Having thus seined President Winston's rhetorical sea, let us examine our catch and determine what is valuable food and what mere jelly-fish. That the schoolmaster is a very important factor in the social system there can be no question. Let him have all the honor to which he is entitled; but let him not seek to appropriate that which belongs to others. The pedagogue is not the fount of wisdom: he is but the pipe—of large or small caliber as the case may be— through which the wisdom of others flows to fertilize the intellectual fields. How much, prithee, have all the public pedagogues of America—including the president of the Texas 'varsity—added to the world's stock of wisdom during the last decade? Does it begin to dawn upon President Winston that there is another very important factor in the world's progress, viz., the Newtons, Bacons, Koperniks, Watts, Edisons, Shakespeares, Burkes, Keplers, Platos, Jeffersons and others who, by patient research or the outpourings of super-gifted minds have furnished forth the pedagogue's stock-in-trade? Science and Art, Philosophy and Religion—all that contributes to man's welfare, material or spiritual, originated in obscure closets and caves, in the open fields, beneath the star-domed vault of night, and during all these ages have received chief furtherance from individual genius or application, the schools but recording the progress made, spreading abroad more or less skillfully, the sacred fire wrested from Heaven by intellectual Titans. Still the pedagogue may well be proud of his profession, for it is a privilege to think—or even think at—the thoughts of men of genius, to officiate as their messengers to mankind. Let these royal heralds flourish their birchrods in every bypath, cry "The King!" and thereby get much honor. Winston says that education and organization are really the same, because one is a means to the other. How that may be I know not. An avowal of love is usually a means to a baby; still it were a work of supererogation to put diapers on a proposal of marriage. Organization is ever education of a certain sort; but education is not always organization. Many of the world's wisest have stood, like Byron, AMONG men, but not OF them—"In a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts."

Oxen organized in teams may accomplish more than working single; but you cannot yoke Pegasus and a plow- horse—Bellerophon's winged mount peremptorily refuses to be "organized" and turn rectilinear furrows, but plunges through Time and Space in an orbit of its own making—often mistaken by the patient organizers for a lawless comet, its appearance a dire portent. You cannot drive Shakespeare and Charles Hoyt in double harness, nor make the mock-bird and night-hawk sing in harmony.

The public pedagogue does not go out every morning before breakfast and, with ferula for Archimedean lever and Three R's for fulcrum, prize open the gates of day. The organization of infants of every conceivable degree of intellectuality into classes, and their formal elevation through successive "grades" by means of cunningly devised educational jack-screws or block-and-tackle, does not constitute the complete dynamics of the universe, President Winston to the contrary, notwithstanding. Knowledge must exist somewhere before there be any pedagogue to impart it; and though, under the name of Truth, it hide in Ymir's Well, those whose souls are athirst therefore will assuredly find it, though denied all mechanical furtherance. Education is simply the acquirement of useful information, it matters not how nor where nor when. Deprive any man—even a 'varsity president—of all knowledge but that obtained in the schools and he were helpless as an infant abandoned in mid-ocean. He could not so much as distinguish between peas and beans, between dogs and wolves, by the descriptions furnished by naturalists. That man who has lived to learn wisely and well has reached the Ultima Thule of terrestrial knowledge, the ne plus ultra of human understanding. More can no college professor or 'varsity president impart. If he know not this he is uneducated, though he be graduate of every university from Salamanca to the Sorbonne, and from Oxford to Austin.

Organization connotes mutual interdependence of the component parts, limitation of individualism, the circumscription of personal liberty. To a certain extent this is advantageous to man—without it civilization, human progress, were impossible; but to draw a line between wise use and abuse were a task of some difficulty. President Winston assures us that the British Government is the best in the world, yet it is a chaos compared to the organization of the Russian autocracy. Because we find beneficial that organization which makes cooperation possible, would he carry it to the extent of communism? Because concentration of capital reduces cost of production, does he approve of that organization which enables trusts to juggle prices? When organization has reached that point where one-third of our wealth-producers must stand idle because denied the privilege of producing the wherewithal to feed and clothe and house themselves, it might be well for 'varsity presidents to apply the soft pedal to their paean of praise and inquire diligently whether it be possible to get entirely too much of a good thing. Too many accept St. Paul's concession of a little wine for the stomach's sake for license to become sots.

Thomas Carlyle, who could see almost as far into a millstone as the average 'varsity president, was of the opinion that the tendency to ever more compact organization was transforming both education and religion into farces, blighting the spiritual and intellectual life of man and precipitating in the world of industry the most important and complex question with which political economists had ever been called upon to deal. That was nearly seventy years ago, when vast organization of capital had just begun—when the age of machinery, both for the grinding of corn and the inculcation of knowledge, was but nascent. Hear him growl:

"Though mechanism, wisely contrived, has done much for man, we cannot be persuaded that it has ever been the chief source of his worth or happiness. . . . We have machines for education. Instruction, that mysterious communing of Wisdom and Ignorance, is no longer an indefinable, tentative process, requiring a study of individual aptitude, and a perpetual variation of means and methods to attain the same end; but a secure, universal, straightforward business to be conducted in the gross, by proper mechanism, with such intellect as comes to hand. . . . Philosophy, Science, Art, Literature, all depend on machinery. No Newton, by silent meditation, now discovers the system of the world by the falling of an apple; but some quite other than Newton stands in his Museum, his Scientic Institution, and behind whole batteries of retorts, digesters and galvanic piles imperatively 'interrogates nature'—who, however, shows no haste to answer. In defect of Raphaels, and Angelos, and Mozarts, we have Royal Academies of Painting, Sculpture, Music; whereby the languishing spirit of Art may be strengthened by the more generous diet of a Public Kitchen. . . . Hence the Royal and Imperial Societies, the Bibliotheques, Glypthotheques, Technotheques, which front us in all capital cities, like so many well-finished hives, to which it is expected the stray agencies of Wisdom will swarm of their own accord, and hive and make honey! . . . Men have grown mechanical in head and heart as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavor and in natural force of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combination and arrangement, for institutions, constitutions—for Mechanism of one sort or another, do they hope and struggle. . . . Science and Art have derived only partial help from the culture or manuring of institutions— often have suffered damage."

Of course Carlyle may have been mistaken; still the fact that since he uttered his warning the world has not produced one man of genius except in the department of mechanics—that intellectually the last half of the present century is to the first half as "moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine"; that religion is becoming even more materialistic, patriotism passing and poetry dying or already dead; that millionaires are multiplying while the legion of idle labor grows larger, suggests that important inferences may be drawn from this ever-increasing organization of powers spiritual and material; and, like Quintius Fixlien, I "invite the reader to draw them."

If "the English race" be indeed "rising to the mastery of the globe," there is no cause for immediate alarm, for, at his present rate of progress, it will be some ages yet before John Bull succeeds in stealing it all. Nations, like individuals, have their youth, their lusty manhood and their decline; and there is every indication that Britain has passed the meridian of her power, while Russia and America, her equals in the arena of the world, still find their shadows falling toward the west. Persia, Assyria, Rome and Spain have aspired to the lordship of the world; and each in turn has been brought low by that insidious power that for a century has been draining the iron from the blood of England—the love of luxury, the subjection of Glory to Greed. If history be "philosophy teaching by example," the lion of Britain is senescent, if not already dead and stuffed with sawdust; but let the world look well to that savage brute known as the Russian bear. No: England is not "master of the globe," nor can she ever be; for her home territory is trifling and distant provinces are a source of weakness in war.

It were idle to discuss with a confirmed Anglomaniac the respective merits of the British and American governments. It may be that the former is "cheapest," despite the maintenance of an established church, a great army and navy and a sovereign who, with her worthless spawn, costs the taxpayers $3,145,000 per annum, while our president requires less than one-sixtieth of that sum. England does not pension the adult orphan children of men who sprained their moral character in an effort to dodge the draft, nor does Queen Victoria sell government bonds to banker syndicates on private bids; hence I will have no controversy with the learned Theban on the question of economy. The British subject may enjoy greater "individual liberty" than does the American sovereign, for aught I am prepared to prove. True, he is taxed to support a church founded by that eminent Christian Apostles Henry VIII, and whose next fidei defensor will be the present worshipful Prince of Wales; is represented in but one branch of Parliament and has no voice in the selection of his chief executive officer. If the sovereign and hereditary house of lords refuse to do his bidding, he must grin and bear it, while we can "turn the rascals out"—even if we turn a more disreputable crew of chronic gab-traps and industrial cut-throats in. He enjoys one privilege which is denied us, much to the dissatisfaction of our Anglomaniacs, that of purchasing titles of nobility; but we can acquire a life tenure of the title of Judge by arbitrating a horse-trade or officiating one term as justice of the peace, while by assiduous bootlicking we may, like Rienzi Miltiades Johnsing, obtain a lieutenant-colonelcy—or even a gigadier-brindleship—on the gilded staff of some 2 x 4 governor, and disport in all the glorious pomp and circumstance of war at inaugural balls or on mimic battlefields; hence honors are easy.

. . . . . .

That the Irish race is deficient in the organizing faculty is a great discovery, and I would advise President Winston to apply for a patent. John Bull will prove himself ungrateful indeed if he neglects to pension him for having demonstrated that those Irish organizations which, for half a century have kept his public servants looking under their beds o' nights for things neither ornamental nor useful, were mere Fata Morganas, Brocken specters or disease of the imagination. Winston has evidently been misled by a mere than Boeotian ignorance blithely footing it hand-in- hand with a vivid anti-Celtic imagination. He does not know that Ireland was the seat of learning and the expounder of law, both human and divine, when the rest of Europe was a wide-weltering chaos in which shrieked the demons Ignorance and Disorder. He was oblivious of the fact that the American people—the master organizers of the age—are far more Irish than English. You can scarce scratch an American babe of the third generation without drawing Celtic blood. Strange that the only Federal regiment which did not go to pieces at the Battle of Bull Run, though occupying the hottest part of the field—was composed of these very Irishmen who are incapable of organization! McClellan, the greatest military organizer of modern times— though by no means the ablest commander—was of Celtic extraction, as was the Duke of Wellington, as are the men at the head of the British and American armies to-day.

Were President Winston better informed he would not talk so glibly of what the "English race" has done for literature. No Englishman of pure Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Saxon- Norman lineage has ever reached the front rank in the great Republic of Letters. In Art and Science, in Oratory and Music—even in War and Commerce—they have had to content themselves with walking well to the rear of the band-wagon. Shakespeare was of Welsh descent, but whether of Celtic or Cimbric stock it were difficult to determine. The Cimbri and Celts are both very ancient races. A remnant of the former is found in Wales, while the survivors of the latter are the Irish and Scotch Highlanders. Northern France and Wales have strong Celtic contingents. Byron, "Rare" Ben Jonson, Christopher North, Oliver Goldsmith, Dean Swift, Lawrence Sterne and Louis Stevenson were Celts by blood. Scott, Burns, Carlyle and Macaulay were Scots of Celtic extraction. Tom Moore, Brinsley Sheridan and Edmund Burke were Irishmen, as are Balfe and Sullivan, the musical composers. Disraeli was a Jew. The genealogy of Pope and Tennyson remain to be traced. That the original Duke of Marlborough was an Englishman by birth and breeding "goes without saying." He acted like one. No Celtic commander could have robbed his dead soldiers. In the province of belles-lettres John Bull can at least claim Alfred Austin, his present poet- laureate, and Oscar Wilde, the dramatic decadent. Dr. Jameson is England's military lion and President George T. Winston of the Texas 'varsity her representative of learning! The English proper are but "a nation of shopkeepers," and the greatest shops are not conducted by Anglo-Saxons. England's great manufacturers are Scots, her merchant princes are Irishmen, her leading bankers are Jews and her reigning family an indifferent breed of Low Dutch. The Romans overran England, but unable to subjugate either Scotland or Ireland, abandoned "perfidious Albion," as a worthless conquest. Everybody took a turn at robbing it whenever it had anything worth carrying off, until the Norman buccaneers appropriated it bodily and reduced the Saxons to serfdom. By amalgamation with the inferior race they produced the Tudors, who gave them 'An'some 'Arry and a Virgin (?) Queen. Then the Scotch Stuarts took a turn at ruling and robbing England, and were followed by the religious bigots and witch-burners. The French ruled it awhile through their puppets and were succeeded by the Dutch, who held it in such contempt that they would not permit its language to be spoken at court. They are still milking it for more than three millions per annum, with an extra pull at the udder whenever one of the seventy-odd descendants of the Sovereign concludes to found a family. The Scotch, the Welsh and Dutch enabled England to enslave and plunder Ireland, and upon this meat John Bull, the J. Caesar of pawnbrokers, is growing great.

I much fear that President Winston studied sports under the tuition of Referee Earp, else he could have scarce given a decision to the favorite of the college campus. Football requires neither the intellect nor the perfect organization which is a sine qua non to success in our great "national game." Its chief requisites are long hair, leathery lungs and abnormally developed legs. The game owes its popularity to the average boy's predilection for the brutal, his inherent animalism. Football has for ages been a favorite game with savages, while baseball is a product of civilization. I am not decrying football—I incline to the view that an occasional rough-and-tumble scrapping match in which there is imminent danger of black eyes, and even of broken bones, is good for a boy I simply point out that as an intellectual game it not only ranks far below chess, billiards and baseball, but does not rise to a parity with pugilism. It is a mistake to assume that an intellectual divertisement must be popular with an intellectual people. The highest culture is but a film cast over a fathomless sea of savagery. The most learned of the Greeks, the most cultured of the Romans gloried in brutal games, and to-day a dog fight, a slugging match or even a college football game is relished by the Titan of intellect as keenly as by the Bowery tough.

I cannot imagine where President Winston absorbed the idea that lack of organization has been the curse of the South. It may surprise him to be told that in ante-bellum days it was not only the chief repository of culture, but possessed a fair proportion of the nation's wealth. The South has ever been chiefly an agricultural country, and will so remain despite the frantic efforts of enthusiasts to subvert natural laws. Not until the resources of our soil are in great measure exhausted, or increase of population forces people from the fields, can the South become a great manufacturing country. Such is the lesson of history, which we can only ignore to our loss. Wealth accumulates at large manufacturing and trade centers as it cannot elsewhere, and naturally seeks to further its interest by organization. The concentration of forces, intellectual and industrial, on that stupendous scale which has won President Winston's admiration, is a post-bellum development both North and South. The greatest of American organizers have been Southern men. Washington and Jefferson were types of the individualism which is supposed to have been our bane; yet one organized the Continental Army which won our independence, the other organized the Federal Government. It is not true that the Southern Confederacy was crushed by superior organization. Better disciplined troops than the veterans of Lee and Jackson never faced a battery. "Hardee's Tactics," one of the most highly esteemed of military manuals, was the work of a Confederate general. The assault on the heights of Gettysburg has become historic as much because of the wonderful organization displayed by the Confederate troops as because it marked the supreme hour of a nation's agony. It was the only time in the history of this world when an assaulting column was greeted with cheers of admiration by the soldiers who stood to receive the shock. That fact alone should suffice to make an American college president proud of his country—should purge him of every atribilarious taint of Anglomaniacism. Only once have the sons of men in any age or clime displayed a grander heroism than did those who hurled themselves against the heights of Gettysburg, and that when the Federals silenced their guns to cheer the dauntless courage of their foe. It is not my present purpose to refight the Civil War, and trace every effect to its efficient cause; I have simply undertaken to make good my original proposition—that President Winston is, as Thersites says of Patroclus, "a fool positive," and should, therefore, hold his peace.

The schoolteacher has doubtless played no unimportant part in the rehabilitation of the South; but he should not set up as Autocrat of the Universe on a salary of $40 a month, and burden the Asses' Bridge with the idea that he "maketh all things, and without him was nothing made that is made." His ferula may be an Aaron's rod which buds and blossoms; but it does not bear sufficient fruit to furnish a hungry world with necessary aliment. We still crave manna from Heaven and grapes from Hebron. The public pedagogue does not make the laws of trade. His province is to interpret them; and proud may he be of his labor if his proteges do not find it necessary to forget, at the very gateway of a commercial career, that he ever had a name and habitation on the earth. Nor does he frequently alarm the plodding natives by the "introduction of new systems of thought and action." Such "systems" do not spring completely panoplied from the cerebrum of our educational Jove, and stand about on one foot like a lost goose, or country lad, awaiting an introduction. New systems of thought and action are usually the growth of ages, the seed often sown by men we hear not of. When of such sudden development that they require a formal introduction, they are apt to be received with the scant courtesy of a poor relation, the introducer reviled as a crank or condemned as a heretic and crucified. Generally speaking, the professional educator confines himself pretty closely to his birch and his textbooks, being quite content to propagate, as best he may, the ideas of others. Neither the birch nor the text-book, it may be well to remark, constitutes the world's stock of wisdom, but only an incidental furtherance thereto—the key, as it were, by which the treasure is more readily come at. When the schoolmaster has put his pupil in possession of the open sesame he considers his duty done—that he has earned his provender. And perhaps he has. In this day and age it is all that is expected of him, all that he is paid for. He is not required to inculcate wisdom, which is well; for that can no man do. He is not even expected to impart much knowledge; but to put his pupil through a course of mental calisthenics, miscalled education. But even this is by no means to be despised. With mind strengthened by exercise, even in a desert, and lungs developed by football, the youth may be able to delve the harder for knowledge when happily released from the "gerund-grinder," to pray the more lustily to the immortal gods for understanding, which transmutes what were else base metal into ingots of fine gold. There was a time when more was expected of a teacher; but that was before the application of labor-saving machinery to spiritual matters; before colleges became known as places "where coals are brightened and diamonds are dimmed"— before it became customary to cast potential Homers and Hannibals, Topsies and Blind Toms into the same educational hopper, and hire some gabby-Holofernes from God knows where to manipulate the mill. It was a time when men considered qualified to teach declined to waste effort on numskulls, no matter whose brats they might be. It was a time when the fame of a great, the honor of a good and the infamy of a bad man were shared by their preceptors. Those were the days of individualism which President Winston so much deplores—the era which fashioned those men whom the world for twenty centuries has been proud to hail as masters. As the doctors have decided that all human frailties are but diseases, I do not despair of our 'varsity president. Some Theodorus may yet arise to "purge him canonically with Anticryan hellebore," and thus clear out the perverse habit of his brain and make him a man of as goodly sense as the rejuvenatedGargantua.

* * * PUFFERY OF THE PRESS.

The "able editor" is perhaps the only quack doctor extant who greedily swallows his own medicine and foolishly imagines that it does him good.

Puffery is the "able editor's" invariable prescription, no matter whether the patient be a moss-grown town, a broken-down political roue—the victim of early indiscretions—or a Cheap-John merchant suffering the first paroxysms of financial dissolution. Although he knows how his medicine is made,—knows that it is a nauseous compound of rank hypocrisy and brazen mendacity—he actually believes that, if taken in liberal doses, it is potent to cure commercial paralysis or put new life into a political corpse. When the first experiment fails to prove satisfactory, instead of changing the treatment he doubles the dose.

One would suppose that, like most Cagliostros who pick up a precarious livelihood by pumping the bellies of their betters full of the east wind, the "able editor" would laugh in his sleeve at his dupes; but not so. He is more in earnest than the Lagado doctor, described by Gulliver, who had discovered a short-cut for the cure of colic,—as little discouraged when a patient bursts under the somewhat peculiar treatment. So greedy is he for his own medicine, so fond of working the bellows for the expansion of his own bowels, that he can scarce find time to attend to his patients. Pick up any newspaper, big or little, "great daily," with fake voting contest annex, or country weekly shot full of ads. of city swindling concerns and note what the "able editor" thinks of himself; how he twists and turns to find some pretext for parading his own transcendent greatness! See how he greedily seizes upon every little chunk of "taffy" and rolls it as a sweet morsel under his tongue; how he places in his cap every foolish feather which the idle wind of puffery wafts within his clutch, and then struts in the face of Heaven, a sight to provoke the contempt of men, the pity of the gods! Let the Boomerville Broadaxe but intimate that the Bungtown Boomer knows a thing or two, and forthwith the latter transfers the saccharine slug to its own columns, and perchance, "points to it with pride,"—bids the Bungtown world behold what the world of Boomerville thinks of it! Then the Bungtown Boomer intimates that the Boomerville Broadaxe likewise knows a thing or two, and the latter, which has been eagerly watching for this Roland for its Oliver, swoops hungrily down upon this delectable morsel and cries ha! ha! It has obtained value received, has tickled and been tickled in return! Then the editors of these two great "public educators" begin a cross-fire of sugar-plums, much to the edification of the world and their own mutual satisfaction!

What would we think of that lawyer, doctor or merchant who went about assiduously proclaiming with sound of trumpet what his fellows said about him? Would we not vote him a fool? at best a conceited prig, lacking in taste and good manners?

Commendation is sweet to all; but it is just as permissible for a belle to boast her conquests in the ballroom; the lawyer to inform judge and jury what his fellow-disciples of Blackstone think of him; the scholar to parade his erudition or the merchant his integrity, as for an editor to reproduce in his own paper fulsome compliments paid him for no other purpose under Heaven than to get a puff in return.

* * * THE BIKE BACILLUS.

The Women's Rescue League met recently at Washington and launched a double-shotted anathema at the female bike fiend. The Leaguers attribute to the bicycle craze "the alarming increase" in the number of courtesans, and call upon ministers and respectable women everywhere to denounce cycling by the sex as "vulgar and indecent." Nor do they stop there. The bike, in their opinion, is irremediably bad. While destroying the morals of the maid, it wreeks the prospective motherhood of the matron. It is provocative of diseases peculiar to women, and calculated to transform the sex into a grand army of invalids. These are a few of the reasons why the Women's Rescue League is scattering tacks in the pathway of the pneumatic tire. There are others.

Those whose specialty is the conservation of virtue should carefully study the causation of vice. In dealing with the red-light district, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. To remove the causes which produce courtesans were a nobler work than to drag debased womanhood out of the depths. Doubtless the Rescuers imagine they have made a new discovery of inestimable benefit to society—have laid the ax to the root of that evil of which the bawdy-house is the flower and Hell the fruitage. After patient research in the science of sexual criminology, they have determined that the bicycle is naughty without being nice. It is perversity personified. It is the incarnation of cussedness, the avatar of evil. Turn it which way you will, it rolls into the primrose path of dalliance, whose objective point is the aceldama. No more do woman's feet "take hold on Hell": she goes scorching over the brink with her tootsies on the handle-bar. So say the ladies of the Rescue League.

What are we going to do about it? Clearly it were useless to denounce a "craze," sheer folly to argue against a "fad." We had better save our breath to cool our broth. The ministers cannot be depended on to lend their moral support to this new movement against the Magdalen maker—they have bought bikes and are chasing the girl in bloomers. One-half the great she-world's on wheels—the other wondering how it feels to ride clothespin fashion. Clearly the Women's Rescue League cannot stem the tide— not even with the help of the ICONOCLAST and ex- Governor Hogg; it must either straddle a bike and join in the stampede, climb a fence or get run over. Hevings! is there no help for us—no halting-place this side of hetairism? Are we all pedaling at breakneck pace to the Grove of Daphne, where lust is law? Is the bike transforming this staid old world into one wild bacchic orgy or phallic revel? Have we toiled afoot thus far up the social mountainside, only to go bowling down on a pneumatic tire—"as low as to the fiends?" Head us, somebody! Police!

Just why the bicycle affects woman so unfavorably, the Leaguers do not inform us. We are left to surmise why tramping a bike should make her more reckless than treading a sewing-machine; why exercise in the open air should be more deleterious to health and morals than the round dance in a heated ball-room, or even the delightfully dangerous back-parlor hug; why segregation on the cycle should be more potent to evoke those passions which make for perdition than the narrow-seated buggy, with its surreptitious pressure of limb to limb and the moral euthanasia which the man of the world knows so well how to distill into the ear of womanhood. Why the bike should be more dangerous to morals than the French fiddle mentioned by Shakespeare appears to be a question solely within the province of the pathologist. As pantagruelism is proceeding almost exclusively on micrological lines, we may expect that, sooner or later, some "eminent physician" will startle the world by discovering the bicycle bacillus. All our ills appear to be caused by minute insects that get inside of us, demoralize our system of government and inaugurate a reign of anarchy. Everything, from mugwumpery to the meddler's itch, from corns to crime, is now traced to the pernicious activity of some microbian. Even our currency system is blasted by goldbugs, and Prohibition milk- sickness is being treated with vermifuge. A Kansas M.D. has succeeded in hiving the old-age microbe, and is now treating the ballet girls whom Weis & Greenwall and Rigsby & Walker will bring South next winter, while a New York empiric has discovered the insanity insect and is fumigating the brain of the Rev. Mr. Parkhurst. Thus does medical science go marching from conquest to conquest, reforming and rejuvenating this wicked and suffering world. Clearly the Rescue League should have cried for aid to the doctors of medicine instead of to the doctors of divinity. If the bicycle bacillus can be caught and killed, the red-light district will disappear and the Rescuers turn their wonderful energies in new directions. Once the existence of this nymphomania-micrococcus—as we philomaths would call it—is established, the rest will be dead easy. Whether patients will be treated externally or internally depends, of course, upon the habits of the infinitesimal vulture that is feeding on our social vitals. We do not know as yet whether it is a moral microbe or a physical phylloxera. If the former, the mind will have to be taken out, sand- papered, carefully rinsed in a strong aseptic solution and treated with soothing antaphrodisiacs after each meet of the bicycle brigade; if the latter, the evil can easily be obviated by providing the softer sex with medicated cycling suits, or half-soling their bloomers with asbestos. If the Rescuers really have the good of their frail sisters at heart they should cooperate with the physician—should provide themselves with compound microscopes and search assiduously for baccili, instead of appealing to preachers who may themselves be veritable breeding grounds for the most destructive of all bacteria. It may be necessary, in order to compel success, for the Rescuers to sacrifice themselves upon the altar of science, to become martyrs to the cause. In striving to save others from the pestilence that walketh in darkness, they may be themselves destroyed; but the true reformer draws back from no danger. Let them take their lives in their hands, if need be, boldly seize the bicycle bacillus by the ears and bump his head.

The crisis is indeed acute; still we may rely on science to save us. It is possible that the first step in that direction has been already taken, for is not the insanity germ discovered by the New York doctor responsible for the "bicycle craze" as well as the reform frenzy? And if a "free-silver lunatic" or "goldbug crank" can be permanently cured by the simple expedient of boring a hole in his lumbar region and drawing off the cerebro-spinal fluid, and in it the microbes that build wheels in his head, is there not hope that the bicycle habit may be altogether abolished by the return of the "fiends" to mental normality? Now that Dr. Babcock has learned to cast out devils, will not the world be redeemed? Cert! Let the Women's Rescue League take courage, and bask in the sunny optimism of the ICONOCLAST. We'll soon have all the various brands of bacteria in the bouillon; then there'll be nobody to rescue, nothing to reform, and the Leaguers and the public can take a much needed rest.

In all seriousness, I opine that the bike is a harmless instrument when properly handled. The trouble is not so much with the evasive machine as with the woman who straddles it. It will carry its rider to church as rapidly as to the Reservation. Doubtless many women employ it to seek opportunities for evil—as a means of attracting the attention of libidinous men; but had the bike never been built, they would find some other way into the path of sin—would get there just the same. There were courtesans before it came; there will be demimondaines ages after its departure. Mary Magdalen either walked or rode a mule Aspasia was a "scorcher," but she couldn't "coast." Helen of Troy never saw a pneumatic tire. Semiramis preferred a side-saddle. Cleopatra didn't attract Col Antony's attention by mounting a machine in the market place. The bike is no more an incentive to bawdry than is a wheelbarrow. It doesn't make a woman depraved; it only renders her ridiculous.

EVIDENCES OF MAN'S IMMORTALITY.

Unless you accept the testimony of the Bible as conclusive, what evidence have you of God's existence and man's immortality?—GLADSTONE.

The same evidence that we would have of the existence of the ocean were one drop of water withdrawn, of the life of a forest, were a single leaf to fall. The Bible did not create man's belief in God's existence and his own immortality, but of this belief, old as Zoroaster, antedating Babylon, was the Bible born. It is simply an outward evidence of man's inward grace. I do accept the testimony of the Bible, but only as one of a cloud of witnesses. In questions of such grave import, we cannot have too much evidence; hence it is strange indeed that anyone should make the Bible the sole foundation of his faith, should take his stand upon an infinitesimal portion of what the world knew in ages past. The Bible is but one of many sacred books in which man has borne witness that he is the favored creature of an Almighty Being, but one voice in a multitude singing hosannas to the Most High, a single note in the mighty diapason of the universe.

A hundred men are shipwrecked upon an island in the Arctic Ocean. By day and night they dream of absent friends, of mother, wife and child, the pleasant meadows or the sunny hills of their distant homes. Hourly they scan the horizon with eager eyes. Daily they ask each other, "Is there hope?" All former animosities are forgotten, for they are brothers in misfortune. One declares that the island lies in the pathway of a regular line of steamers, and that they must soon be rescued. This view is approved by many, and their hearts beat high with hope. Their sufferings are borne with cheerfulness, their hardships appear trivial, for their probation is soon to pass and they will be at home. Another avers that they are too far north to be reached by the ocean liners, but that a whaler will soon be due in that vicinity, and all will be well. This view is approved by some, and thus there are two parties confidently expecting succor, but from different sources. A third studies the map, notes the advanced season, inspects the food supply and shakes his head. "We shall be lost," he says; "desire has misled your judgment; you do but dream." Do the two parties that entertain hope strive, each to disprove the theory of the other, and unite in persecuting the dissenter? No; they reason together, each anxious to ascertain the truth, knowing that it will profit him nothing to believe a lie. Suddenly a cry is heard, "A sail!" Do those who put their trust in the whaler turn their backs to the sea and say, "Oh, H—l! that's only one of those regular steamship heretics! no rag of canvas will he discover!" Do those who were destitute of hope decline to look? No; all rush to the shore, and strain their eyes to penetrate the mist, little caring whether it be whaler or steamer, so they do but see a ship. When one makes out the vessel, he is not content until the eyes of others confirm his vision, and all look, not with the jealous hope that he may be wrong, but with an earnest prayer that he may be right. That island is this little earth, its shipwrecked mariners all sons of men; yet how different we set about determining whether, from out the everlasting sea that encircles us, there comes indeed a Ship of Zion to succor and to save!

What one man believes or disbelieves is a matter of little moment; for belief will not put gods on High Olympus, nor unbelief extinguish the fires of Hell. Man can neither create nor uncreate the actual by a mental emanation. If Deity exists, he would continue to exist did a universe deny him; if he exists not, then all the faith and prayers and sacrifices of a thousand centuries will not evolve him from the night of nothingness. There is or there is not a life beyond the grave, regardless of the denial of every atheist and the affirmation of every prophet. Then what boots it whether we believe or disbelieve in God's existence or man's immortality? Nothing, in so far as it concerns the factual; much, in that upon our hopes and fears is based our terrestrial bane or blessing. Banish all belief in God, eliminate the idea of man's responsibility to a higher power, make him the sole lord of his life and earthly good his greatest guerdon, and you destroy the dynamics of progress, the genius of civilization. Man has a tendency to become what he believes himself to be. Consciously or unconsciously, he strives with less or greater strength toward his ideal; hence it is all-important that he consider himself an immortal rather than the pitiful sport of Time and Space; a child of Omniscience, rather than the ephemeral emanation of unclean ooze. Had man always considered himself simply an animal, his tendencies would have been ever earthward; believing himself half divine, he has striven to mount above the stars. True, many great men have been Atheists; but they were formed by ancestry and environment permeated by worship of Divine power. Without a belief in his own semi-divinity to lead the race onward and upward, the conditions which produce a Voltaire or Ingersoll were impossible. Civilization is further advanced than ever before, and Atheism more general; but those who employ this fact as argument against religious faith forget that a body thrown upward will continue to ascend for a time after it has parted from the propelling power. Atheism is in nowise responsible for human progress, for Atheism is nothing—a mere negation—and "out of nothing nothing comes." A belief in God affords man a basis upon which to build; it is an acknowledgment of authority, the chief prerequisite of order; but in Atheism there is no constructive element. While it may be no more immoral to deny the existence of Deity than to question the Wondrous Tale of Troy, history teaches us that, considered from a purely utilitarian standpoint, the most absurd faith is better for a nation than none; that the civic virtues do not long survive the sacrifice; that when a people desert their altars their glories soon decay. The civilization of the world has been time and again imperiled by the spirit of Denial. When Rome began to mock her gods, she found the barbarians thundering at her gates. When France insulted her priesthood and crowned a courtesan as Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame, Paris was a maelstrom and the nation a chaos in which Murder raged and Discord shrieked. To-day we are boasting of our progress, but 'tis the onward march of Jaganath, beneath whose iron wheels patriotism, honesty, purity and the manly spirit of independence are crushed into the mire. We have drifted into an Atheistical age, and its concomitants are selfishness, sensationalism and sham. The old heartiness and healthiness have gone out of life, have been supplanted by the artificial. Everything is now show and seeming—"leather and prunella"—the body social become merely a galvanic machine or electric motor. In our gran'sire's day "the great man helped the poor, and the poor man loved the great"; now the great man systematically despoils the poor and the poor man regards the great with a feeling of envy and hatred akin to that of which the French Revolution was born. Character no longer counts for aught unless reinforced by a bank account. Men who have despoiled the widow of her mite and the orphan of his patrimony are hailed with the acclaim due to conquering heroes. Our most successful books and periodicals would pollute a Parisian sewer or disgrace a Portuguese bagnio. The suffrages of the people are bought and sold like sheep. The national policy is dictated by Dives. Men are sent to Congress whom God intended for the gallows, while those he ticketed for the penitentiary spout inanities in fashionable pulpits. The merchant who pays his debts in full when he might settle for ten cents on the dollar is considered deficient in common sense. The grandsons of Revolutionary soldiers, who considered themselves the equal of kings and the superior of wear the livery of lackeys to obtain an easy living. Presidents save seven-figure fortunes on five-figure salaries and are applauded by people who profess to be respectable. Governors waste the public revenues in suppressing pugilistic enterprises, begotten of their own encouragement, only to be reelected by fools and slobbered over by pharisees. Bradley-Martin balls are given while half a million better people go hungry to bed. Friendship has become a farce, the preface of fraud. Revolting crimes increase and sexuality is tinged with the infamy of the Orient. Men who were too proud to borrow leave sons who are not ashamed to beg. In man great riches are preferable to a good name, and in woman a silken gown covers a multitude of sins. The homely virtues of the old mothers in Israel are mocked, while strumpets fouler than Sycorax are received in society boasting itself select. Why is this? It is because the old religious spirit is dormant if not dead; it is because when people consider themselves but as the beasts that perish, they can make no spiritual progress, but imitate their supposed ancestors. Religion is becoming little more than a luxury, the temple a sumptuous palace wherein people ennuied with themselves may parade their costly clothes, have their jaded passions soothed by sensuous music, their greed for the bizarre satiated by sensational sermons.

This being true, the question of evidence of God's existence and man's immortality becomes the most important ever propounded. The devout worshiper points to his Sacred Book; but we have had Sacred Books in abundance so far back as we can trace human history, yet the wave of Atheism, of Unbelief, rises ever higher and higher— threatens to engulf the world. After nearly nineteen centuries of earnest proselyting less than a third of the world has accepted Christianity, and in those countries professedly Christian, Atheism flourishes as it does nowhere else. Of more than seventy million Americans, less than twenty-four million are church communicants, and it is doubtful if half of these really believe the Bible. Beecher criticized it almost as freely as does Ingersoll, while a number of prominent preachers of the Briggs-Abbott brand are even now explaining, in the pulpit and the press, that it is little more than a collection of myths. The people are drifting ever further from the Book of Books, and the pulpit appears ambitious to lead the procession. It is idle to urge that man should believe the Bible; for man should believe nothing, man can believe nothing but what receives the sanction of his reason. He is no more responsible for what he believes or disbelieves than for the color of his eyes or the place of birth. He may deceive the world with a false profession of faith, but can deceive neither God nor himself. The mind of even the worst of men is a court in which every cause is tried with rigid impartiality, with absolute honesty. A fool may mislead it, a child may convince it, but not even its possessor can coerce it; hence to command one to "believe," without first providing him with a satisfactory basis for his faith, were an idle waste of breath. A man is no more blamable for doubting the existence of Deity than for doubting aught else that may seem to him absurd. He doubts because the evidence submitted is unsatisfactory, or his mind is incapable of properly analyzing it. Probably none of the Sacred Books ever yet convinced an intelligent human being that there is aught in the universe greater than himself. I do not mean by this that the Bible and the Koran, the Zend-Avesta and the Vedas are all false, but that there is lack of sufficient evidence that they are true. Those who accept them do so because they harmonize with their own half-conscious religious conceptions, because their truth is established by esoteric rather than by exoteric evidence. All attempts to supplant Buddhism and Mohammedanism by Christianity have proven futile, and that because the former do while Christianity does not voice the religious sentiment of the Orient, a sentiment which exists regardless of their Sacred Books, and of which the latter are but indications. You can no more demonstrate the truth of the Bible to a Hindu than you can demonstrate the truth of the Vedas to a Christian, for in either case outward evidence is wanting and the subject is not en rapport with the new doctrine. It is not infrequently urged that evidence sufficient to convince Mr. Gladstone should likewise convince Col. Ingersoll. And so it doubtless would in a court of law; but in matters spiritual what may appear "confirmation strong as proofs of Holy Writ" to the one may seem an absurdity absolute to the other. Neither had the pleasure of Moses' acquaintance. All witnesses of his miracles have been dead so long that their very graves are forgotten. There is nothing in the accounts, however, violative of Mr. Gladstone's conception of Deity, hence he finds no difficulty in accepting them. To Col. Ingersoll, however, there is something ridiculous in the idea of the Creator of the Cosmos become a bonfire and holding a private confab with the stuttering Hebrew. He demands undisputable evidence, it is not forthcoming, and he brands the story as a fraud. For the same reason that Mr. Gladstone accepts the miracles of Moses he accepts Christ as the Savior; for the same reason that he denies the burning bush, Col. Ingersoll denies Christ's divinity. The story of a suffering Savior appeals directly to Mr. Gladstone's heart, but it gets no further than Col. Ingersoll's head. The one tries it by his sympathies, the other by the rules of evidence that obtain in a court of law. In summing up, Col. Ingersoll might say: It has not been demonstrated to the satisfaction of this court that Jesus ever claimed to be "the only begotten Son of God." The testimony to the effect that he raised the dead, walked upon the waves, came forth from the grave and ascended bodily into Heaven, appears to be all hearsay, and by witnesses of unknown credibility. If we consider the impression made upon his contemporaries, we find that his miracles and resurrection failed to convince those best qualified to analyze evidence. He seems to have been regarded as nothing more than a popular religious reformer or schismatic. From the New Testament we learn that he did not found a new faith, but lived and died in that of his fathers—that it is impossible to follow the instruction of Jesus without becoming in religion a Jew. As he was the sixteenth savior the world has crucified, his tragic death does not prove him divine. As immaculate conceptions were quite common among the Greeks and Romans, with whom both he and his immediate following came much in contact, I incline to the view that he entered the world in the good old way.

Granting the correctness of such a conclusion, it does not necessarily follow that Jesus was not heaven-sent, or that he was in any way unworthy the love and veneration of the world. The proposition of the eloquent Father Brannan that Jesus was either in very truth the only begotten Son of the Father, or an impious fraud deserving execration, is only tenable on the supposition that the language attributed to him by New Testament writers is properly authenticated. When we remember that the art of printing had not then been invented; that Christ wrote nothing himself; that the record of his life was probably not composed until he had been long dead; that the besetting sin of the East is exaggeration; that it was the custom of the Greeks, in whose language the New Testament was first written, to assign a heavenly origin to popular heroes, we must concede that there is some reason for doubt whether Jesus ever claimed to be other than the son of Joseph the carpenter. Granting that his life and language are correctly reported, that he was indeed Divinity: The fact remains that a vast majority of mankind decline to accept him as such; that while the church is striving with so little success to raise his standard in Paynim lands, Atheism is striking its roots ever deeper into our own. The church should recognize the fact that no man is an Atheist from choice. Deep in the heart of every human being is implanted a horror of annihilation. A man may become reconciled to the idea, just as he may become resigned to the necessity of being hanged; but he strives as desperately to escape the one as he does to avoid the other. Does the church owe any duty to the honest doubter, further than the reiteration of a dogma which his reason rejects? When he asks for evidence of God's existence, Judaism points him to the miracles of Moses, Christianity to those of Jesus, Mohammedanism to the revelations of its prophet; and if he find these beyond his comprehension or violative of his reason, they dismiss him with a gentle reminder that "the fool hath said in his heart there is no God." He retorts by accusing his critics either of superstitious ignorance or rank dishonesty, so honors are easy. He is told that if he doesn't perform the impossible—work a miracle by altering the construction of his own mind—he will be damned, and is touched up semi-occasionally by the pulpiteers as an emissary of the devil. Being thus put on the defensive, he undertakes to demonstrate that all revealed religions are a fraud deliberately perpetrated by the various priesthoods. He searches through their Sacred Books for contradictions and absurdities, and not without success; proves that their God knew little about astronomy and less about geography; then sits him down "over against" the church, like Jonah squatting under his miraculous gourd-vine in the suburbs of Nineveh, and confidently expects to see it collapse. He imagines that in pointing out a number of evident errors and inconsistencies in "revealed religion" he has hit Theism in its stronghold; but he hasn't. He has but torn and trampled the ragged vestments of religion, struck at non-essentials, called attention to the clumsy manner in which finite man has bodied forth his idea of Infinity—has made the unskillful laugh and the judicious grieve. In an ignorant age the supernatural appeals most powerfully to the people; hence it is not strange that revealed religion, so-called, should have been grounded upon the miraculous; but the passage of the Red Sea, the raising of Lazarus and kindred wonders are not readily accepted in an enlightened era, and are utilized by scoffers to bring all religion into contempt. We can scarce conceive of God being reduced to the necessity of violating his own laws to demonstrate his presence and power. While it were presumption to ask any church to abate one jot or tittle of its dogma, it seems to me that all would gain by relying less upon the "evidential value of the miracles"; that a broader, nobler basis can be found for religious faith, one more in accord with the wisdom and dignity of the great All-Father than tradition of signs and wonders in a foreign land in the long ago. Had God desired to personally manifest himself unto man, to deliver a code of laws, to establish a particular form of worship, it is reasonable to suppose that he would have done so in a manner that would have left no doubt in the mind of any man, of any age or clime, anent either his divinity or his desires. That he has not done this, argues that all "revealed religions" are but the voices of the godlike within man, rather than direct revelations from without. All religions are fundamentally the same, and each is the highest spiritual concept of its devotees. Whence came the gods of the ancient Greek and Egyptian, of the Mede and Persian? If they were made known by direct revelation, how came they to be false gods? If they were the result of a spirit of worship inherent in all men, who implanted that spirit? If God, he must have done so for a purpose, and what purpose other than to enable man to work out his own salvation? Would we not expect him to operate through this spirit for universal guidance, rather than leave the world in darkness while he retired to an obscure corner thereof and practiced legerdemain for the edification of a few half- civilized people? If we adopt the internal instead of the external view of the origin of Judaism and Christianity, all the other Sacred Books range themselves about the Bible and with it bear witness that man is the creature of Design and not a freak of Chance. We bring to confirm the teachings of Moses and Christ and the wise Zoroaster, the loving Gautama, the patient Mahomet, the priests and prophets of every clime, the altars of every age, the countless millions, who, since man's advent on the earth, have worshiped the All-in-All. If this be not basis broad enough for man's belief, add thereto the story of God's wisdom written in the stars and the never-ceasing anthem of the sea; the history of every consecrated man who has died for man, whether his name be Christ or Damien; the song of every bird and the gleam of every beauty; the eternal truth that shines in a mother's eyes, the laughter of little children and the leonine courage of creation's lord; every burning tear that has fallen on the face of the dead, and every cry of anguish that has gone up from the open grave to the throne of the Living God. Were not this "revelation" enough? Yet 'tis but the binding of humanity's Sacred Book, of that Universal Bible in which God speaks from the age and from hour to hour to all who have ears to hear.

The fact that man desires immortality is proof enough that he was not born to perish. 'Tis a "direct revelation" to the individual, if he will but heed it—will get out of the grime of the man-created city, with its artificialities, into the God- created country, where he may hear the "still small voice" speaking to that subtler sense, which in animals is instinct, in man is inspiration. There is no error in the ordering of the universe. It was not jumbled together by self-created "force," operating in accordance with "laws" self-evolved from chaos, on matter which, like Mrs. Stowe's juvenile nigger, "jis growed." It is the work of a Master who "ordereth all things well." Beauty might be born of Chance, but only Omniscience could have decreed the adoration it inspires. Hate might spring from the womb of Chaos, but Love must be the child of Order. Pain might be begotten of monsters, but only Infinite wisdom could have invented Sorrow. Nature does not put feathers on fishes, fins on birds, nor give aught that lives an impossible desire or an objectless instinct. Then why should man desire immortality, why should he fear annihilation more than the fires of Hell? During a third of his life he is unconscious, and annihilation is but an ever-dreamless sleep. Whether he sleeps the sleep of health or that of death, an hour and an eternity are the same to him; yet he desires the one and dreads the other. If man's fierce longing for immortal life is not to be gratified, then is the whole universe a cruel lie; its wonderful arrangement from star to flower, its careful adaptation of means to ends, the provision for the satisfaction of every sense, an arrant fraud, a colossal falsehood. If there be no God, then is creation a calamity; if there be a God and no immortality for man, then it is a crime.

God does not reveal himself to beasts, nor to men of brutish minds. How can those who have no ear for music, no eye for beauty, hear the melody of the universe or comprehend the symmetry of the All? What need have those for immortality to whom love is only lust, charity a pander to pride, a full stomach the greatest good and gold a god? It is these who become "motive grinders," dig genius out of the earth like spuds and goobers, and achieve perpetual motion by making the universe a self- operative machine needing neither key nor steam generator to "make it go." They pride themselves, sometimes justly, on their reasoning powers; but the product of their logic-mill is like artificial flowers, as unprofitable as the icy kiss of the Venus de Medici. Of that knowledge gleaned in the Vale of Sorrow they know nothing; of that wisdom which cannot be demonstrated by the laws of logic they have no more conception than has a mole of the glories of the morning. They are of the earth earthy. To make them understand a message God would have to typewrite it, add the seal of a notary public and deliver it in person. They hear not the silver tones of Memnon, heed not the wondrous messages that come from the dumb lips of the dead. They search through musty tomes and explore long-forgotten languages to prove the rhapsodies of some old prophet false, while the grave of the babe that was buried yesterday is more than a prophecy—is an Ark of the Covenant.

* * * THE PROFESSIONAL REFORMER.

This is preeminently the era of the reformer, and there are few things, great or small, upon which he has not tried his Archimedean lever with more or less effect.

Progress should ever be the shibboleth of man, but progress and improvement are not always synonyms. When a man becomes possessed of an idea that differs materially from the ideas of mankind in general; when he takes issue with the emulative wisdom of a world he knows not how many ages old, simple modesty would suggest that, before arrogating to himself superior discernment, he inquire diligently whether he is really a philosopher or a fool. When a man takes issue with the world the chances are as one to infinity that he is wrong. Since man's appearance upon the earth a great many sages have graced it, and the present generation is "heir of all the ages." Its judgment is grounded upon the net result of thousands of years of careful study and costly experiment, and it is much safer to trust to it than to new- born theories.

Occasionally a man appears who can add to the general stock of wisdom; but such men are seldom conscious of the fact that they are wiser than the world they live in,—seldom consider that they have a special call to embark in a "radical reform" crusade. They know that society is an organism, not a machine, and that it cannot be violently transformed, any more than a man can be changed into a demigod, or a monkey into a mastodon. They realize that the "old order changeth, yielding place to new"; but they also realize that the change must be slow in order to be healthy. Nearly every change that the world has witnessed has been slowly, almost imperceptibly wrought. Even all governments that have stood the test of time were the work of time. The present government of England has been built up almost imperceptibly, and the Constitution of the United States is but a differentiation of Magna Charta, not a new and violent birth. It is much safer to change the old order of human thought and action by evolutionary than by revolutionary methods.

. . .

It has been the custom of society for many ages to make woman the custodian of her own virtue; but in this age of reformers it has been discovered that this is a grievous mistake. According to the new school of morals, woman is not competent to distinguish between right and wrong, and even wives of mature years are sometimes "led astray" by "fell destroyers," whom the "injured husband" feels in duty bound to chase around the world, if need be, with a Gatling gun. Instances where "designing villains" have "invaded the sanctity of the home" are multiplying, and while the world is not ready to forgive the erring woman it is daily asked to anathematize her paramour and stand between her husband and the penitentiary should his marksmanship prove successful. In other words, the world is asked to regard every man that a woman may chance to meet as her guardian angel,—to place her honor in his keeping instead of her own; to crucify him should he not prove as indifferent as Adonis, as chaste as Joseph. Truly this is very complimentary to man, but quite the reverse to woman. It would substitute male for female virtue and place the sanctity of the home at the mercy of strangers. Unquestionably all men should be pure; but they are not. In fact the pure man is the exception and not the rule. Every man who takes unto himself a wife must know this. He knows that he places his honor in the keeping of the woman, not in the keeping of his fellow men. He knows that she can live as pure as Diana if she elects to do so; that if she does not so choose she will have no difficulty in finding companions in crime. He does know—as does the world—that no man will attempt to "lead her astray" so long as her deportment is such as becomes a true wife; that no "wolf in sheep's clothing" will ever find his way into the fold without her assistance.

It will not do. Every sane woman who has arrived at the age of discretion is the guardian of her own honor. To relieve her of this responsibility is to insult her intelligence.

To divide the responsibility with men of the world is to place her on the same moral plane with the roue and the courtesan, ready to err should opportunity offer.

It is a trifle strange that those good people who value female purity so highly that they would reform every roue in Christendom to secure it, have little or nothing to say about the chief cause of hymeneal infidelity,— loveless marriages. No woman who really loves her husband can be untrue to him. Duty and inclination point the same way. But if a woman does not love her husband she will, in nearly every instance, love someone else. She may never manifest this illicit affection by word or look—she may not admit it even to her own heart; but no matter how strongly armed she be in honesty, she stands within the pale of danger. From the questionable act of bartering, according to due forms of law and with priestly blessing, an attractive person for wealth or social position, is a comparatively easy step to practices no more reprehensible, but wanting the sanction of society. Is it at all strange that an impulsive young woman, whose parents have persuaded her to marry a man she cordially detests, and who is perhaps four times her age, should conclude that moral codes are chiefly fashionable cant and that a pretense of observing them is all that is really necessary?

. . .

While the reformers are busy saving the world it is strange that they do not devise some method of checking the decided misogamistic tendency of the young men of to-day. Marriages are becoming decidedly unpopular with them, and the result is that thousands of young men, who should be model husbands, are living lives of but quasi- respectability; thousands of young women who should be honored wives and happy mothers are thrown upon their own resources,—forced to choose between virtue and rags and silks and shame. The latter soon learn that honest poverty brings almost as complete social ostracism, almost as much contumely, as dishonest finery, and, despairing of ever becoming true men's wives, too many of them become false men's mistresses.

Here is work in abundance for the reformer. To it, oh, ye saviors of the world. Teach the young men of the land that marriage is a thing to be desired, even though they be not millionaires and no heiress smiles upon them.

. . .

The true reformer will not wait for some grand "mission," some mighty crusade to call him to action. The world is full of wrong which needs no preternatural prescience to discover—fraud which bears its name boldly upon its very face. The true reformer will denounce fraud and falsehood wherever found—will assail the wrong no matter how strongly intrenched it be in prescriptive right. But he will make haste slowly to change the fundamental principles upon which society is founded. He will proceed cautiously, modestly, until he does know, so far as aught is given to human wisdom to know, that it is a "condition and not a theory" with which he is dealing; that he earl point the world to new truths whose recognition and adoption will make better the condition of his species; then, if he be a true man, he will speak, not in humble whispers, lest he offend potentates and powers; not ambiguously, that he may escape "the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely," but in clarion tones, like another Peter-the- Hermit, who, bearing all, swerving neither to the right nor to the left, preached the crusade of the Holy Sepulcher till at last his words of fire burned through dull understandings, into cold hearts, and steel-clad Europe quivered like a million globules of quicksilver, then massed beneath his ragged standard.

* * * TRILBY AND THE TRILBYITES. APOTHEOSIZING THE PROSTITUTE.

The Trilby craze has overrun the land like the "grip" bacillus or the seven-year locust. Here in America it has become almost as disgusting as the plague of lice sent upon Egypt to eat the chilled steel veneering off the heart of Pharaoh the fickle. Everything is Trilby. We have Trilby bonnets and bonbons, poses and plays, dresses and drinks. Trilby sermons have been preached from prominent pulpits, and the periodicals, from penny-post to pretentious magazine, have Trilbyismus and have it bad. One would think that the world had just found Salvation, so loud and unctuous is its hosannah—that Trilby was some new Caaba- stone or greater Palladium floated down from Heaven on the wings of Du Maurier's transcendent genius; that after waiting and watching for six thousand—or million—years, a perfect exemplar had been bequeathed to the world.

I have read Du Maurier's foolish little book—as a disagreeable duty. The lot of the critic is an unenviable one. He must read everything, even such insufferable rot as "Coin's Financial School," and those literary nightmares turned loose in rejoinder—veritable Rozinantes, each bearing a chop-logic Don Quixote with pasteboard helmet and windmill spear. I knew by the press comments—I had already surmised from its popularity with upper-tendom— that "Trilby" was simply a highly spiced story of female frailty; hence I approached it with "long teeth"'—like a politician eating crow, or a country boy absorbing his first glass of lager beer. I had received a surfeit of the Camillean style of literature in my youth before I learned with Ecclesiastes the Preacher—or even with Parkhurst—that "all is vanity."

So far as my experience goes the only story of a fallen woman that was worth the writing—and the reading—is that of Mary Magdalen; and it is not French. Her affaires d'amour appear to have ended with her repentance. She did not try to marry a duke, elevate the stage or break into swell society. After closing her maison de joie she ceased to be "bonne camarade et bonne fille" in the tough de tough quarter of the Judean metropolis. There were no more strolls on the Battery by moonlight alone love after exchanging her silken robe de chambre for an old- fashioned nightgown with never a ruffle. When she applied the soft pedal the Bacchic revel became a silent prayer. So far as we can gather, the cultured gentlemen of Judea did not fall over each other in a frantic effort to ensnare her with Hymen's noose. If the Apostles recommended her life to the ladies of their congregations as worthy emulation the stenographer must have been nodding worse than Homer. If the elite of Jerusalem named their daughters for her and made her the subject of public discussion, that fact has been forgotten. And yet it is reasonably certain that she was beautiful—even more beautiful than Trilby, the bones of whose face were so attractive, the pink of whose tootsie-wootsies so irresistible. The Magdalen of St. Luke appears to have been in many respects the superior of the Magdalen of Du Maurier. She does not appear to have been an ignorant and coarse-grained she-gamin who frequented the students' quarter of the sacred city, posing to strolling artists for "the altogether," being, in the crowded atelier like Mother Eve in Eden "naked and not ashamed." We may suppose that the sensuous blood of the Orient ran riot in her veins—that she was swept into the fierce maelstrom by love and passion and would have perished there but for the infinite pity of our Lord, who cast out the seven devils that lurked within her heart like harpies in a Grecian temple, and stilled the storm that beat like sulphurous waves of fire within her snowy breast.

"And behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet and anointed them with ointment."

How stale, flat and unprofitable the modern stories of semi- repentant prostitutes beside that pathetic passage, which shears down into the very soul—penetrates to the profoundest depths of the sacred Lake of Tears! And yet this ultra-orthodox age—which would suppress the ICONOCLAST if it could for poking fun at Poll Parrot preachers—has not become crazed over Mary Magdalen— has not so much as named a canal-boat or a cocktail for her.

Du Maurier says of his heroine: "With her it was lightly come and lightly go and never come back again. . . . Sheer gayety of heart and genial good fellowship, the difficulty of saying nay to earnest pleading . . . so little did she know of love's heartaches and raptures and torments and clingings and jealousies," etc. A woman who had never been in love, yet confessed to criminal intimacy with three men—and was not yet at the end of her string! Not even the pride of dress, the scourge of need, the fire-whips of passion to urge her on, she sinned, as the Yankees would say, simply "to be a-doin' "—broke the Seventh Commandment "more in a frolicsome spirit of camaraderie than anything else." That's the way we used to kill people in Texas. Still I opine that when a young woman gets so awfully jolly that she distributes her favors around promiscuously just to put people in a good humor, she's a shaky piece of furniture to make a fad of—a doubtful example to be commended from the pulpit to America's young daughters. The French enthusiasts once crowned a courtesan in Notre Dame as Goddess of Reason and worshiped her; but I was hardly prepared to see the American people enthrone another as Goddess of Respectability and become hysterical in their devotion. I am no he-prude. I have probably said as many kindly things of fallen womanhood as Du Maurier himself, but I dislike to see a rotten drab deified. I dislike to see a great publishing house like that of Harper & Bros. so indifferent to decency, so careless of moral consequences, that, for the sake of gain, it will turn loose upon this land the foul liaisons of the French capital. I dislike to see the mothers of the next generation of Americans trying to "make up" to resemble the counterfeit presentment of a brazen bawd. It indicates that our entire social system is sadly in need of fumigation—such as Sodom and Gomorrah received.

Trilby, the child of a bummy preacher and a bastard bar- maid, was born and bred in the slum of the wickedest city in the world. Little was to be expected of such birth and breeding. We are not surprised that she regards fornication as but a venial fault—like cigarette smoking—and sins "capriciously, desultorily, more in a frolicsome spirit of camaraderie than anything else." Girls so reared are apt to be a trifle frolicsome. We are not shocked to see her stripped stark naked in Carrel's atelier in the presence of half a hundred hoodlums of the Latin quarter—seeming as unconcerned as a society belle at opera or ball with half her back exposed, her bust ready to spill itself out of her corsage if she chance to stoop. We even feel that it is in perfect accord with the eternal fitness of things when these wild sprouts of Bohemia, "with kindly solicitude, help her on with her clothes." We can even pause to admire the experienced skill with which they put each garment in its proper place—and deftly button it. That she should have the ribald slang of the free-and-easy neighborhood at her tongue's end and be destitute of delicacy as a young cow might be expected; but we are hardly prepared to see one grown up among such surroundings so unutterably stupid as not to know when her companions are "guying" her. Trilby croaking "Ben Bolt" for the edification of les trois Angliches were a sight worthy of a lunatic asylum. It was even more ridiculous than the social performance of that other half-wit, Little Billee, in Carrel's atelier. Stupidity covers even more sins than charity, hence we should not judge Du Maurier's heroine too harshly. As weak intellects yield readily to hypnotic power, Svengali had an easy victim. I have no word of criticism for the poor creature. I do not blame Du Maurier for drawing her as he found—or imagined—her, nor can I blame popular preachers, "able editors" and half-wit women for worshiping the freckled and faulty grisette as a goddess; for does not Carlyle truly tell us that "what we see, and can not see over, is good as Infinity?" Still I cannot entertain an exalted opinion of either the intelligence or morals of a people who will place such a character on a pedestal and prostrate themselves before it.

I confess my surprise at the phenomenal popularity of the book among people familiar with Dickens, Scott and Thackeray, triune transcendent of fiction. I had hoped when "Ben Hur" made its great hit that the golden age of flash fiction was past—that it could henceforth count among its patrons only stable boys and scullions; but the same nation that received "Ben Hur" with tears of thankfulness— thankfulness for a priceless jewel of spotless purity ablaze with the immortal fire of genius—has gone mad with joy over a dirty tale of bawdry that might have been better told by a cheap reporter bordering on the jimjams. Has the American nation suddenly declined into intellectual dotage— reached the bald-head and dizzy soubrette finale in the mighty drama of life?

I can account for the success of Du Maurier's book only on the hypothesis that "like takes to like"—that the world is full of frail Trilbys and half-baked duffers like Little Billee, who, Narcissuslike, worship their own image. They don't mind the contradictions and absurdities with which the book abounds; in fact, those who read up-to-date French novels are seldom gifted with sufficient continuity of thought to detect contradictions if they appear two pages apart. The book is ultra-bizarre, a thin intellectual soup served in grotesque, even impossible dishes and highly flavored with vulgar animalism—just the mental pabulum craved by those whose culture is artificial, mentality weak and morals mere matter of form. The plot was evidently loaded to scatter. It is about as probable as Jack and the Beanstalk, and is worked out with the skill of a country editor trying to "cover" a national convention. The story affords about as much food for thought as one of Talmage's plate- matter sermons—is fully as "fillin' " as drinking the froth out of a pop-bottle, and equally as exhilarating. Like other sots, the more the literary bacchanal drinks the more he thirsts— appetite increased by what it feeds upon. We can forgive Byron and Boccaccio the lax morals of their productions because of their literary excellence, just as we wink at the little social lapses of Sarah Bernhardt because of her unapproachable genius; but Du Maurier's book is wholly bad. It could only have been made worse by being made bigger. It is a moral crime, a literary abortion. The style is faulty and the narrative marred—if a bad egg can be spoiled—by slang lugged in from the slums of two continents with evident labor. Employed naturally, slang may serve—in a pinch—for Attic salt; but slang for its own sake is smut on the nose instead of a "beauty-spot" on the cheek of Venus—sure evidence of a paucity of ideas. A trite proverb, a non-translatable phrase from a foreign tongue may be permissible; but the writer who jumbles two languages together indiscriminately is but a pedantic prig. It were bad enough if Du Maurier mixed good English with better French; but he employs in his bilingual book the very worst of both—obsolete American provincialisms and the patois of the quartier latin side by side. To the cultured American who knows only the English of Lindley Murray and scholastic French, the book is about as intelligible as Greek to Casca or the "dog-latin" of the American schoolboy to Julius Caesar.

His characters resemble the distorted freaks of nature in a dime museum. They may all be possible, but not one of them probable. Taffy and Gecko are the best of the lot. The first is a big, good-natured Englishman who wants to see his sweetheart married to his friend, weds another and supports her quite handsomely by painting pictures he cannot sell; the latter a Pole with an Italian's temperament, yet who sees the woman he loves in the power of a demon—by whom she is presumably debauched—and makes no effort to rescue her, is not even jealous. Svengali is the greatest musician in the world, yet cannot make a living in Paris, the modern home of art. He is altogether and irretrievably bad—despite the harmony in which his soul is steeped! Think of a hawk outwarbling a nightingale—of a demon flooding the world with melody most divine! We may now expect Mephistopheles to warble "Nearer My God to Thee" between the acts! Trilby can sing no more than a burro. Like the useful animal, she has plenty of voice, and, like him, she can knock the horns off the moon with it or send it on a hot chase after the receding ghost of Hamlet's sire; but she is "tone-deaf"— can't tell Ophelia's plaint from the performance of Thomas' orchestra. Svengali hypnotizes her, and, beneath his magic spell she becomes the greatest cantatrice in Europe. Hypnotism is a power but little understood; so we must permit Du Maurier to make such Jules Verne's excursions into that unknown realm as may please him. Had Svengali made a contortionist of the stiff old Devonshire vicar we could not cry "impossible." The Laird of Cockpen is a good-natured fellow to whom Trilby tells her troubles instead of pouring them into the capacious ear of a policeman. He is a kind of bewhiskered Sir Galahad who goes in quest of Trilby instead of the Holy Grail, and having found her, sits down on her bed and cheers her up while she kisses and caresses him. As she is in love with his friend, the performance is eminently proper, quite platonic. The Laird advises Trilby to give up sitting for "the altogether"; yet Du Maurier assures us that "nothing is so chaste as nudity"—that "Venus herself, as she drops her garments and steps on to the model-throne, leaves behind her on the floor every weapon by which she can pierce to the grosser passions of men."

Then he informs us that a naked woman is such a fright "that Don Juan himself were fain to hide his eyes in sorrow and disenchantment and fly to other climes." How thankful Cupid must be that he was born blind! Still the most of us are willing to risk one eye on the average "altogether" model. Du Maurier—who is a somewhat better artist than author—illustrates his own book. He gives us several portraits of Trilby, all open-mouthed, with a vacant stare. Strange that he did not draw his heroine nude as she sat on the bed hugging and kissing the Laird—that he did not hang up "on the floor every weapon" by which Venus herself "can pierce to the grosser passions of men." But perchance he was afraid the Laird would "hide his eyes in sorrow and disenchantment and fly to other climes." He could not be spared just yet. Despite his plea for the nude, I think he exercised excellent judgment in leaving Trilby "clothed and in her right mind"—such as it was—while the Laird roosted on her couch in that attic bedroom and was— to us a Tennysonianism—mouthed and mumbled. Even New York's "four hundred" might have felt a little squeamish at seeing this pair of platonic turtle doves hid away in an obscure corner of naughty Paris in puris naturalibus even if "there is nothing so chaste as nudity."

Du Maurier says that Trilby never sat to him for "the altogether," and adds: "I would as soon have asked the Queen of Spain to let me paint her legs." If nudity be so chaste, and Trilby didn't mind the exposure even a little bit, why should he hesitate? And why should he not paint the legs of the Queen of Spain—or even the underpinning of the Queen of Hawaii—as well as her arms? But if we pause to point out all the absurd contradictions in this flake of ultra-French froth we shall wear out more than one pencil.

Little Billee is a very nice young man who has been kept too close to his mother's apron-strings for his own good—a girlish, hysterical kind of boy, who should be given spoon- victuals and put to bed early. Of course he wants to marry Trilby, for he is of that age when the swish of a petticoat makes us seasick. She is perfectly willing to become his mistress—although she had "repented" of her sins and been "forgiven" but a few days before. She has sense enough—despite Du Maurier's portraits of her—to know that she is unworthy to become a gentleman's wife, to be mated with a he-virgin like Little Billee. But she is overpersuaded— as usual—and consents. Then the young calf's mother comes on the scene and asks her to spare her little pansy blossom—not to blight his life with the frost of her follies. And of course she consents again. She's the great consenter—always in the hands of friends, like an American politician. "The difficulty of saying nay to earnest pleading" prevents a mesalliance. Trilby skips the trala and Little Billee—who has no chance to secure a reconsideration cries himself sick, but recovers,—comes up smiling like a cotton- patch after a spring shower. He is taken to England, but fails to find that "absence makes the heart grow fonder." He gets wedded to his art quite prettily, and even thinks of turning Mormon and taking the vicar's daughter for a second bride, but slips up on an atheistical orange peel, something has gone wrong with his head. Where his bump of amativeness should stick out like a walnut there is a discouraging depression which alarms him greatly, and worries the reader not a little. But finally he sees Trilby again, and, the wheel in his head, which has stuck fast for five years, begins to whizz around like the internal economy of an alarm clock—or a sky terrier with a clothespin on his tail.

Of course there is now nothing for Trilby to do but to die. They could be paired off in a kind of morganatic marriage; but it is customary in novels where the heroine has been too frolicsome, for her to get comfortably buried instead of happily married,—and perhaps it is just as well. Even a French novelist must make some little mock concession to the orthodox belief that the wage of sin is death. So Trilby sinks into the grave with a song like the dying swan, and Little Billee follows suit—upsets the entire Christian religion by dying very peaceably as an Atheist, without so much as a shudder on the brink of that outer darkness where there's supposed to be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Svengali has also fallen by the wayside, a number of characters have been very happily forgotten, so the story drags along to the close on three not very attractive legs, Taffy, the Laird and Gecko. It is a bad drama worse staged, with an ignorant bawd for heroine, a weak little thing for leading man, an impossible Caliban for heavy villain and Atheism for moral. Such is the wonderful work that has given this alleged land of intelligence a case of literary mania a potu, set it to singing the praises of a grimy grisette more melodiously than she warbled, "mironton, mirontaine" at the bidding of the villainous Svengali. Such is this new lion of literature who has set American maids and matrons to paddling about home barefoot and posing in public with open mouths—flattering themselves that they resemble a female whom they would scald if she ventured into their back yard.

BALAAM'S ASS.

AND OTHER BURROS.

"Force first made conquest, and that conquest, law; Till Superstition taught the tyrant awe, Then shared the tyranny, then lent it aid, And gods of conquerors, slaves of subjects made. She, from the rending earth and bursting skies, Saw gods descend and fiends infernal rise; Here fixed the dreadful, there the blest abodes; Fear made her devils and weak hope her gods; Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust, Whose attributes were rage, revenge and lust; Such as the souls of cowards might conceive, And, formed like tyrants, tyrants would believe. Zeal then, not charity, became the guide; And hell was built on spite, and heaven on pride." —POPE.

Kind reader, have a care! For aught I know this article may be the rankest blasphemy, and reading it may wreck your immortal soul—granting of course, that you are in possession of such perishable property. I submitted it to several of my brother ministers and sought their opinion as to the propriety of publishing it; but while some assured me that it was calculated to purify the moral atmosphere somewhat and foster respect for true religion, others were equally certain that Satan had inspired it—that it was, in fact, a choice bit of immigration literature for the lower regions. Finding even the elders unable to decide what should be done with Balaam's Ass—whether it should be turned loose upon the land like another evangelist, or consigned to the flames as a hopeless heretic—I determined to give it the benefit of the doubt. The animal may break into the preserves of some unctuous hypocrites and trample a few choice flowers of sacerdotal folly; but I opine that no honest man of average intellect will find herein occasion for complaint. I would not wantonly wound the sensibilities of those earnest but ignorant souls who believe the very chapter headings of the Bible to have been inspired; who interpret literally every foolish fable preserved therein—"like flies in amber"; but the Car of Progress cannot roll forward without crushing an occasional pismire. We cannot bid it stand forever in the same old rut, like an abandoned road-cart or "Jeffersonian Democrat," because across its shining pathway lie the honest prejudices of zealous stupidity.

The Bible is a great gold-mine, in which inexhaustible store of yellow metal is mixed with much worthless rubbish that must be purged away by honest criticism before the book becomes really profitable even fit for general circulation. I would rather place in the hands of an innocent girl a copy of the Police Gazette or Sunday Sun than an unexpurgated Bible. It is a book I value much, yet keep under lock and key with "Don Juan" and the "Decameron." It contains both the grandest morality and most degrading obscenity ever conceived in the brain of mortal man. There are passages whose beauty and power might cause the heart of an angel to leap in ecstasy, others that would call a blush of shame to the brassy front of the foulest fiend that ever howled and shrieked through the sulphurous valleys of Hell.

The man who rejects the Bible altogether because it is honey-combed with barbarous traditions, rank with revolting stories and darkened by the shadow of a savage superstition, is cousin-german to him that casts aside a priceless pearl because it is coated with ocean slime. He that accepts it in its entirety—gulps it down like an anaconda absorbing an unwashed goat; who makes no attempt to separate the essential from the accidental—the utterance of inspiration from the garrulity of hopeless nescience; who forgets that it is half an epic poem filled with the gorgeous imagery of the Orient, may, like the ass which Balaam rode, open its mouth and speak; but he never saw the Angel of the Lord; he utters the words of emptiness and ignorance.

Had the Bible been taught intelligently and truthfully the entire world would have accepted it centuries ago. Its very worst enemies are those who insist upon its inerrancy—who strive by some esoteric alchemy of logic to transmute its every fragment of base metal into bars of yellow gold, the folly of the creature into the wisdom of the Creator. During the Dark Ages hide-bound orthodoxy prevailed and practically every man was a church communicant; it is paramount to-day only in those countries that have failed to keep pace with the Car of Progress. It is a sad commentary upon all religious faiths that they flourish best where ignorance prevails—that Atheism is rapidly becoming the recognized correlative of education. By presuming to know too much of God's great plan; by decrying intelligent criticism and attempting to seal the lips of living students with the dicta of dead scholastics; by standing ever ready to brand as blasphemers those who presume to question or dare to differ, the dogmatists are driving millions of God- fearing men into passive indifference or overt opposition.

Ignorance is not a crime per se; but it is the mother of Superstition and Intolerance, those twin demons that have time and again deluged the world with blood and tears; that for forty centuries have stood like ravenous wolves in the path of human progress; that with their empoisoned fangs have torn a thousand times the snowy breast of Liberty—that have done more to inspire Doubt and foster Infidelity than all the French philosophes that ever wielded pen. The logical, well-informed man who to-day becomes a church communicant does not so because of the doctrine promulgated by the average pulpiteer, but despite of it.

The long night of intellectual slavery has not altogether passed, but on the higher hills already flame the harbingers of Reason's glorious morn. Gone is the Inquisition with its sacred infamies—the Christian rack is broken and the thumb-screw rusted in twain. The persuasive wheel no longer whisks the non-conformist into full communion, the Iron Virgin has ceased to press the writhing heretic to her orthodox heart. The faggot has fallen from the hand of the saintly fanatic and the branding iron from the loving grasp of the benevolent bigot, while Superstition, that once did rule the world with autocratic sway, can only shriek her impotent curses forth and flourish her foolish boycott at Reason's growing flame.

If I can but enable sectarians to understand that all so- called sacred books are essentially the same—that Brahma and Baal, Jupiter and Jehovah are really identical; if I can but make them cognizant of the crime they commit in decrying honest criticism; if I can but convince them that the man who is

"Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through nature up to nature's God,"

is not necessarily an active emissary of evil whom it is their duty to denounce; if I can but create a suspicion in the minds of the clergy that perhaps they know no more of the Omnipotent than do other men—are possibly mistaking bile for benevolence, gall for godliness and chronic laziness for "a call to preach"—I will feel that these few hours expended grooming Balaam's burro have not been cast away.

. . .

Our information concerning the Rev. Mr. Balaam and his burro is very limited. Although the latter was endowed with the gift of gab it appears to have spoken but once and then at the especial bidding of an angel, which fact leads us to suspect that the voluble jackasses now extant have deteriorated at both ends since the days of their distinguished ancestor—have parted with all their brain as well as with half their legs. Brother Balaam does not appear to have "syndicated" his sermons or made any special bid for notoriety. If he ever hired half-starved courtesans a la Parkhurst—to dance the can-can, then hastened into court to file complaint against the very bawds he had filled with booze and dandled naked on his knee; if he called the ladies of his congregation "old sows" after the manner of Sam Jones; if he got himself tried on a charge of heresy or became entangled with some half-wit sister whose religious fervor led her to mistake Levite for the Lord, no record of the shameful circumstance has been preserved. He appears to have attended pretty strictly to the prophet business, and we may presume, from such stray bits of his biography as have come down to us, that he prospered.

The Israelites, who had gotten out of Egypt between two days with considerable of the portable property of other people concealed about their persons, had gone into the Bill Dalton business under the direct guidance—as they claimed—of their Deity, and were for some time eminently successful. Wholesale murder and robbery became their only industry, arson and oppression their recognized amusement. They had swiped up several cities—"leaving not a soul alive"—and were now grinding the snickersnee for Moab and Midian. The people of the petty nations of Palestine—whom God's anointed received an imperative command to "utterly destroy"—had builded them happy homes and accumulated considerable property by patient industry. They appear to have been peacefully disposed and devout worshipers of those deities from whom the better attributes of Jehovah were subsequently borrowed. The Israelites had not struck a lick of honest labor for forty years. They had drifted about like Cosey's "Commonwealers" and developed into the most fiendish mob of God-fearing guerrillas and marauding cut-throats of which history makes mention. Compared with Joshua's murderous Jews, the Huns who followed Attila were avatars of mercy and the Sioux of Sitting Bull were Good Samaritans. A careful comparison of the crimes committed by the Kurds in Armenia with those perpetrated by "God's chosen people" in Palestine will prove that the followers of Allah are but amateurs in the art of outrage. Doubtless any other people, brutalized by centuries of bondage, then turned loose without king or country, with only ignorant prophets for guides and avaricious priests for law-givers, would have become equally cruel—would have adopted a divinity devoid of mercy and a stranger to justice. The god of a people is, and must of necessity ever be a reflection of themselves, an idealization of their own virtues and vices—a magic mirror in which, Narcissuslike, man worships his own image.