did not differ from the rest of the cell, but on the wall was the rough impress of a hand, and one finger pointed downward.

Then he was sure. He saw his way to liberty. It was curious how this discovery calmed him. His feverish excitement faded out, and the fury of baffled desires no longer possessed him. In their stead came a great quiet and steady resolve. The absorption of labor was upon him, and he lived only when he worked; at other times he slept or mused, and the hours passed unheeded.

Now Pedro had discovered, long before, during hours of wakefulness, that before dawn the sentinels were apt to be neglectful and remittent in their walk, and he therefore fixed that time for the beginning of his labor. But better to secure himself, he put the table under the window, the chair upon it, and so managed to climb up and fasten his blanket over the grating, in order to keep his light from being seen. And because he wanted to save his candles he burnt them at no other time, but hid them; otherwise the jailor might have noticed, and not given him one each day, when he brought the loaf of bread and jug of water.

The floor was very hard, and the only tools Pedro had were a broken iron plate and a nail over six inches in length, which he had worked out of a board under his bed; for the part of the cell where he sat and slept was floored over. But he had his two young, strong hands, and he did good work with them, no mole ever digging better. He toiled hard, but as he had to remove all traces of his labors, he had the less time to dig. After a while he was greatly helped by a discovery which other prisoners have made. He found that he had become so thin and meager that the band around his ankle no longer fitted, and that he could, with some effort and pain, draw his foot out.

p. 6, col. 3 Truly it was good to be free of the weight. He sprang into the air, he danced an airy measure, and sang to himself as he danced. It seemed to him as though gravitation were suspended, and only the walls and roof kept him from rising into the upper air.

From this moment he never doubted his escape, perhaps because, being free from his chain, he once more felt command of himself. All his thoughts turned unwavering toward plans for the future, and he worked with a perseverance and cheerfulness that never faltered. Not very far down the river lived Pedro’s cousin, and he had faith that, could he once get to him, he would be as safe as friendship could make him. After that it should be as his kinsman advised and God willed. His belief in the honesty of man was the stronger because he perceived that the plan was honest and faithful. He had to break his way, but he never went astray, for there were indications in irregular stones and looser soil that the way had been burrowed out, and then filled in again. He perceived that a prisoner had once escaped in this way, and that the authorities had discovered it and filled the tunnel again. Nothing was plainer than this, but what amused and strengthened Pedro was the knowledge of how Rodriguez had outwitted himself, and by putting him into this dismal dungeon had himself opened the avenue of release. So (Pedro went on to reason) will malice forever outrun its own goal, and if we will but be patient and faithful fate (or Provi- dence will sometimes take our revenges into its own hand.

Even in the burrow, as he worked, Pedro would laugh, thinking of Rodriguez. But how it happened that his daily inspectors never noticed his hands he could not understand. He could hide his worn and broken finger nails, but the marks of earth and of digging would not be rubbed from his hands and arms. But the young fellow did not realize how woe begone and forlorn a figure he was. He was gaunt and wild, his beard was grown, his hair a tangled mass, and his torn and scanty garments were almost fantastic, with their rich texture and ragged condition; and he was altogether covered with dirt and grime, and bore every mark of misery.

After some weeks he reached the apex of the angle, and there he found a walled-in chamber, narrowing to a pipe-like chimney, many feet high and open to the sky. Looking up, he saw a star, and he breathed an air purer and fresher than any he had breathed since he was thrust into his dungeon. But in this chamber, which was so narrow that he could scarcely turn in it, was a skull and some other bones, and a rosary. Pedro took the rosary in his hand, and looked up at the star overhead.

“God!” he said, drawing his breath, “O God, burn them, burn them in hell, and never show them paradise, except to torture and confound them!” Then, on the rosary of the dead man who had here been walled up, Espinosa prayed for his soul.

But behold, when he had broken out of this chamber he came to a passage, clear and open, as if the workmen had not thought it worth while to fill up this remote portion. It was higher and larger than the one Pedro had made, and much he wondered what tools his prede- cessor had used, and where he put the dirt and stones he brought from the excavation. He no longer wormed his way, but could with ease creep on his hands and knees; and so he went along until he came to a wall, and knew that his work was almost over.

He had now been so long absent from his cell that he could not delay to examine this wall, and he turned and went back, and found it was daylight, and so late that the jailer came in before he had got his foot well into the chain. But the chain was not the jailer’s affair, and he took no notice, but put down the jug and loaf, and went his way. When the officer and blacksmith came the prisoner was asleep on the floor, and the men glanced at him; they did not waken him, for the chain was now in its place.

Pedro slept long, for he was very tired; but when he awoke he felt well rested, and his youth was strong in every muscle of his body. He would have liked to make a toilet before he left his cell, knowing that his work this night would be his last; but he could only empty the jug of water into his hands and well lave his face and neck and then run his damp finger through his hair and push it off his brow.

He began to uncover the hole he had made in the floor, but this time carelessly, and with no heed whether the dirt scattered or not, and so he crept into his burrow, the long nail fastened in his belt, the broken plate in his hand; and poor enough tools were these for breaking through a stone wall! In the chamber he paused, and looked up at the star, which shone as yet dimly, the twilight still lingering.

“Greet your comrades for me,” whispered he in a voice husky and strange for want of use, “and say I shall see them all to-morrow night.” Then he took the rosary, knowing he should like to have it when he was again a free man.

It was slow and toilsome work breaking though this last wall^sic, but the young fellow had now learned some lessons in quarrying, and he wasted neither time nor strength in idle or futile labor. Every effort told, and little by little the stones loosened and the fissure widened. He could hear sounds that he knew must be footsteps in the guard house, and once he fancied he heard the dip of oars in the water. As the night grew older, he worked desperately, resolved never to re-enter the cell, but to gain the river before daylight. The stones began to give more easily, and he at last thrust his hand into an empty space. Then he knew that he was through the wall. His haste was now nervous and fiery; the stones broke, crumbled, under his strong, eager hands, and he could hardly wait until the aperture was large enough for his body. He felt as though he must thrust himself through, push, pull, drag himself. Still he was wise enough to make the opening so large

p. 6, col. 4 that with a little tugging he got safely out.

It was yet very dark, and he could see no stars. The air was close, and he did not hear the water. He stood still, trying to accustom his eyes to the darkness. Then he put out his right arm and touched a wall; his other arm, and behold, there was another wall; but he was not disconcerted, being sure he had entered some sort of shed or shelter. He could hear no sounds, so he crept softly on, feeling his way by the wall. When he had gone some fifteen feet or thereabouts, he found he was in a corner, and the wall turned. He hardly knew what to make of this, he had been so certain that he was groping his way into the open. Just then his foot struck something that jangled, and he stood stock still in terror; but the noise aroused no one, so he stooped to feel what it was that lay there.

A great terror took him, a hideous horror, and he turned and looked up—up, through the barred window of his cell—his cell!—dimly outlined in the wan light of the morning.

He gave a loud cry, a horrible shout; at once the door opened, and, as if they had been called, the guard came in. Their torches flared, and Pedro saw the two heaps of rubbish—the place where he had gone out and the broken wall where had come back. Behind the soldiers came the governor of the fortress, smiling. Pedro sprang at him, and the fingers hardened by tearing out iron, and pulling away stones, and digging into the earth, closed on the throat of the traitor. But Rodriguez had his dagger; out it came, and quick and sharp cut into Pedro’s heart. But the fingers never loosened, so the two men fell dead together.

Thus did Don Pedro Espinosa, a grandee of Spain, gain his liberty, and by a road for which he had not looked did he put himself out of the reach of his jailer; but what happened next I cannot tell. Whether the two foes, at once and again, fell on each other, or whether they instantly parted, and without a backward glance went each on his own road, I know not. If they again fell into fight, Pedro must now have had the odds, seeing how much purer and stronger was his spirit, and how much more ardent and fiery was the nature God had given him. I could fancy that Rodriguez, all his armor, his plans, and stratagems left behind, and no longer supported by his soldiers, but taken alone, would show without disguise what a craven he could be. Indeed, no worse coward than he was ever born, because Pedro had once summoned him to equal fight, and that is better grace than most young noblemen would grant a traitor; and instead of meeting him the creature got him first into prison and then into this devil’s trap and excavated passage, of which the true plan was well known to Rodriguez. I have thought that had we wanted any further proof of the baseness of this man than his conduct toward Espinosa shows, we should have in it his knowledge of this most diabolic device. Vile secrets, when they are to be shared, are told to the vile, and Pedro might have been governor of the fortress all the days of his life and never have known of this trap, except there had been intention to have destroyed it.

The whole scheme, as can be readily seen, was of the simplest character, but well calculated to deceive a man digging in the dark and without measurements, and that on a route pre-arranged for him.

The plan in the possession of Rodriguez was made in this manner—the line of the secret passage after turning at B, did not run to C—the moat—but to D, the prisoner’s cell.

Will Volapuk Last?

St. Louis Spectator.

The death of Father Schleyer, the inventor of Volapuk, brings a new interest into the attempts made for the last few years by the adepts of the universal language for its progress and diffusion through the whole universe. Will this event have any influence on the destiny of Volapuk?

Which are the results already obtained, and what the actual condition of the French Volapuk academy, of Paris, for continuing the great work of its master? Prof. [Kerckhoffs?], president of the institution, believes the new language will last. “It is wrong to believe,” says he, “that the idea of creating a universal language is of modern origin. Many learned and clever men have tried, since the seventeenth century, to compose an artificial universal language, but all these attempts have failed through the difficulties of the various systems devised. But what has so long been looked upon as a dream is now an accomplished fact, and it is no exaggeration to say that Volapuk is surely destined to become the great international commercial medium of the future. In 1629 Descartes speaks of a universal language, in a letter which he addressed from Amsterdam to Father Mersenne. In the same century I. I. Becher, Dalgrane^sic, and Bishop Wilkins, in England, and Leibnitz, in Germany, agitated the same question, but it was especially in France where the idea of a universal language met with enthusiasm and where the greatest efforts were made for the success of its cause. To illustrate what has been done for this great work of humanity I will give you now,” said the professor, “the names of the most illustrious among the great number of French writers who devoted part of their life to the study and discovery of a universal language: In 1657, M. de Bermonville writes a book on”A New Discovery of a Universal Language for Commercial Intercourse.” In 1765 the Encyclopedia reproduced an article on the same subject by M. Faiguet. Then comes Condorcet, the great philosoher^sic, and the world renowned Ampere, who publishes a poem written in a new and original language. In the year III. of the republic Delorme writes a project on the universal language. In 1801 M. Butet sends to the “Institut de France” a most remarkable work, having in view the same idea. But more recently M. Letellier, Officier d’Academic^sic, published in 1852 four large volumes on a universal language and a dictionary of not less than 30,000 words, the result of twenty years of work and efforts. In [1853?] MM. Rambosson and Aug. Comte, the publicist, take up the same question, the latter in his work on “Positive Politics Insituting^sic the Religion of Humanity.” In 1858 a committee is organized in Paris for the purpose of ‘a universal language,’ and issues during two years a paper called Tribune of the Linguists. In 1862 a gentleman named Sudre gives in Compiegne a curious and interesting illustration of a new method of intercourse before the imperial court. His scheme consisted of a musical combination of sound serving as an alphabet to play all possible sentences on his hunter’s horn. Napoleon III. took a great interest in this invention, and thought it could render great services during the war for corresponding at great distances. To be short, I will say that since [1620?] there have been no less than one hundred and fifty different systems of a universal language, and that the simplicity of Volapuk and its rapid spreading^sic

p. 6, col. 5 all over the world shown its superiority, and solves the problem so long sought for. Now, sir,” continued the professor, in a manner more and more convincing, “since you ask me what progress has been accomplished in Volapuk for the last few years, I will give you a list of all the books published in Volapuk since 1885. It is estimated that over 1,000,000 people are now studying this language in France, Germany, Austria, England, Spain, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Turkey, Portugal, Greece, Syria, Arabia, China, South and Central America, and all those countries are provided with grammars, readers and dictionaries. Next year, is the occasion of the Universal Exhibition, and the International Volapuk Congress will be held in Paris, at which representatives from all parts of the world will be invited. The main point for the success of the movement is that the decisions rendered by this supreme tribunal shall be accepted universally as the final settlement of disputed questions. You understand now, that the death of Father Schleyer will by no means impede the diffusion of Volapuk and that this great work will be continued by the French Volapuk academy, with the same zeal and interest.

A Class of Tenants Whom English Landlords Take Good Care Of.

Westminster Review.

On most well conducted estates a certain number of birds are caught in October or later, are taken to the pheasantry, where, having had their wings clipped, they are kept and fed during the winter. The birds that are left in the woods, to be expertly “driven to the guns” when the time comes, have also their table spread for them. You may see in most coverts a covered feeding place for the pheasants, stacks of wheat or barley, and little water troughs let into the ground. The birds in the pheasantry are kept until they begin to lay, and lay very much like hens. A pheasant hen may be expected even in the mew to lay as many as twenty-five to thirty eggs. The eggs are taken away as soon as they are laid, and the cocks in the pheasantry have often to be taught not to eat the eggs by a little preparation of cayenne pepper. The eggs are then placed under hens, which can hatch and breed about fifteen to eighteen young pheasants. Turkeys have been tried as foster mothers for tame birds, but on the whole unsuccessfully. To describe all the minute details of the hatching pens and coops would be tedious. One particular will show the care which must be brought to the hatching of pheasants. The hens ought, in the early morning, to be allowed to have a run in the wet grass that they may damp their breast feathers, which increases the amount of warmth imparted to the eggs in the day’s sitting; and when that is impossible it is not unusual to sprinkle the eggs with tepid water at the time of the morning meal. Of course, where pheasants are reared in any numbers there must be a large number of these nurses or foster mothers, and sometimes even these are insufficient to the wants of the pheasant farm, and an incubator has to be had recourse to. The commercial element of the sport begins to appear here. It may have cost the gentleman who rears pheasants a considerable amount of money to rear his birds, to feed his pheasantry birds, and the like, and if he can recoup himself to some extent by selling he no doubt will. Pheasant eggs are, according to the time of year, sold at something like [£4?] to £5 a hundred, and a careful breeder will not neglect to give, if possible, a “change of blood” by the exchange by some of his cocks and hens or eggs for the cocks, hens, or eggs of another locality.

Well, What do You Propose to do About It?

New York Tribune.

Moralists and real estate investors who have been putting the question whether we have not built too many tenement houses, will find some facts worthy of their serious attention in the census of the tenements just completed by the health department. It shows that 856 tenements have been built in the last six months and [63,393?] souls added to the population. It is now close to 1,100,000. Packed as this enormous swarm of people is, there is still room for more. In the [32,290?] tenements, there are [31,180?] suites of rooms without tenants, or nearly one for each house. They have room for nearly one-seventh as many families again as are now housed in them.

The trouble is that the spare room is not distributed equally. The pressure of the population is, despite rapid transit and cheap fares, still out of all proportion in the lower wards. There are only [4,349?] vacant family apartments below Fourteenth street against [26,810?] above that line, which is a good deal more than half the actual excess. The census shows that [19,190?] tenements above Fourteenth street have only [15,647?] family apartments more than the [13,220?] in the older part of town. Significant for the missionary, the sanitarian and the student of social conditions is the statement that there are [63,370?] children under five years in these down town tenements. The number above Fourteenth street is [79,149?]. The same damaging disparity is here apparent.

In some of the districts, notably that between Broadway and the Bowery and Chatham and Canal streets, of which the notorious “Bend” is the center, there is hardly standing room. There are just seven vacant apartments in this district. In the scarcely less foul one west of Broadway, between Canal and Prince streets, that receives the overflow of the “Bend,” there are none at all. The district is “full.” So with the packed tenements east of the Bowery, between Houston and Broome streets. These are the places that are responsible for the showing New York made in the census of 1880 with [16 37-100?] persons to each house against Lon- don’s 7 8-10, Philadelphia’s 5 76-100 and Boston’s [8 26-100?]. Worse, New York had increased its percentage from 14 72-100 in 1870 to 16 37-100 in 1880, while London had maintained the same rate since 1861.

It should be added that flats are not included in this last census, but only “tenements,” regardless of the legal definition of that term as applying to all houses rooming three families or more.

The Effect of the Competitive Examination System.

Frederic Harrison in The Nineteenth Century.

The examination, thus made the “fountain of honor,” governs the whole course of study. If the teacher takes up a subject not obviously grist for the great mill the students cease to listen and leave his classes. The instant he says something which sounds like an examination “tip,” every ear is erect, every pen takes down his words. The keen student of to-day is getting like the reporter of an evening journal—eager after matter that will tell, will make a good “answer,” capital examination “copy.” The mill governs the whole period of education, from hic, hæc, hoc, to the final launch in a profession. I know little boys of ten, in the ego et Balbus stage, who are being ground in printed examination papers, which I could not answer myself. And big men, older than Pitt when he governed England, or Hannibal when he commanded armies, are still ruining their constitutions by cramming up “analyses” and manuscript “tips” of great “coaches.” The result is that poor little urchins in frocks are in training for some “nursery stakes,” as an old friend of mine used to call the trials of preparatory schools. The prize schoolboy who sweeps the board on speech day often gets a perfect loathing for books, and indeed for any study that is not “cramming;” and the youth who leaves his university loaded with “honors” may prove to be quite a portent of ignorance and mental babyishness. He has learned the trick of playing with a straight bat the examiner’s most artful twisters. But he cannot bear the sight of a book; and, like any successful speculator, he has a hearty contempt for knowledge.

L’Etat c’est Moi.

Nineteenth Century.

Numerous and conflicting versions of that scene are to be found in contemporary memoirs. Louis the fourteenth is supposed to have arrived from the Forest of Vincennes, and entered the parliament in his hunting costume, with a whip in his hand. [The?] parliament had expressed a wish to revise a finan-

p. 6, col. 6 cial decree it had registered, and the king is declared to have said:

“Every one knows the misfortunes that have been caused by the discussions of parliament. I intend to prevent these for the future, and I order that the discussions shall cease which began on the edicts you have registered. M. le President, I forbid you to allow these deliberations to continue, and you, gentlemen, to ask for them.” On being remonstrated with that these deliberations were “for the good of the state,” he answered, “L’etat c’est moi!”

Forgotten Days.

New York Sun.

“Pa,” inquirred^sic Bobby, “what’s the meaning of E pluribus unum?”

“Oh, it’s a Latin phrase, Bobby. I used to know when I was at college, but a man is apt to forget most that he learned at college when he gets to be as old as I am.”

Just then a procession of college students passed the door shouting vociferously, “Rah! Rah! Rah!” “Tiger!” yelled the old man, and he broke both suspenders before he reached the gate.

TO HELP SINGLE TAX STRANGERS.

The following list contains the names and addresses of men active in the single tax cause in their respective localities, with whom believers wishing to join in the movement may communicate:

Akron O—Jas R Angier, [109?] Allyn street.

Albany, N Y—Robert Baker, 175 Madison avenue; J C [Roshirt?], 23 Third avenue, or James J Mahoney, secretary Single tax Cleveland and Thurman club, [5?] Myrtle avenue.

Alhambra, Mon Ter—W E Brokaw.

Altoona, Pa—Joseph Sharp, jr., secretary Single tax club, 411 Tenth street; Albert C [Rouzee?], [923?] First avenue.

Amsterdam, N Y—Harvey Book.

Anacostia, D C—[Leonard?] W [Smith?], office Anacostia tea company, Harrison and Monroe streets.

Anaheim, Cal—James R Hassett.

[Anton Chico?], N M—[Lewis?] [Grunsfeld?].

Ashtabula, Ohio—A D Strong.

Auburn, Me—F W Beals, secretary Single tax club.

Avon, N Y—Homer Sabin.

Ballston Spa, N Y—Richard Feeney, [61?] Milton avenue.

Baltimore, Md—John W Jones, sec Single tax league of Maryland, [125?] N Bond street; John Salmon, pres Henry George club, [415?] N Eden street; Dr Wm N Hill, [1438?] E Baltimore street.

Bayside, Long Island, N Y—Antonio M Molina.

[Braceville?], Ill—William Matthews, secretary Tariff reform club.

Bradford, Pa—J C De Forest, secretary Land and labor club, 26 Newell place.

Binghampton, N Y—E W Dundon, [53?] Maiden lane.

Boston, Mass—Edwin M White, 208 Main street, Charlestown; J R Roche, 45 Converse avenue, Malden; Hamlin Garland, chairman Single tax league, Jamaica Plain.

Brooklyn, N Y—J [Richards?], [41?] Sidney place, president Single tax club.

Burlington, Iowa—James Love, bookseller, or Richard Spencer.

Burlington, Vt—Charles N Moran, cigar manufacturer.

Cambridgeport, Mass—Wm Ford, 116 Norfolk street, secretary Single tax organization.

Canisteo, N Y—H W Johnson, P O box [30?].

Canon City, Col—Frank P Blake, M D.

Chamberlain, Dak—James Brown.

Charles City, Iowa—Irving W Smith, M D, office opposite Union house.

Chicago, Ill—Frank [Pearson?], secretary Land and labor club No 1, [45?] LaSalle street.

Cincinnati, O—Dr David De Beck, [139?] West Ninth street; Jones’s news and stationery store, [522?] Vine street.

Clanton, Ala—O M Mastin or Alex G Dake.

Cleveland, O—Frank L Carter, [13?] Chestnut street.

Clinton, Ind—L O Bishop, editor Argus.

[Cohoes?], N Y—J S Crane.

Columbus, O—[E J Brabaker?], president Single tax club, [53?] North High street; Sam F [Caen?], corresponding secretary, care Edward Hyneman, [Wm?] South High street.

[Cocoanut?], Cal—[Dr?] T A [Bailey?].

[Cramer Hill?], Camden county, N J—Chas P Johnson.

Dayton, O—W W Kile, [?] E Fifth street; J G Galloway, [?] Samuel street.

Denver, Col—Charles G Buck, chairman State executive committee National tax reform association, [1047?] Tabor block.

Detroit, Mich—J F Pinchart, [45?] Waterloo street; J F Duncan, [271?] Third street, secretary Tax reform association.

Diamond Springs, Eldorado county, Cal—J V Langton.

Dunkirk, N Y—Francis Lake.

East Cambridge, Mass—J F Harrington, St John’s Literary institute.

East Northport, Long Island, N Y—J K Rudyard.

East Rindge, N H—Edward Jewett.

Elizabeth, N J—Benjamin Urner.

Elmira, N Y—William Bergman, 712 East Market street.

Fitchburg, Mass—[S F?] Terry.

Farmington, Iowa—[C W?] Rockwell.

Gardner, Ill—T S Cummings.

Glen Cove, Long Island, N Y—Herbert Doremer.

Glens Falls, N Y—John H Quinlan.

Gloversville, N Y—Wm C Wood, M D.

Grand View-on-the Hudson, N Y—Henry L Hinton.

Harrison, Tex—[I J?] McCollum.

Harrington, Neb—J H Fuller.

Haverhill, Mass—Arthur F Brock.

Hornellsville, N Y—George H Van Winkle.

Hot Springs, Ark—W Albert Chapman.

Hoosick Falls, N Y—F S Hammond.

Houston, Tex—H F Ring, corporation attorney.

Hutchinson, Kan—J G Malcolm, M D.

Ilion, N Y—George Smith, P O box [?].

Indianapolis, Ind—Herman [Koenig?], [?] Talbot block; or L P Custer, member of Single tax club.

Ithaca, N Y—C C Platt, druggist, [75?] East State street.

Janvier, N J—S B Walsh.

Jersey City, N J—Joseph Dana Miller, secretary Hudson county Single tax league, [56?] Lee avenue.

Kansas City, Mo—Chas E Reed, [2?] Woodland avenue.

Kingston, N Y—Theodore [M?] Romeyn.

Lansingburgh, N Y—James McMann, 21 Eighteenth st.

Lonsdale, R I—Dr L F Garvin.

[illegible]

Los Angeles, Cal—[illegible] H [illegible], [?] North Alameda street; [illegible] [Los Angeles?], P O box 182.

[Louisville?], Ky—[illegible] Williamson, cor Fifth and Church streets.

Lynn, Mass—Theodore P Perkins, [11?] South Common street.

Madison, Dak—E H Evenson.

Mahanoy City, Pa—J N Becker, president Free trade club; Robert Richardson, secretary.

Manistee, Mich—Albert Walkley or W R Hall.

Marblehead, Mass—[illegible] [Robbins?].

[Mechanicville?], N Y—[illegible] H [Rendon?].

[illegible], N [illegible]—[illegible], chairman Ninth congressional district organization.

Massillon, O—Samuel T Waggle, [?] West Main street.

Memphis, Tenn—R G Brown, secretary Tariff reform club, [?] Main street.

Middletown, Conn—John G Hopkins, P O box [?].

Middletown, N Y—Chas H Fuller, [?].

Minneapolis, Minn—C J Buell, president Single tax league, [402?] W Franklin avenue; E E [illegible], secretary.

Mt Pleasant, Iowa—A O Pitcher, M D.

Mt Vernon, N Y—Richard Watson.

Murrayville, Ill—William Camm, president Democratic club.

Nashville, Tenn—[P H?] Carroll, [?] N High street, secretary American land league.

Neponset, Mass—Q A Lothrop, member Henry George club, [5?] Walnut street.

Newark, N J—Rev Hugh O Pentecost, [?] Oriental street.

Newburg, N Y—D J McKay, secretary Single tax club, [235?] Broadway.

Newport, Ky—Joseph L Schraer, secretary Single tax league, [237?] Southgate street; Wm C James, [53?] Taylor street.

New Westminster, Brit Col—[Alex?] Hamilton, member Tax reform association.

Norfolk, Va—Edward K Robertson, secretary Alpha Club, Marine Bank.

Oberlin, O—Edw B [Haskell?].

Omaha, Neb—[Hugh?] [Linder?], [522?] [Virginia?] avenue.

Ordway, Dak—R H [Garland?], member Tax reform association.

Passaic, N J—[I D?] [Bonnard?], P O box [151?].

Paterson, N J—E W Nellis, chairman Passaic county Single tax Cleveland campaign committee, [?] North Main street.

Parkersburg, W Va—W I Boreman, member of Single tax league.

Pawtucket, R I—Edward Barker, [3?] Gooding street.

Peoria, Ill—J W Avery.

Philadelphia, Pa—Wm J Atkinson, [926?] Chestnut street or A H Stephenson, [214?] Chestnut street, secretary Henry George club.

Piermont, N Y—Charles R Hood, P O box [15?].

Pittsburg, Pa—Mark F Roberts, [?] [Carey alley?].

Portland, Ore—S B Riggen, [?] Stark street; James P Kohler, [?] Grand street, or [?] H Thompson.

Poughkeepsie, N Y—William C Albro.

Providence, R I—Robert Grieve, [?] Sutton street; Dr Wm Barker, pres Rhode Island single tax association.

Pulaski, N Y—C V Harbottle.

Ravenswood, Ill—W B Van Ornum.

Reading, Pa—Chas S Prizer, [1014?] Penn street; Charles Corkhill, [?] Penn street.

Richmond, Ind—[D?] Quigley, [?] South Third street.

Ridgeway, N Y—D C Sullivan.

River Falls, Wis—George H Bates.

Rochester, N Y—Charles Avril, 7 Morrill street.

Roselle, N J—Reed Gordon.

Rutland, Vt—T H Brown, [11?] Cherry street.

San Francisco, Cal—Judge James G Maguire, Superior court.

San Luis Obispo, Cal—Mrs Frances M Milne.

Seattle, Wash Ter—E P Morrow.

Seneca Falls, N Y—Wm H Atkinson, P O box [36?].

Shenandoah, Pa—Morris Marsh, president Single tax club; [Thos?] [Potts?], secretary.

[Southboro?], Mass—S H Howes.

South Gaston, N C—W L M Perkins.

Sparrow Bush, Orange county, N Y—C L Dedrick, president Progressive association; John Sheehan, secretary.

Spirit Lake, Iowa—J W Schrimpf, secretary Tariff reform club.

Springfield, Mo—H A W Juneman, [665?] Nichols street.

St. Louis, Mo—Geo S Bonnell, president Single tax league, [1527?] Leffingwell avenue; Sidney A Reid, secretary, [1105?] Olive street.

Stockton, Cal—D A Learned.

Syracuse, N Y—Charles S Hopkins, 9 Seymour street; A R Perry, 130 South Clinton street; or F A Paul, 4 Walton street; or James K McGuire, secretary Single tax club, 59 Greene street.

Toronto, Can—W A Douglass, president anti-poverty society, 218 Wellesley street.

Trenton, N J—H R Mathews, 9 Howell street.

Troy, N Y—B B Martin.

Tuckahoe, N Y—Albert O Young.

Unionville, Conn—John McAuliffe.

Utica, N Y—Thomas Sweeney, 156 Elizabeth street, or Daniel M Buckley, grocer, southwest corner First and Catharine.

Vincennes, Ind—Hon Samuel W Williams, rooms 2 and 3 Opera block.

Waco, Tex—Frank Grady, lawyer, 163 south 4th street.

Wakefield, R I—David Harrower.

Washington, D C—Dr. William Geddes, 221 E street, N W, secretary anti-poverty society.

Weatherford, Tex—William M Buell.

West New Brighton, Staten Island, N Y—A B Stoddard.

Whitestone, Long Island, N Y—George Harnwell.

Whitman, Mass—C P Bolin, cigar store; Thos Douglass, president Single tax league.

Wilmington, Del—Geo W Kreer, [717?] West Ninth street.

Woodstock, Ill—A W Cummins.

Worcester, Mass.—E K Page, Lake View.

Yonkers, N Y—Joseph Sutherland.

Youngstown, O—Billy Radcliffe, Radcliffe house.

Zanesville, Ohio—W H Longhead, [27?] Van Buren street;

INFINITE SPACE.

From the Wonders of the Heavens by C. Flammarion.

There are truths before which human thought feels itself humiliated and perplexed, which it contemplates with fear, and without the power to face them, although it understands their existence and necessity; such are those of the infinity of space and eternity of duration. Impossible to define, for all definition could only darken the first idea which is in us, these truths command and rule us. To try and explain them would be a barren hope; it suffices to keep them before our attention in order that they may reveal to us, at every instant, the immensity of their value. A thousand definitions have been given; we will, however, neither quote nor recall one of them. But we wish to open space before us and employ ourselves there, in trying to penetrate its depth. The velocity of a cannon ball from the mouth of the cannon makes swift way, 437 yards per second. But this would be still too slow for our journey through space, as our velocity would scarcely be 900 miles an hour. This is too little. In nature there are movements incomparably more rapid, for instance, the velocity of light. This velocity is 186,000 miles per second. This will do better; thus we will take this means of transport. Allow me, then, by a figure of speech, to tell you that we will place ourselves on a ray of light and be carried away on its rapid course.

Taking the earth as our starting point, we will go in a straight line to any point of the heavens. We start. At the end of the first second we have already traversed 186,000 miles; at the end of the second, 372,000. We continue. Ten seconds, a minute, ten minutes have elapsed—111,600,000 miles have been passed. Passing, during an hour, a day, a week, without ever slackening our pace, during whole months, and even a year, the time which we have traversed is already so long that, expressed in miles, the number of measurement exceeds our faculty of comprehension, and indicates nothing to our mind: they would be trillions, and millions of millions. But we will not interrupt our flight. Carried on without stopping by this same rapidity of 186,000 miles each second, let us penetrate the expanse in a straight line for whole years, fifty years, even a century.

Where are we? For a long time we have gone beyond the last starry regions which are seen from the earth, the last that the telescope has visited; for a long time we travel in other regions, unknown and unexplored. No mind is capable of following the road passed over; thousands of millions joined to thousands of millions express nothing: at the sight of this prodigious expanse the imagination is arrested, humbled. Well! this is the wonderful point of the problem: we have not advanced a single step in space. We are no nearer a limit than if we had remained in the same place; we should be able again to begin the same course starting from the point where we are, and add to our voyage a voyage of the same extent; we should be able to join centuries on centuries in the same itinerary, with the same velocity, to continue the voyage without end and without rest; we should be able to guide ourselves in any part of space, left, right, forward, backward, above, below, in every direction; and when, after centuries employed in this giddy course, we should stop ourselves, fascinated, or in despair before the immensity eternally open, eternally renewed, we should again understand that our secular flights had not measured for us the smallest part of space, and that we were not more advanced than at our starting point. In truth, it is the infinite which surrounds us, as we before expressed it, or the infinite number of worlds. We should be able to float for eternity without ever finding anything before us but an eternally open infinite.

Hence it follows that all our ideas on space have but a purely relative value. When we say, for instance, to ascend to the sky, to descend under the earth, these expressions are false in themselves, for being situated in the bosom of the infinite, we can neither ascend nor descend; there is no above nor below; these words have only an acceptation relative to the terrestrial surface on which we live.

The universe must, therefore, be represented as an expanse without limits, without shores, illimited, infinite, in the bosom of which float suns like that which lights us, and earths like that which poises under our steps. Neither dome, nor vaults, nor limits of any kind; void in every direction. and in this infinite void an immense quantity of worlds.

Can Congress Make as Good a Showing?

Pall Mall Gazette.

Mr. John Morley, speaking at the Newcastle college of science, paid a high tribute to the house of commons, and maintained that there was quite as much of what Lord Palmerston called “that damned intellect” in it as in any of its predecessors. Here is the passage:

“I often think that even from the house of commons we could furnish you in your college of science here, or to more bodies—we could furnish you a very respectable faculty of professors in literature and in science. (Cheers.) We have among us the author of the most luminous historic speculation of the day; we have among us the author of the most brilliant biography of the day; we have among us a capable and most eminent scientific chemist; we have a most distinguished naturalist, and the university—of Cambridge^sic itself, as it did in the days of Sir Isaac Newton, sends once more to the house of commons one of the most eminent and distinguished men of abstract science—the president of the Royal society—(cheers)—though I regret that that illustrious man sits on what I must be allowed to think the unscientific side of the house.” (Laughter.)

This is interesting; but there ought to have been cries of “Name, name.” As it is the reporters were obviously puzzled; for whereas one report makes Mr. Morley claim for the house one “eminent chemist,” another makes him claim “a couple.” “A couple” is no doubt right, for Sir Lyon Playfair deserves to be mentioned as such almost as much as Sir Henry Roscoe. The distinguished naturalist is, of course, Sir John Lubbock. The historian is Mr. Bryce, the biographer Sir George Trevelyan. The president of the Royal society is Professor Stokes. If Mr. Morley’s imaginary college wanted a professor of mineralogy, Mr. Story-Maskelyne would be the man; and only Mr. Morley’s modesty prevented him from nominating himself for the chair of literature. Thus constituted the parliamentary faculty would certainly be a strong one. It is interesting, by the way, as a refutation of the Unionist boast that their party contains all the intellect of the country, that of the above mentioned members five are Home Rulers and three Unionists.

The Sort of People Out of Whom Nihilists Are Made.

Westminster Review.

And yet, when this religious indifference was at its height, thousands, nay millions of Russians were found ready to endure the most frightful persecution, eager even to grasp the crown of martyrdom, to seek literal baptism by fire, rather than accept the most trifling innovation on their ancient ritual. In the whole history of religious enthusiasm there is no popular movement more incomprehensible at first sight than the Rascol—the great religious schism of a portion of the Russian peasantry in the seventeenth century. So far as one can see, this revolt of the peasants against their church was caused simply by the Patriarch Nicon’s determination in 1654 to reform the missal, so as to bring it into harmony with the Greek mother church—e. g., by making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two, by representing the cross itself with four equal arms instead of three short and one long arm, by spelling the name of “Jesus” as we spell it instead of in the corrupt Russian form “Jsus.” These and a few similar matters of even less importance were the only matters of religious doctrine or practice at issue. Apparently it was a clear case of “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” The bulk of the people indeed took this view; but a minority would not have these “innovations” at any price. “It was for these trifles—a letter less in a name; a finger more in a cross; the doubling instead of trebling of a word—that thousands of men and women encountered death on the scaffold or at the stake. It was for these things that other scores of thousands underwent

p. 7, col. 2 the horrible torture of the knout, had their bodies mutilated, their tongues cut out, their hands chopped off.” Incredible as all this seems, is it not far more incredible that “their opponents, the dominant church party, comprising all the best educated among the clergy and society, should burn, hang and decapitate hundreds and thousands of their fellow creatures, and ruin and devastate entire provinces (of their own country!) for questions so utterly unimportant?” Is it not monstrous that a great council of the church, presided over by the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, should solemnly pronounce a frightful curse upon the handful of pops and moujiks who clung to the forms to which they and their ancestors for generations had been accustomed—“their souls,” so runs this blasphemous curse, “in virtue of the power conferred on the church by Jesus Christ, to be given up to eternal torments, together with with the soul^sic of the traitor Judas and the souls of Jews by whom Jesus Christ was crucified”?

The spiritual thunder of the Patriarchs was supported by the lightning blast of the secular power, armed with sword and power^sic; but the Rascolniks (Schismatics) only multiplied in numbers, and their zeal grew more intense as the persecution became more inhuman. Thousands perished, but thousands also escaped to the impenetrable forests and marshes, to the frozen shores of the White sea, to the uninhabited wilds of Siberia. By the order of the Tsar Alexis they were hunted down like wild beasts, and burned alive when caught. But the religious exaltation of the Rascolniks was more than equal to the fury of the “orthodox.” Resignation to martyrdom passed into a yearning for it. Take the following historical incident, one of many similar: On a small island in the sea of Ladoga there stood an orthodox monastery—Paleostrovsky—hated by the Rascolniks because its monks used their knowledge of the surrounding country to guide the tsar’s soldiers to the Rascolnik settlement. In 1688, while a party of the fiercest of the orthodox were devastating the Rascolnik settlements in the Onega district, a Rascolnik monk, Ignatius or Solovezks^sic conceived the idea of a great holocaust for the glory of the true faith. At the head of a great crowd, armed with bludgeons and axes, he crossed the frozen lake, put to flight the soldiers who guarded Paleostrovsky, drove out the the orthodox monks^sic and took possession of the monastery. In due time the Tsar’s troops, a battalion of infantry and guns, arrived from Novgorod and marched to the assault. The Rascolniks retired to their big wooden church, filled it with combustible material, and when the troops broke into the monastery, shut themselves up, barred the doors and windows, set fire to the building and perished in the flames. At least 1,500 sacrificed themselves on this occasion, but the Rascolnik historians double this number. This event is known as the first Paleostrovsky “locking up.” The monastery was rebuilt and the orthodox monks restored, but a few years later the Rascolniks were seized with a wild desire to repeat the same act of faith in this stronghold of the Niconians. They took possession of the monastry^sic a second time, but, far from wishing to hold it, their chief anxiety was to gain time sufficient to allow the inhabitants of the neighboring villages to join them and share the glory of the “locking up.” With sham debates and other devices they managed to delay the assault until some 1,500 candidate martyrs had secured places in the church. Then they set fire to it. The soldiers pulled a few of them out of the flames, but those who were thus rescued were overwhelmed with this proof of their exceeding sinfulness, seeing in it the stern refusal of God to accept a sacrifice at their unworthy hands.

The Oak and the Parasite.

New York Sun.

Of old there grew a tall and sturdy oak,
A century’s son, and calmly it defied
The fiercest tempests that above it broke,
And still maintained its unabated pride;
When wind and storm at times o’ercame it, then
It bent and bowed, but always rose again.

When bitter blasts of winter stripped it bare,
It never mourned the foliage that it shed;
But waiting calmly till the skies were fair,
Still lifted proudly its undaunted head,
And in the spring, all splendidly arrayed,
Rejoiced as if no leaf could ever fade.

Its sturdy strength was fitted to invite
All cunning, creeping plants to climb and cling,
And so there came a sapless parasite,
A valueless and most obnoxious thing,
That grew about the tree so tall and stanch,
And covered with its leafage bole and branch.

The people wondered as the creeper grew,
Absorbing lifeblood from the juicy tree,
Which seemed no more the oak that once they knew,
A tethered giant that would fain be free;
And as they gazed upon the leafy head,
“The parasite is now the tree,” they said.

There came a wild and fierce November storm,
A hurricane cyclonic in its force;
The ancient oak before it bowed its form,
And with it fell the parasite, of course.
The proud tree’s leafage flew before the blast
Which freed it from the parasite at last.

The people said: “Behold again the tree!
How grandly does it lift its head once more,
Stripped of its leaves, but from the creeper free,
Erect as ever, sturdy as before!
It well may bless the storm that shook its base,
But freed it from the parasite’s embrace!”

Profits, Losses and Suicides at Monte Carlo.

London Echo.

Affairs are not so brillant^sic at the Casino at Monte Carlo now as they used to be. The shareholders held their annual meeting in the private salon of the directorate the other day, and it is said by the Daily News correspondent that the report then presented showes^sic a profit of a little over £250,000, as compared with nearly £300,000 last year. This is far below the results of a few years ago, when the profits averaged £500,000. The cashier has just resigned, it is said, through remorse. There is little of the high play of former days. There have been twenty-five suicides during the year, as compared with nineteen last year, the number of unfortunates generally being in proportion to the profits. A few days ago a young Russian lady lost all her fortune. She threw herself into the Mediterranean. As usual, nothing has since been heard of the body. The directors are just now making strenuous efforts to increase the fascinations of the place by an installation of electricity throughout the building. They are also considering a scheme for erecting a lift to obviate the necessity of climbing the existing long flight of steps, and to transport people direct from the station to the gardens of the Casino. Prince Charles is also going in a fortnight to raise the drooping spirits of the gambling establishment.

The Market for Human Hair.

Pall Mall Gazette.

There is a human hair market at Morlans (says Galignani) in the department of the Lower Pyrenees. It is little known except, perhaps, in Paris, where it has a high reputation. The market is held every other Friday. Hundreds of trafficking hair dressers throug^sic to the little place from far and near to buy up the hair of the young peasant girls. The dealers wander up and down the long, narrow street of the town, each with a huge pair of bright shears hanging from a black leather strap around his waist, while the young girls who wish to part with their hair stand about in the doorways, usually in couples. The transaction is carried on in the best room of the house. The hair is let down, the tresses combed out, and the dealer names the price. This varies from three to twenty francs. If a bargain is struck the dealer lays the money in the open palm of the seller, applies his shears, and in a minute the long tresses fall on the floor. The purchaser rolls up the tresses, places them in paper, and thrusts them into his pocket. Of course a maiden can rarely see her fallen tresses disappear into the dealer’s pockets without crying. But she consoles herself with the thought that it

p. 7, col. 3 will grow again, and by looking at the money in her hand.

There is at present a scarcity of fancy human hair in the market. The rarest hair is pure white, and its value is constantly increasing; and if it is unusually long—that is, from four to five feet—the dealer can get almost his own price, while if it is of ordinary length it is worth from 375f. to 500f. an ounce. The fact that pure white hair is the court coiffure throughout Europe keeps the demand for it very high. It is much prized by American women whose own hair is white and who desire to enrich its folds, for white hair is held to give certain distinction to the wearer. There is no fancy market for gray hair. It is too common. Next to pure white hair the demand is for hair of the color of virgin gold. It is said that the Empress Eugenie paid 1,000f. an ounce for a braid of golden hair that exactly matched her own.

NEW IDEAS, METHODS AND INVENTIONS.

The electric welding apparatus now coming into general use does its work with marvelous rapidity. It is used not only for joining ends or pieces, but for shaping metals. Professor Elihu Thomson gave an exhibition the other day, of specimens of work done with the apparatus. In one case a bar had been put through a hole in a flat piece of wood, and then, while the current was passed through it, it was pressed at each end so as to make it expand outside of the wood, so that the wood was held between the two expansions in the bar, and almost pinched between them. The operation was all done so quickly that the heat had not time to char the wood and enlarge the hole, or in other words, the wood had not time to find out that it should burn. Two pieces of lead pipe were welded together without any obstruction of the interior and no expansion outside. A finished ax was also shown, with the steel cutting edge welded to the body by electrical means, the welding being the last operation done before final grinding for finish.

The minister of public works for the republic of Chili gives notice that he is prepared to receive tenders for the supply of 739,400 iron or steel railroad ties 2.75 meters long, and 725,100 of 1.30 meters. This along with the fact of recent large contracts entered into for the Argentine republic, and one, at least, for Mexico, in all of which steel ties were stipulated for, shows what progress the substitution of iron or steel for timber is making in other countries. The New York Central railroad is also going to give the system a trial, and has ordered 800 steel ties to be put down on the Harlem road.

An electrically-driven pleasure boat, 65½ feet long, 10 feet beam, to carry eighty passengers, was launched in the Thames on October 15. The electrical machinery and storage cells are placed below the deck fore and aft, leaving a clear run the whole length of the boat for passengers. In the middle is a handsomely fitted cabin with lavatories, dining table, etc. The electrical energy is stored in 200 accumulators, and is converted into motive power by two motors of 7½ horse power each, driving twin three-bladed propellers.—[Ironmongery.

The Journal printed a few days ago a description of the Tribune Lynotype^sic type-setting machines, which have now been in use for some time and work satisfactorily. The name “type-setting machine” is hardly correct; it does not set type; it sets matrices, a matrix being a mold or die in which a type or line or page of type is cast. The machine looks like a small pipe organ. It has a keyboard, one key for each letter or character, back of which are a lot of pipes in which are the little brass matrices or type molds, and the copy or manuscript is held on a rack just as the music is held above the banks of keys on an organ. Whenever a key is pressed a corresponding type mold, made of brass, drops out of its pipe into a groove, and the operator at a glance can tell whether he has set up the right mold. After each word a “space band” is inserted. This “space band” is wedge-shaped arrangement^sic, very thin above and thick below. A gauge shows the operator when sufficient matrices have been set to complete a line. Then comes another important function of the machine. The operator simply moves a lever and sets another part in motion. A pair of grippers seize the line of matrices and remove them from the slide on which they rest. The space bands are forced upward through the line of matrices and spread the words out so that the line is “justified,” that is, made as long as the width of the newspaper column. Then the line is carried against the face of a wheel. Behind the wheel is a little furnace, a pot of molten type metal and a small force pump. The movement of the lever which has set this part of the machine in motion has also started the force pump. A sufficient quantity of liquid metal is forced through a slot in the wheel against the moulds on the faces of the matrices. In a second a solid block is cast just the size of a full line of types, which bears on its face the letters corresponding to the line of matrices. This block of type is then trimmed by the machine and carried to the bottom of a gallery, where it is followed by the next line. The machine returns the matrices to the pipes automatically and correctly. If by any possible mischance a matrix doesn’t drop into its own channel it can’t get into any other, and moreover, if it makes any attempt to do so, it stops the machine and thus gives warning to the operator that something is wrong. When the line of type is cast the matrices are lifted to the top of the machines and delivered upon a sort of endless railroad, which moves across the top of the machine, across the upper openings in the matrix channels. The top of each matrix as it stands is cut into the shape of a letter V, and along the inner edges of the V are arranged little notches. Each matrix has its own individual series of notches, unlike those of any other. As the little railroad or endless belt moves the matrices along, the V-shaped tops closely hug a fixed bar, the sides of which are cut into fine ridges. This is just before the tops of the channels, and the ridges change in form and arrangement over the top of each channel, so that when a matrix reaches a position over its own receptacle, the notches on the sides of its V-shaped top no longer engage any ridges on the bar, and the matrix drops into place.

Thus the operations of the machine are complete, the matter is set and cast into lines, ready for making up, and the matrices are returned to their places, ready to be set over again. There is hardly a limit to the class of work. Headlines and tabular matter can be set as easily as plain “news matter,” and reservoirs of “sorts” may be placed in position to be set in a moment.

The commissioner of patents estimates that “from six to seven-eighths of the entire manufacturing capital of the United States, or $600,000,000, is directly or indirectly based upon patents.” A calculation of the same kind in England, according to the London Inventor, reveals a still more surprising result, the capital invested being enormous. It has been computed that Siemen’s inventions have produced more than five millions sterling. “There is,” says an eminent authority, “scarcely an article of human convenience or necessity in the market to-day that has not been the subject of a patent in whole or in part. The sale of every such article yields its inventor a profit.”

At the Point Breeze gas works, Philadelphia, they have introduced what they term an “iron man”—an odd looking piece of machinery that runs up and down on tracks in front of the retorts. It is managed by one man, and as the Record puts it, performs the duty “of a discharger; primarily to discharge the contents of the retorts, and secondarily to discharge a few of the superfluous employes.” Of this “man,” the manufacturers say: “As to the moral effect caused by the introduction of these machines and the soothing effect it has upon strikes, we respectfully refer to those now using them.” One of these “men” will take care of fifty retorts in an hour, and in a Chicago gas establishment the introduction of two of these mechanical workers enabled the superintendent to dispense with the services of thirty-two flesh and blood men.

p. 7, col. 4

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ANY PERSON holding a receipt for one year’s subscription to THE STANDARD may become a member of “The Standard Association” by applying to W. C. BOHANNON, Secretary, 2,319 Chestnut street, St. Louis, Mo.

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p. 7, col. 5

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WHO TAKES THE PRIZE?

[Illustration: outline engraving of a row of six babies seated on a blanket on a grassy bank, the “Prize Babies” picture; no caption beyond the heading above]

The above illustration gives only the outlines of a picture which bids fair to be one of the most popular we have ever issued. It is one of our latest productions, and has all the charm of novelty. It is called the

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p. 7, col. 6

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The following is a list of tracts in print:

1. First Principles. Henry George. 4 pages.
   
2. Land and Taxation. David Dudley Field and Henry George. 4 pages.
   
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12. Sailors’ Snug Harbor and the Randall Farm. W. T. Croasdale. 12 pages.
    
13. The Collegiate Church and Shoemaker’s Field. W. T. Croasdale. 12 pages.
    
14. Only a Dream. Abner C. Thomas. 4 pages.
    
15. It is the Law of Christ. Rev. S. H. Spencer. 4 pp.
    
16. My Landlord. John Jones. 4 pages.
    
17. “Thou Shalt Not Steal.” Henry George. 8 pages.
    
18. Christianity and Poverty. Father Huntington 4 pp.
    
19. Poverty and Christianity. H. O. Pentecost. 8 pages.
    
20. The Single Tax. Thomas G. Shearman. 8 pages.
    
21. Religion vs. Robbery. Rev. Dr. McGlynn. 8 pages.
    
22. Back to the Land. Bishop Nulty. 16 pages.
    
23. Anti-slavery and Anti-poverty. H. O. Pentecost. 8 pp
    
24. Tenement House Morality. J. O. S. Huntington. 4 pp.
    
25. The Case Plainly Stated. H. F. Ring. 8 pages.
    
26. Questions by Rev. Howard Henderson, with answers by Henry George. 2 pages.
    
27. Objections to the Land Tax. Thos. G. Shearman. 4pp
    
28. Socialism—Its Truth and Its Error. Henry George. 4 pages.
    
29. Horse Sense. W. C. Woods, M. D. 2 pages.
    
30. Taxing Land Values. Henry George. 8 pages.
    
31. “God Wills It.” Henry George. 4 pages.
    
32. What We Want. Everett Glackin, ex-president Typographical union No. 6. 2 pages.
    
33. How John’s Father Saw the Light. W. C. Woods. 2pp
    
34. The Distribution of Wealth. T. G. Shearman. 16 pp
    
35. Ten Thoughts for Christian Thinkers. Rev. John W. Kramer. 4 pages.
    
36. What the United Labor Party Want. Henry George. 2 pages.
    
37. Stories for Farmers. 4 pages.
    
38. Electoral Reform. A. T. Rice. 4 pages.
    
39. A Practical Illustration. Hugh B. Brown. 2 pages.
    
40. Hints as to What You Can Do. Henry George. 4 pp.
    
41. To a Bookkeeper. Bartholomew Appleby. 2 pages.
    
42. A Lawyer’s Reply to Criticisms. Samuel B. Clarke. 16 pages.
    
43. A Piece of Land. The late Francis G. Shaw. 2 pp.
    
44. The Tax on Buildings. William T. Croasdale. 8 pp.
    
45. My Butcher Woman and My Grocery Man. William McCabe. 4 pages.
    
46. Election-Reform. Louis F. Post. 12 pages.
    
47. The Single Tax in Canada. 2 pages.
    
48. The Onward March. William Lloyd Garrison. 4 pp.
    
49. A Republican’s Reasons for Supporting Cleveland. Judge Frank T. Reid. 2 pages.
    
50. A Catechism. D. A. 46. 2 pages.
    [86?]. Jefferson and Hamilton. Chauncey F. Black. 8 pp.

[Advertisement] The Democrat

THE DEMOCRAT.

A RADICAL REVIEW MONTHLY.

The Democrat advocates Land Resumption and those reforms which are necessary to make the English people a free people. It asks “compensation” not for those who have benefited by unjust legislation, but for those who have suffered thereby.

For one dollar the Democrat is supplied for 18 months to any address in the United States or Canada.

Address 5 New Bridge street, London, E. C.

[Advertisement] Coogan Bros. 

[Illustration: engraving of the four-story Coogan Brothers store front, with pedestrians, a cab and a horse-drawn delivery wagon in the street. Lettering on the building: “COOGAN BROTHERS”; “WHOLESALE & RETAIL FURNITURE & CARPETS” [partly legible]; “BEDDING WAREROOMS” [partly legible]; “MANUFACTURERS” [partly legible]; across the shop front: “125 COOGAN BRO’S 121”]

COOGAN BROS.,

CARPET AND FURNITURE DEALERS,

COR. BOWERY AND GRAND STS.

CURRENT THOUGHT.

FOR A SINGLE TAX CLUB HOUSE.

We, the undersigned, hereby agree to buy, at ($1.00) one dollar apiece, the number of Tontine shares set opposite our respective names, and pay for the same at any time as soon as the minimum number of (5,000) five thousand shares be subscribed for.

Name……………………………………………..

Address……………………………………………..

Amount……………………………………………..

When filled out please forward to William McCabe, 236 East Fourteenth street, New York city.

p. 8, col. 2 [continued from column 1] ed by the very existence of the poverty and degradation which are either kept out of sight or used as good literary material. She goes back to the foundation doctrine of Christianity, the brotherhood of man, and endeavors to emphasize the lesson that if “one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.” The risk to physical health that the rich run from the existence of such places as Mulberry bend and other tenement house quarters has been insisted on over and over again by our newspapers; what has not been so clearly pointed out has been the moral danger. Cassie voices this lesson in the following sentence: “A rich man ruins a poor girl; a poor girl ruins a rich man.”

“What we want,” says Mrs. Rollins, speaking through one of her characters, “is an Abraham Lincoln to emancipate the slaves of New York by a single stroke of the pen, his signature to a check for twenty millions that would leave him not a sweetmeat less on his own table.” And earlier in the story her favorite character, Benham, writes an imaginary advertisement: “Wanted, an Abraham Lincoln to emancipate the slaves of New York!” But the fact is ignored that simple emancipation is not enough. After the war was ended, the colored people would soon have relapsed into their servile state, although nominal slavery was at an end, had no steps been taken to secure their rights to them. It is often claimed that the serfs are practically as badly off as before Alexander’s emancipation proclamation. What is needed is to root out slavery, not merely to free slaves. And there are some of us who think they see signs that the era of true freedom for each and all will soon be begun. That such books as “Uncle Tom’s Tenement” may help toward this end is proved by the closing sentences of W. D. Howells’s critique on the story.

If ever prosperity visits these miserable houses in the shape of better wages, it is seized and confiscated to the landlord’s behoof in an increased rent. The disease is well studied and the symptoms all clearly ascertained; the remedy proposed is more conscience in the landlords. But is there any hope of permanent cure while the conditions invite one human creature to exploit another’s necessity for his profit, or a bad man, under the same laws, may at any moment undo the work of a good one? This is the poignant question which the book seems to leave unanswered. It is so poignant that we are fain to turn from it to more strictly literary interests again, and try to forget it.

This is an easy way to dispose of the difficulty, and this sentence may serve to show why, with such a brave beginning, Mr. Howells has made so pitiful an ending of his “Annie Kilburn.”

But, fortunately for the human race, difficult questions will not be forgotten by all. Some will never be satisfied until somehow the question is satisfactorily answered. And every book or article that keeps the public mind agitated on this subject is to be welcomed, even though it may fail in reaching a satisfactory conclusion.

ELIZABETH B. SYKES.

Mr. William Nelson Black thinks that the great need of humanity is more capital. He also has other ideas, of which the following are fair samples:

Credit is capital, income is capital, education is capital, nay, at the foundation of all, good character is capital.

Wealth is broadly a fruit of some form of capitalization on surplus earnings or income.

It may be truthfully charged that not only are the great majority of men not producers of wealth, but that a very large proportion of this majority are consumers of the accumulations of the few, and help to deplete the granaries where the public harvests are stored.

Mr. Black has written a little book(1) to show that poverty is to be abolished, and rent paying to cease from out the land, through the organization of gigantic building associations on a new plan. If it were possible to accept his premissis^sic—of which the quotations given above are specimens—it might be worth while to consider his conclusions. But when a man commences his argument by announcing that, for him, two and two make five, it is scarcely necessary to waste time in tracing his further fallacies of ratiocination.

(1)Ultimate Finance: A True Theory of Co-operation. By William Nelson Black. New York: The Humboldt Publishing Company.

HOW TO BEHAVE.

A BOWERY LODGING HOUSE.

[Advertisement] Pears’ Soap

[Display advertisement in large decorative type, spanning columns 5–6 at top of page]

Pears’ Soap

Fair white hands

Brightclear complexion

Soft healthful skin.

[A Bowery Lodging House, continued from foot of column 4] stench overpowering, and nearly every lodger in the place was continually scratching his head, shoulders or sides. The old man, who it turned out was a sailor, was allowed to go out, remarking as he did that he had been forty-two years at sea, and had had some rough times and hard places to sleep in, but that place was the worst. Jim wound himself up among the feet, and taking off his coat for a pillow, which seemed to be the custom, soon fell asleep.

As for myself, I rested content sitting on the corner edge of the board as far as possible from any part of the repulsive human beings who lay packed like a litter of pups and were still talking, snoring and scratching. Their talk, on the whole, was very uninteresting, chiefly consisting of the amount of drainings they had got from empty beer kegs, the amount of money they had begged and various growls in their several languages against their bedfellows for putting their feet in their face or talking so as to interrupt their slumbers. One occupant of the room who had the choice position on the bench, I was informed, was the “boss bum” and regular customer of the establishment—a man of about fifty years of age, grimy with dirt, clothed in the filthiest of old clothes, who week in and week out lived the same kind of life. Begging and draining beer kegs during the day, probably stealing when he had a chance, and sleeping regularly at the same station, he had been promoted to the proud position of “boss bum.” His duties consisted of keeping the denizens of the place quiet and in the morning setting them to work cleaning out the place with hose and brooms before they left for their day’s labors. Rumor said that the boss had a comfortable little pile saved up, and no doubt there may be some truth in the statement, as only a few months ago one of these bummers, on being arrested as a vagrant, produced a roll of bills to prove that he was innocent of the charge preferred against him.

After having been closeted in this den of filth for about ten minutes the door was opened and another visitor was ushered in. He was a toothless old man, gray, and with his face lined with seams. Though not drunk he had evidently had a drop, and was holding forth about the troubles of life. “I’m religious,” he said. “Four years I have prayed to the Lord. I pray—I pray—I pray—I’m always praying, and yet somehow the Lord don’t seem to hear me; anyhow he don’t answer my prayers.” I asked him what he prayed to the Lord for, if he had anything definite in view; but he did not appear to know quite what he expected would be done for him. He had originally come from St. Louis, years back, with several hundred dollars and stopped at the Astor house. As his funds began to run short he moved to a cheaper place, and kept moving on the downward scale from hotel to boarding house, from boarding house to lodgings and thence to the police stations and the park, where, unless in some unforeseen manner his numerous prayers are answered he is likely to remain.

Two of the men, evidently partners or friends, were mapping out their next day’s work—one was to work in one direction and the second in another. They were to meet at noon, and, if their funds were sufficient, have a drink and something to eat. Among all the men in those two rooms, about thirty in all, there did not appear to be a single decent man, with the exception of the old sailor who left, and who, I am glad to say, had his papers with him, and was on his way to Snug Harbor, where he had work promised him. All the others were beggars, beats and bummers not deserving a thought of pity. Gradually silence stole over the scene and all was quiet, with the exception of a steady snoring from some of the somnolent, and a periodical scratch—scratch of some victim of the vermin. In the morning at 6 o’clock the sleepers were awakened and rose yawning, gaping and stretching themselves. Under charge of the “boss bum” they set to work to clean up their sleeping apartment, washing it down and whitewashing it. Every morning this process is gone through, and during the day not one could wish to see a cleaner or nicer place than the rooms for casual lodgers.

In the early morning a [more?] horrible hole could not be imagined than the same rooms, yet day after day the foulest and about the lowest specimens of humanity are only too glad to make the place their feasting spot. Nothing can be done for them, and they probably would not thank you for trying unless it took the form of donations of money.

As far as the authorities of the station are concerned they do all that is possible. They supply day by day a clean room for their casual lodgers, smelling of fresh whitewash, but within a few hours the room has been reduced to a state of one of the most horrible and filthy dens in existence.

[Advertisement] Briggs’ Pianos

[Illustrated advertisement spanning foot of columns 5–6: engraving of an upright piano in a frame with foliage; a ribbon/banner pointing right]

[On banner:] [illegible] SEND FOR CATALOGUE

BRIGGS’ PIANOS

C. C. BRIGGS & Co

5 APPLETON ST. BOSTON MASS.

MANUFACTURERS OF

GRAND · · SQUARE · · & · · UPRIGHT

PIANO FORTES

GRACEFUL DESIGNS · · SOLID CONSTRUCTION

MATCHLESS TONE · · BEAUTIFUL FINISH.

p. 8, col. 6 [Columns 5–6 at the top of the page are occupied by the Pears’ Soap advertisement transcribed under column 5.]

[Advertisement] The Keystone Watch Club Co.

[Advertisement in an ornamental border of watch-case illustrations; vertical lettering in the side borders [illegible] (apparently branch-office names and addresses; “WALNUT ST.” legible at upper right); keystone-shaped emblem at upper right reading “THE KEYSTONE WATCH CLUB CO.” around a watch, “PHILA.” beneath]

OUR $43 RAIL ROAD WATCH is specially constructed for the most exacting use and is the BEST Railroad Watch made. It contains numerous important patented improvements of vital importance to accurate timing—Patent Dustproof, Patent Stem Wind, &c., which we control exclusively. It has 15 Genuine Ruby jewels in settings, and is accurately adjusted to heat, cold and isochronism. It is fully equal for appearance, accuracy, durability and service to any $90 watch. Price $43, either all cash or in Clubs, $1 a week. Open face or hunting. Our $1 a week Club System, while as convenient to the buyer as any installment system, is a wholesale spot cash system to us. The Co-operation of the club members sells us 43 watches in each $43 Watch Club, and we get cash from the club for each watch before it goes out, though each member only pays $1 a week. This is why we give you more for your money than any one else and why we are doing the largest watch business in the world.

An Ajax Watch Insulator given free with each Watch.

The Keystone Watch Club Co

Main Office in Co’s Own Building,

904 WALNUT ST. PHILADA, PA.

Agents Wanted.

Ajax Watch Insulator, $1.00

A perfect protection against magnetism. Fit any Watch. Sent by mail on receipt of price. ☞ We refer to any [Commercial?] Agency.

[Cut: figure of Ajax carrying a large watch labeled “AJAX” on his shoulder, lightning bolts glancing off it]

[Advertisement] Empire Wringer

[Cut: clothes wringer with crank handle; the word “OUR” printed along the handle]

BUY THE WRINGER THAT SAVES THE MOST LABOR. OUR PURCHASE GEAR [illegible] Saves half the labor of other wringers, and costs but little more. Does not GREASE the CLOTHES. EMPIRE [on the wringer, small lettering illegible]

Solid White Rubber Rolls. Warranted. [Agents?] wanted everywhere. Empire W. Co., [Auburn, N. Y.?]

[Advertisement] Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell

HEAVEN AND ITS WONDERS, THE WORLD OF SPIRITS AND HELL, described from things heard and seen, by EMANUEL SWEDENBORG, “Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Also THE LAST JUDGMENT, as witnessed by him in the spiritual world in 1757; The Doctrine of Life, The Sacred Scriptures, The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine, in all, 750 octavo pages mailed prepaid for $1.00. Discount to the trade. Address, American Swedenborg Printing and Publishing Society, 20 Cooper Union, New York City.

[Advertisement] Piso’s Cure for Consumption

[Display advertisement in ornamental white-on-black lettering framed by decorative bars; vertical lettering on the side bars illegible]

PISO’S CURE FOR

CURES WHERE ALL ELSE FAILS.

Best Cough Syrup. Tastes good. Use in time. Sold by druggists.

CONSUMPTION

[Advertisement] Peck’s Cushioned Ear Drums (F. Hiscox)

[Cut: woman’s head, hand cupped to ear. Display headline in decorative letters very faint]

[CURE THE DEAF?]

Peck’s Pat. Improved Cushioned Ear Drums PERFECTLY RESTORE THE HEARING, whether Deafness is caused by [colds, fevers?] or injuries to the natural drums. Invisible, comfortable, always in position. [Music?], conversation, whispers heard distinctly. Successful where all other remedies fail. Sold only by F. HISCOX, 853 Broadway, cor. [14th?] St., New York. Write or call for [illustrated?] book of proofs FREE.

[Advertisement] J. H. Bauerlein & Co., Kansas City

KANSAS CITY, MO.

FIVE YEARS REAL ESTATE FIRST MORTGAGE COUPON BONDS,

in sums of $1,000 to [$10,000?] each, bearing interest at the rate of eight per cent per annum. Interest payable semi-annually. These bonds are secured by first mortgages on Kansas City property worth three and four times the amount of bonds. Prompt payment of principal and interest guaranteed at maturity. Interest collectable through your own bank, with New York exchange added. Recorded mortgage forwarded with each bond.

CERTIFICATES OF DEPOSIT

issued in amounts of [$500?] and upward, bearing interest at the rate of eight per cent per annum. Certificates of deposit are secured by first mortgage bonds deposited with a trustee, a special deposit receipt to that effect, from the trustee, is attached to each certificate issued, therefore making the certificate of deposit an absolutely safe investment.

When ordering securities write your name in full, also that of your city, county and state.

J. H. BAUERLEIN & CO.,

Security Building,

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI.

[Advertisement] Frink’s Rupture Remedy

[Display heading: “RUPTURED?” in large type, with “ARE” set small above the first letters and “YOU” set small above the “U”, reading “ARE YOU RUPTURED?”]

R^AREUPTU^YOURED?

That is the question. Are you ruptured? If so, use FRINK’S RUPTURE REMEDY, the only quick, safe, sure and permanent cure for hernia (breach) or rupture. This great remedy has cured many persons every year for the last twenty years, and they have stayed cured. It cures by penetrating through the pores of the skin and building up and strengthening the abdominal wall, at the same time closing the hernial opening. The Remedy is generally used in connection with a truss. Children in arms are cured by the remedy alone without the aid of a truss. Soreness caused by chafing or pressure of truss pads, relieved immediately. The pressure can be relaxed gradually and the truss abandoned altogether in six to eight weeks. Price of Remedy, sufficient to cure an ordinary case, $5; sample package, containing enough to show good effect, $1. Sent by mail, postpaid, upon receipt of price. Full directions accompany each package. O. FRINK, sole proprietor, [231?] Broadway, New York. (Opposite the post office.)

[Advertisement] Pennsylvania Agricultural Works (A. B. Farquhar & Son)

[Cut: portable steam engine belted to a saw mill]

Pennsylvania Agricultural Works, York, Pa.

Farquhar’s Standard Engines and Saw Mills. [illegible]

Send for Catalogue. Portable, Stationary, Traction and Automatic Engines a specialty. Warranted equal or superior to any made.

Address A. B. FARQUHAR & SON, York, Pa.

[Advertisement] Dog Buyers’ Guide (Associated Fanciers)

[Cut: dog’s head in an ornamental frame; side-border lettering illegible]

DO YOU WANT A DOG?

DOG BUYERS’ GUIDE.

Colored plates, 100 engravings of different breeds, prices they are worth, and where to buy them. Mailed for 15 Cents.

ASSOCIATED FANCIERS,

237 S. Eighth St. Philadelphia, Pa.

[Foot of columns 5–6: Briggs’ Pianos advertisement, transcribed under column 5.]