ously weak and inefficient. Its plain duty is to denounce the money power, the Republican party, and the railroads. In regard to the latter, an audience was informed that "The beast in the east masquerades under the name of the Boston and Maine Railroad, and it is one of the corrupting influences in the east.'

Parenthetically there is about one ounce of vanishing truth in this statement, and a ton of gross misrepresentation. Any one of its thousands of employees could have informed the speaker what the Boston and Maine Railroad and its management stand for to-day, socially, educationally, and industrially. As for the past let the dead bury its dead.

According to these speakers, however, the greatest offender is the church itself. Its stand on economic and social questions is the centre of attack. The church is accused of being 'long on salvation somewhere else, and mighty short of it here.' One speaker, relating his experience and opinion, had this to say: 'I saw a congregation of people who would sing and who would talk about the brotherhood of man, but who would resent any attempt to make that brotherhood possible.'

'Where save in the church would you find buyers of legislatures?' he inquired. 'Where save in the church will you find the owners of foul tenements that kill the people who are compelled to live in them?'

The moral effect of this kind of sermonizing, advertised as it has been all over the country, is simply to bring all churches and every form of religious teaching into disrepute with the people. Not only is its tendency to initiate and encourage dissatisfaction and vagrancy in religious circles, not only are its accusations often exaggerated, but its very aims are themselves founded on error and misconception. This

final and most important phase of the situation should be clearly explained and understood.

One of the chief of these misconceptions relates to the function and duties of the Christian minister, and to the understanding or misunderstanding of Christian endeavor in all parts of the world in times past. The modern religious reformer, in thinking that he can fill the rôle of a political partisan or a corporation-baiter, and at the same time expect to remain on a spiritual eminence and direct the conscience of even a small congregation, is making a great mistake.

Personally this action of his may be commendable; he may be peculiarly fitted for this kind of work; nevertheless, it must be to him a fundamental change of occupation.

The position of the writer on the matter can be stated in the words of Phillips Brooks: 'God's purpose on the earth is man, and the primary and final concern of the Christian minister is human character.' This religious programme is not only all a Christian minister can reasonably be expected to attend to, but, as we shall see later, it includes, and always has included, social justice and betterment work of every description. Let us first emphasize this position or sphere of duty a little.

The Reverend Frederick A. Bisbee, editor of the Universalist Leader of Boston, in his baccalaureate sermon at the University of Maine some time ago, called attention to the part played by religion in the present great drama of life.

"The great need of the world,' he said, 'is not more laws, not more schemes for human betterment, but more of just plain, good, true men. The best office in the world will fail unless you

have good men to administer it. Every social system ever instituted has met wreck because of the failure of the individual man in it. All our evils, social, economic, and political, have their primary cause in evil men, often men of talent and training. The only way to reform the world is to reform the men in it.'

Here, then, is the religious proposition of to-day actually more insistent and more clearly defined than ever. This is the prescribed sphere of action of the Christian minister. It is orthodox, liberal, and catholic. But the American genius is averse to restrictions of any kind, and the fever in the blood is now running its course through the churches.

Let us take a glance at this now popular movement in perhaps its latest manifestation.

The Presbyterian Church in the United States, for example, with its one million three hundred thousand members, has recently issued a sort of manifesto on the subject. The document was reported to the assembly at Atlantic City, by Reverend John McDowell, D. D., and adopted with unanimity. Its terms call upon the church to declare itself specifically on certain social, moral, and industrial issues. It is true Jesus approached the social question from within. He dealt with individuals; he made men; he served the world through inspiration; he left the organization of social and industrial details to the individual who listened to and profited by his teachings. But the Presbyterian and other Protestant churches now propose to go further. The time has come, they declare, 'when our churches and ministers must speak their minds concerning particular problems now threatening society.'

To begin with, then, let it now be preached that 'All wealth, from whatever source acquired, must be held or

administered as a trust from God for fellow men.' The church must declare, too, for the application of Christian principles in the conduct of industrial organizations, whether of capital or labor; for a more equal distribution of wealth; and for the abatement of poverty. Furthermore, the church must stand for the abolition of child-labor. Provision must be made to relieve from want those who, through no fault of their own, now suffer the brunt of losses incurred in the service of society as a whole. The church must also have an eye on and a hand in regulating the condition of the industrial occupation of women. She must declare for the protection of working people from dangerous machinery, and for adequate insurance; and finally, "The pay of every worker for six days' work'-the church must see to it — ‘should be made sufficient for the needs of seven days of living.'

Evidently these issues and interests are of the greatest importance, both to the churches and to the nation at large. The proposition from beginning to end does credit to the religious instinct and human sympathies of any church.

The principles concerned in the programme are all right, but in the working out of its details there is a peck of trouble, for both minister and church. But the churches have always preached and acknowledged the principles of social justice, on a level, at any rate, with the times. What they now propose to do is to step down into the social arena and take sides. Once in the arena there is no help for it. The minister must come out for the open shop or against it. He must be socialist or anti-socialist. Sooner or later he must be female suffragist or anti-suffragist. He must come out for an eight-hour day or against it. Meanwhile, under these circumstances, his congregation

being human, only a man-miracle could retain his spiritual jurisdiction.

In fact, to saddle the modern minister with even a subordinate part in the organization and solution of these problems of social justice is simply preposterous.

President Eliot of the American Unitarian Association is evidently of this opinion. He does not believe that 'one man can be a theologian, a sociologist, a raiser of church income, and a pastor with sufficient skill to make himself acceptable to an intelligent and critical congregation.'

This is the situation in a nutshell. Let the minister choose whom he will serve. Let him specialize; and seeing that the primal and final concern of the Christian minister is human character, let him specialize at his own business, and stand to his guns.

The churches to-day are as well aware of these facts, and of this situation, as the writer of this article. But, unfortunately, at the present day they are suffering from a simple case of Christian timidity or fright. Deep in its heart the church is aware of its spiritual mission, but the incessant haranguing of the popular reformer, and various other pressures from without, are eating into its faith, and it now seems to be possessed with a determination to part with no small portion of its spiritual function, in order to acquire an uncertain partnership in affairs over which its influence is comparatively slight.

But this religious misconception is not alone one of function and duty.

At the root of nearly all modern projects, or tendencies, to materialize religion, there is also a misinterpretation of church history and antecedents. For if there is any one thing to-day of which the churches have reason to be proud, it is the record of Christian endeavor and success along the very lines to which popular attention is now being directed.

In reading the programme and announced platform of the Presbyterian Church, one gets the idea that this denomination is becoming interested in these social and industrial problems for the first time. Nothing can be further from the truth. The past and present glory of the Christian Church does not consist in the lists of social and industrial cure-alls which it has officially sanctioned and proclaimed from the housetops. While others have been thus engaged, the individuals, the children and fruits of the church's ministry, the 'just plain, good, true men and women,' have been at work, and have crowded into the past fifty years a record of actual results in humanitarian effort which, properly understood, should fill the faintest religious heart with courage and gladness.

It is only necessary to study these reforms, the names of the reformers, and the associations connected with them, to understand that in a vast majority of cases the great work of human uplift has been initiated and carried on 'In His Name,' and in faithful response to the injunction, "This commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another.'

I

THERE is in all history no better illustration of the advantage, to all concerned, of free and unrestricted trade over a large area of country than that presented by the growth in population and in wealth of the United States within the last century, and especially within the last fifty years. Including the territory west of the Mississippi River, which barely one hundred years ago was foreign soil, and Alaska, which less than fifty years ago was foreign soil, the United States covers an area of 3,500,000 square miles, of which 500,000 square miles are in Alaska. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it contained a population of 5,300,000, which had grown in the first fifty years to upwards of 23,000,000, and at the end of the century to upwards of 75,000,000, and which now numbers about 92,000,000.

For the first fifty years of the century the increase in population and in wealth was comparatively slow, for the reason that transportation of heavy freights for any great distance had to be carried on almost entirely by water. Transportation by teams, which, before the introduction of the railway system, was the only means of inland transportation, was too expensive to admit of the profitable cultivation of farms or of the building up of manufacturing enterprises in places even a little remote from the watercourses. It is probably fair to say that a team of horses, or pair of oxen, could not move

more than one ton of freight over the average country road of a century ago a greater distance than twenty miles in one day. If the team were to make its return journey in half the time, it would involve a cost of transportation of a day and a half for a man and team. At present, the cost of the team to do this work would be about $5 a day, or $7.50 for the day and a half; in the olden time it could probably have been done for, say, $4.50. Reckoning 33 bushels of grain to the ton, that would mean that it would cost 14 cents a bushel to move grain to the watercourse from a farm twenty miles away. Mr. W. C. Brown, president of the New York Central Railroad, has stated that the cost of transportation by teams from Buffalo to the Hudson River previous to the opening of the Erie Canal was $100 per ton, which was reduced to $11 a ton on the opening of the Canal, or, say, 34 cents per bushel on grain. Hence the cost of moving grain from a farm twenty miles from Buffalo to the Hudson River amounted to nearly 50 cents a bushel, which was probably all that the grain was worth at that time at the river point.

But with the introduction of the railway system this condition of things was entirely changed. Heavy freights are now carried one thousand miles by rail at the cost of twenty miles by teams. The railroads have been the pioneers and chief factor in the development of the resources of the country, and unless hampered by restrictive or hostile legislation, they will continue

to be so for many years to come. All sections of the country have shared in the benefit of this development, and have alike been prosperous.

The area of trade in the United States is in remarkable contrast to those of the different countries of Europe. For illustration: Great Britain has an area of 121,000 square miles, which is equal to that of the New England States, New York, and New Jersey. The area of France is equal to that of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan. Germany has an area equal to that of North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. The area of Spain is equal to that of Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi; of Italy, to that of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri; of AustriaHungary, to that of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Sweden and Norway together have about the same area as Arizona, Utah, and Montana; Portugal is something less in area than Oklahoma. The Netherlands, Belgium,Switzerland, and Greece have together an area of about 66,000 square miles-somewhat smaller than that of either Kansas or Nebraska.

These fourteen different countries occupy an aggregate of about 1,500,000 square miles, or about one-half the territory of the United States, exclusive of Alaska; and the remainder of the territory in the United States, including Alaska, is equal to the area of European Russia.

All of these countries, with the sole exception of Great Britain, are hemmed in by hostile tariff walls, each against the others, which limit their trade largely to the territory occupied by each. In addition, they are animated largely by feelings of racial hostility toward one another. They support large standing armies for protection against their neighbors, involving burdensome taxes, and have a system of compulsory mili

tary service, which is also very burden

some.

From all these hindrances to trade the United States has been and is still free. The citizens of one state are free to travel and to trade in every other state, and friendship and friendly interests prevail. This absolute freedom of intercourse, this freedom from military service, and these lighter taxes, together with the opportunity for acquiring land and homes wherever one may see fit to settle, have invited immigration from all parts of the world; and for the last fifty years immigrants have been coming in increasing numbers. These immigrants have left behind them their racial feeling of hostility, they have ceased to be Germans, or Austrians, or Swedes, or Norwegians, and have become loyal and enthusiastic Americans. Were the territory of the United States divided into separate nationalities, as in Europe, there would have been no such rapid growth of cities, no Boston, or New York, or Philadelphia, no Baltimore, or Pittsburg, or Chicago, as we know them to-day. The growth and development of these centres of commerce and industry is wholly due to the absolute freedom of intercourse and community of interest over the enormous area of 3,500,000 square miles.

Assuming that the spirit of private enterprise and the development of the railway system are not to be checked by unwise legislation, what is likely to be the population of the United States in the century to come? The average increase for the nineteenth century was three per cent a year. For the last twenty years the growth was twenty per cent every ten years, or two per cent a year; about fifteen per cent of which was due to reproduction, and five per cent to immigration. It seems to me that for the next fifty years the population will increase in like ratio, in which case we shall have