and yet we have twenty million citizens in the United States who are compelled to pay their taxes and obey the laws, while they are denied any share whatever in the exercise of political power. This is done because of their sex, and is as hateful and antirepublican a discrimination as can well be conceived. An aristocracy founded on it is quite as odious and absurd as an aristocracy founded on color, or race, or any other mere accident of humanity. It cannot be defended for a moment by any believer in democracy. In the name of justice and decency, what has sex to do with the question of moral or political right? But our purpose is not now to argue the question, but only to state it, and to rank it among the grand living issues yet to be tried by the people. How it will finally be decided is not a matter of the least doubt. Our exclusion of woman from politics will take its place among the curious and startling barbarisms of the past. It is true that as yet we are only midway on our journey to universal suffrage; but that journey will be completed, because any step backward will be as impossible as any pause where we are. We are constantly enlarging the sphere of woman's occupations. We are reforming our laws respecting her personal and property rights. We are providing for her a higher education, and thus recognizing her claim to equal rights. We have already made her a citizen, and in some of the States, and as to certain positions, she is entitled to vote and hold office. There is, and there can be, no abiding-place in her progress toward perfect political equality with man. When and how this goal shall be reached, must largely depend upon the labors and sacrifices of those who would speed the work; for the toils and struggles of the abolitionists might just as wisely have been renounced, as to surrender the cause of woman's enfranchisement to the tender mercies of social evolution.

Our space will only permit us to refer to one further task which invokes the helping hand of reform, and that is the total separation of our civil and ecclesiastical affairs. Our Protestant sects complain that the pope, as the vicegerent of God on earth, not only claims supreme authority over the consciences of men, but over all human governments, and thus assails civil liberty as well as religious. They say it was the Catholic Church which defeated Mr. Gladstone's Education Bill, and inspired the Franco

German War, while it is striving to prevent the unification of Germany, and blocking up the way of struggling liberalism in France and Spain. They affirm that this same power is waging war against our common schools, and endeavoring, by sapping and mining, to intrench itself in the United States; and that it believes our free institutions offer a better soil for the growth of its principles than the centralized governments of Europe, while plotting the overthrow of our liberty through its vast and welldrilled army of Jesuits. How shall we deal with this alleged raid upon civilization and progress? Social evolution will not meet the danger, for that has brought it to our doors, and seems to be constantly giving it strength. Shall we appeal to sectarian animosities, and array Protestantism against Catholicism in deadly strife? The thought of such a struggle between a great centralized power, always acting as a unit, and warring sects which could never be effectively rallied under a common banner, is not to be entertained for a moment. The question is not so much one of sects, or religions, as of constitutional liberty, vitally affecting the rights of all men. The Government of the United States is neither Protestant nor Catholic. It is not even Christian, Washington himself being our witness; nor is it Jewish, Mohammedan, or pagan. The Government rightfully has nothing to do with religion, and religion has nothing to do with the Government. The state has no more right to teach religion than the church has to assume the functions of the state. Our only safe ground, therefore, is the total secularization of our politics. The "concubinage of church and state" must be utterly destroyed. On this principle all can stand, irrespective of religious faith. While the state is bound to protect all men in the unmolested enjoyment of their religious opinions, it must stand entirely aloof from any sort of espousal of any form of faith. This is our safeguard against ecclesiastical domination, whether Catholic or Prot

estant.

And this will require an amendment of the Constitution of the United States. It declares that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," and thus places the national Government in its true position; but the individual States are left entirely free in dealing with this question. They may make the Catholic faith

or that of any Protestant sect the state religion, and levy taxes for the support of it upon those who conscientiously disbelieve in its creed. The union of church and state, which our fathers repudiated in the national Constitution, may thus be established in defiance of the rights of conscience, as was systematically done in all the colonies save one during the period of the Revolution and at the beginning of the Government. Some of them required all officers of the State to be of the Protestant faith; and even at this day religious tests are prescribed in several of them as conditions of holding office, by which the choice of fit men for the public service is foolishly restricted. In violation of the principles of our fathers, the church property of both Catholics and Protestants is exempted from taxation, thus indirectly compelling Jews, Mohammedans, theists, atheists, and freethinkers, to contribute to the support of a religion which they disbelieve, and violating the rights of conscience, which, to every reflecting man, are even more precious than the right to liberty or life. A constitutional amendment has recently been proposed in the Senate of the United States, which, if adopted, will recognize the Bible in our public schools by "divine right," and forever protect church property in its present unjust exemption; and this amendment lacked only a few votes of the two-thirds required to pass it. The growth of the ecclesiastical spirit is still further mani. fested by another proposed amendment, emanating from an organization called the "National Reform Association," providing for the "acknowledgment of Almighty God as the source of all authority in civil government, of the Lord Jesus Christ as the ruler of nations, and his revealed will as of supreme authority." Should this be adopted, the union of church and state would be complete, and "appropriate legislation" for the disfranchisement and punishment of heretics would undoubtedly follow. The only true remedy for these threatened dangers is the absolute divorce of civil and ecclesiastical authority. There is no middle ground on which we can stand. "Our Constitution must be changed to suit our practices, or our practices must be changed to suit our Constitution." It must be on one side or the other, and the attempt to place it on both will prove as fruitless, and it may be as disastrous, as was the effort to make our Government "half slave and half free." We oppose and denounce the assaults

of the Catholic Church upon our common schools as a monstrous interference with purely secular affairs; but our own sense of consistency and self-respect should compel us forthwith to exclude the Bible from those schools, and thus deprive that hierarchy of a very convenient and weighty apology for its course. The policy of the Catholic Church, so far as it makes itself the ally of ignorance and superstition, must be resolutely resisted; but that resistance can best be made by jealously maintaining civil liberty, and insisting upon a well-organized system of common schools and compulsory secular education. In thus standing by the equal religious rights of American citizens, we shall be invincible; for liberty and popular intelligence are the deadly enemies of every form of ecclesiastical usurpation, as they are the impregnable bulwarks of our democratic institutions. In seeking our purpose through an amendment of the Constitution, we cherish no hostility to State rights, but only an overmastering devotion to human rights. We cherish no hostility whatever to any form of religion, but would protect and defend all religions under equal laws. Nor do we fear sectarian wrangles and divisions as the result of the principles for which we contend. On the contrary, we confidently predict perpetual peace through the final removal of the chief causes of strife; and our grand aim can only fail through the criminal recreancy of the people themselves to the teachings of our fathers and the pregnant warnings of history.

And here we close our protest against the baleful heresy which has served us for our text. In confounding the distinction between physical and social evolution, it tends to confound the distinction between right and wrong. It threatens to dethrone conscience, and substitute development for duty. It exchanges liberty for necessity, and thus deals with humanity as a factor in mechanics. By committing all social questions to the working of inevitable laws, it disparages the value of human character, and trifles with human responsibility. It weakens the very foundations of virtue by belittling the motives which inspire it. It unduly exalts the intellect, and makes the follies and mistakes of good men an excuse for tearing down the sanctuary of the heart. Its ugly footprints are already visible on the other side of the Atlantic, in the halting steps of special reforms, and the growing indisposition of Government to deal with great social questions VOL. CXXVII.-NO. 264

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over which its jurisdiction is clear. This is true in a measure of our own country, while the moral felonies which blacken our politics and defile the name of religion have their root, to some extent, in the same soil. This deadly mildew of modern life, this dry-rot of moral unbelief which would wither the leaf and flower of virtue, must be arrested, if we would escape social stagnation and spiritual death. We speak earnestly, because we feel deeply, when we say that by all means we must keep alive our faith in virtue, in the preciousness of character, and in personal responsibility; for, without this faith, men will content themselves with coddling their own worldly comfort, and turning every good cause adrift, while we shall be left without God and without hope in the world.

GEORGE W. JULIAN.