subject before the public mind in a strik

ing way. Some of the Judges upheld the practice, making a distinction between "contributions" and "assessments," and arguing that judges, like all other political candidates, were properly called upon to contribute to necessary political expenses. This argument merely suggests the general principle that all collection and expenditure of campaign funds should be under such strict supervision here as in England, with full publicity as to items; the present New York law is really farci cal, as it does not call for any accounting by campaign committees. Apart from the general question, however, the members of the bench exercise a peculiarly important public function, and should be more carefully guarded from the least suspicion than ordinary political candidates. When it is noted that the Judges testified last week to paying from $2,500 to $12,500 each; when it is remembered that in many cases the nomination was all but equivalent to an election; and when it is known that the payments were made to or through such political machinists and corruptionists as the present Tammany leaders, there is certainly reason to regard the practice as reprehensible. New York judges, as a body, have a high reputation for honor and ability, but it is a disgrace that before election or nomination they should have to chaffer with political bosses as to the amount of contribution to be made to the campaign fund. If it cannot truly be averred that they buy their judgeships, it is at least true that they wear the collar of the "organization," and are driven into undesirable relations with men who exert a powerful influence in making the laws which the judges interpret. Judge Barrett, of the Supreme Court, while believing that judges should be elected rather than appointed, declared earnestly that, as far as possible, the judiciary should be absolutely removed from politics. He added:

I think that a man who goes into the judiciary should be consecrated-set apart from other men. His position is second only to that of the ministry, and he should not be regarded in the same light as other candidates to political life. His whole life should be given up to the cause of administering justice, and he should not be required to pay any attention to political considerations. I am absolutely opposed to the whole system of judges paying contributions to campaign funds.

The Negro of the New South

An interesting contribution to what may be called the psychology of the negro problem is that of Mr. David F. St. Clair in the "Criterion," the result of a visit to the South after an absence of ten years. In place of the " old-time darkey" he had known, Mr. St. Clair found "a self-conscious colored man, less optimistic, less mirthful, less improvident, perhaps more morose, more melancholy, and with a more acute sense of pain and suffering;" in short, a changed type, one that had developed a nervous system like that of the white. A conspicuous sign of the change was the abandonment of the banjo, so long associated with care-free plantation jollity-due, probably, to the ambition to imitate the whites-and the substitution for it on excursions of the guitar, zither, or music-box. With the passing of the banjo has also passed the spontaneous love of song-" the sort of song one was wont to hear at the cornhuskings, log-rollings, house-raisings, and railroad-buildings in the '70's and '80's." In a small town in North Carolina Mr. St. Clair saw fifty young negroes laying water-pipes, "working in absolute silence and their faces as glum as so many Italian pipe-layers in New York." He asked one of them to start a song, but "the response was so feeble that the tune soon collapsed." The foreman explained to him: "Dese niggers can't sing. Dey's in no mood." Mr. St. Clair thinks this an explanation which gets near the heart of the secret." Mr. St. Clair saw a like change of mood reflected in the more decorous services of the colored churches. Not once was the word "hell" mentioned in a half-dozen sermons he heard from educated colored preachers. One of them explained to him that while this was due in part to a theological change, the principal reason was that we cannot restrain our people if we go on talking to them about hell. We are now trying to teach our people to reason and think." In illustration, Mr. St. Clair noted a case where a scholarly preacher dropped into a strain of old-time fervor, stirring every man and woman in the congregation to the highest pitch of excitement. Attempt ng in vain to calm the storm he had raised, the preacher sat down in utter disgust. Among the causes to which Mr. St. Clair attributes the loss of

mirthfulness, there comes first the deep chagrin felt by the colored man over the deprivation of the right to vote. Every time he hears the word "'lection" he has some such sinking feeling as a disinherited son has at the mention of his lost inheritance." Despite this bitterness, however, there is no development of race malice. The negro's crimes, says Mr. St. Clair, are principally the result of ignorance and irritation. Not more than five per cent. of the negroes are guilty of the outrages which have caused the lynchings. He adds that in private the severest critic of these brutes is the negro himself." One result of a keener consciousness of his hard lot is an exodus from the country into the towns and cities. There the colored population is crowded into the foulest quarters, entailing effects the most appalling, especially the development of consumption and insanity, whose ravages the race had in the past largely escaped. Mr. St. Clair's conclusion, somewhat incongruous, but in its way interesting, is that, despite changes, "the negro still remains the best judge of a gentleman in the South. When he tells you this white man is a gentleman and the other is not, you have got an opinion from an instinct that is never fooled on this delicate point."

The Pan-Presbyterian The Presbyterian Council, popularly so Alliance called, but more properly the Alliance of the Reformed Churches throughout the world holding the Presbyterian system, assembled at Washington September 27. Its last meeting in this country was in 1880, at Philadelphia. The present meeting is the seventh General Council of the Alliance, which was organized in 1877. The delegates are mainly from English-speaking countries; very few are from Continental Europe. Of the 5,000,000 communicants in the Alliance, only one-fifth speak any other than the English language. The meetings are held in Dr. Radcliffe's church, where, if we mistake not, condemnation was pronounced on Dr. Briggs. The opening sermon by Professor De Witt, of Princeton, on The Bible and the Reformed Churches," naturally recalled that event. He declared it imperative to take notice of the present crisis of Biblical belief, and

to meet the demands of the critics with counter-criticism. On the other hand, he held the great duty in the sphere of feeling to be charity, remembering that "none of us is thoroughly consistent intellectu ally." Dr. J. Marshall Lang, of Glasgow, in his opening address as President of the Alliance, seemed to look out on a wider horizon. The churches, he said, will command the attention of the age only so far as, without lowering their testimony or their ideals, they make room for its trends and habits of thought, its expansions and complexities of life. "We are not worshipers of the past. While a false liberalism ruthlessly tears the present from the past, it is an equally false con servatism which insists that the molds into which the conclusions of a past age were cast shall remain fixed and rigid for all future periods."

Presbyterian Fellowship

The meetings of the Alliance are for purposes of fellowship only, and take on no legislative functions. In this respect it is like the recent International Council of the Congregational Churches at Boston, and aims to realize the spiritual unity and co-operation of the mutually independent Presbyterian denominations. The statistical report by the General Secretary, Dr. Mathews, of London, showed that, whatever drawbacks had occurred, the aggregates of ministers, congregations, elders, communicants, children in Sunday-school, and contributions to missionary work. indicated an increase all along the line. The congregations included in the Alliance number nearly 25,000,000 souls. "Cooperation is the watchword." On the occasion of an exchange of salutations with the Congregational Council at Boston a proposal was made to extend this cooperation and to see if anything could be done toward unifying Presbyterians and Congregationalists, but it was not favorably received. The fellowship of the Alliance itself is not complete in the service of song, as the United and the Reformed Presbyterians count it unlawful to sing hymns, or any other lyrics than the Psalms, and serious difficulties have thus arisen heretofore. That Calvinism is not moribund in the Presbyterian communion was evinced by a strong and striking

Bishop Potter on Divorce

At the Protestant Episcopal Diocesan Convention held last week in New York City, the principal event was a very strong statement by Bishop Potter on the subject of divorce. At the last General Convention he was regarded as a leader in the policy of upholding the existing law of his Church. Hence his opinion that it might be the best course to refuse remarriage to any divorced person is of peculiar interest. Both in his recent speech and in an article in the current number of the "North American Review" Bishop Potter emphasizes the exaggeration of individualism. By individualism he means the modern tendency to throw off the earlier forms of authority and let each person act as his own judgment dictates, so long as the rights of others are not curtailed thereby. While he admits that in the spirit of individualism the historian of the future may perhaps discern the mightiest force of this age, the Bishop holds that it has had a disastrous effect upon family life, and, through the family, upon the institutions and obligations of marriage. The Rev. Dr. Dix, after reading the report of the committee appointed to consider this subject, was even more outspoken. declared that—

He

Families are broken up, homes ruined under frivolous pretenses, or at the dictate of lawless passion; yet it is assumed that these things should be left to the individual as his or her personal concern, and not the concern of the social circle in which he moves, and feeble, if any, opposition is made to the exoneration and full rehabilitation of offenders whose acts merit the reproof of just and honorable men. These sins against human and divine law are not committed only by the low, the degraded, and the ignorant; they are conspicuously manifest in the case of what are known as the higher classes; persons arrogating to them

selves the character of social leaders have been among the most reckless in contempt for obligation and duty, and most flagrant among

the offenders against God and the Christian institutions, while it is a deplorable fact that their associates and companions in the very class which might and ought to exert a salutary influence in frowning on transgression and trying to keep society pure, appear to take their part, and even to justify and applaud teir conduct. We are reaching a point at which alarm is daily growing greater, and disgust and indignation are more widely felt; a point at which the opinion is gaining ground, to which the Bishop has referred, that legislation is advisable which shall prohibit the remarriage of divorced persons under any circumstances whatever.

Council last week was on the question of the training of clergymen. The subject was introduced by President Hyde, of Bowdoin, who declared that a man's first qualification to preach was the call of God. This is no audible voice or visible sign; it is not even some pathological disturbance of the nerves. It is the clear conviction that life, as most men live it, is a wicked waste and an insult to God. It is the equally clear conviction that life, as man ought to live it and as Christ has shown us how, is pleasing to God and restful to the soul. The second qualification is mental drill. Exacting should be the training of the man who is to apply to the soul the active, living word of God. Thirdly, Dr. Hyde puts first-hand secular knowledge. It is, indeed, of little use to preach to a world whose ways of thinking the preacher does not understand. The minister, Dr. Hyde declares, must wrest the scientific concepts of the age direct from the laboratory; nor will any text book or lecturer, giving them in finished form, serve his purpose. The speaker affirmed that

The most ominous sign in American Congregationalism to-day is the disposition of thoughtless churches to welcome to their pulpits, of weak-kneed associations to recognize, of complaisant councils to install, untrained or half-trained men from foreign lands, from denominations having lower intellectual standards, from lay colleges, from Christian Association and Endeavor work, simply because they can glibly proclaim with unctuous fervor the plagiarized platitudes they have borrowed, in substance or in form, if not in both, from pernicious homiletical helps.

Lastly, President Hyde urged the individual grasp of spiritual truth. This involves a radical reform in methods of

seminary instruction. The speaker somewhat sweepingly claimed that when college graduates go to the seminary they almost invariably report a falling off in interest. Men who have learned in college to investigate and think for themselves, when given dictated lectures to write out and learn as the chief means of intellectual growth, feel as if put back into the kindergarten. The best men are disgusted; the poorest, stultified. Their manhood is at the same time threatened by superfluous eleemosynary aid. Again, seminaries which will emancipate the minds of their students must themselves be free from bondage to the letter of antiquated creeds. "Creeds have their purposes and uses, which are akin to the uses of platforms in political parties. What would you think of a college that should bind its professors forever to teach McKinley doctrines of the tariff or Bryan views of silver coinage?"

Other Views

President Slocum, of Colorado College, who followed, agreed with Dr. Hyde, and asked if the time had not come to consolidate the theological schools of New England. Consolidation into one strong divinity school would command great teachers, earnest students, and large financial support. In such an institution high standards could be set and maintained and the eleemosynary element banished. On the other hand, Professor Moore, of Andover Seminary, thought that all of the seminaries were doing their best to administer the trust funds committed to their care for the purpose for which they were given. With one or two exceptions, the seminaries endeavor to administer their funds in scholarships on the same plan as colleges and universities employ. As to the diligence As to the diligence of students, Professor Moore declared the seminaries to be inspired by the supposition that men who came from college to the seminary had already acquired the motive for study. As to the course of study, theological schools do not pursue methods which have become obsolete; the lecture, which is one of the best methods of instruction, being always supplemented by wide reading. Principal Fairbairn, of Principal Fairbairn, of Mansfield College, Oxford, also protested, saying that, whatever American semina

ries might lack, the reforms outlined by Presidents Hyde and Slocum were not needed in British schools. To this we would add that we believe the cry for reform in some directions to be a just cry. Many of the students in our seminaries are suffering from a lack of self-respect. Both as regards education and as regards compensation, the seminaries should place their students on the same basis as that of students in the schools of law and medicine.

The Prison Association

It is an encouraging sign of the times when reform movements grow more enthusiastic. Such a sign, one in which they may well conquer, was seen at the meeting of the National Prison Association in Hartford, September 23-28. This was marked not only in the tone of the papers from such experts, practical and theoretical, as Warden Hert, of Indiana, Warden Wolfer, of Minnesota, Colonel Carroll D. Wright, Professor Bates, of Elmira, and President Slocum, of Colorado, but in the lively discussions and in the admirably full and comprehensive newspaper reports. When a reform meeting gets as much space in a daily paper as a prize-fight, it is enough to comfort a reformer. Everything went to show that the idea of the indeterminate sentence is taking deep root. On that stock must be grafted the best systems for governing any prison or reformatory. Wise labor schemes, technical training, trade teaching, thorough protection of society from the professional criminal-these and kindred methods for improving prison discipline will fail of their purpose without the indeterminate sentence. Dropping out the minimum of a sentence was good so far as it went, but every experiment goes to show that when all reference to the maximum term shall be omitted likewise, the prisoner will first awake to the full responsibilities before him. The dangers that lurk in things apparently good are not sufficiently considered, as a rule, but those who heard the paper by Professor Bates, of Elmira, on the prevention of crime had warnings in that direction. It is almost discouraging to be told that of the convicts sent to one reformatory alone, fifty-eight per cent. have

passed through reform schools or houses of reformation before coming there. Could there be better proof that institutions do not fit boys and girls to meet the stress of life outside the sheltering walls? Mr. Bates finds also great dangers to young people in Sunday excursions, and even in the freedom of our beautiful parks. The remedy for these evils, of course, is education, to teach the use of all that is helpful without abuse. Among other helps toward the prevention of crime, Mr. Bates commended the establishment of lodginghouses for newsboys, and such hotels as the Mills in New York, which have had a distinct influence in improving the behavior of their guests. From figures collected by the Governor of South Carolina it appears that since the establishment of the dispensaries there the cases of drunkenness reported have diminished 57 per cent., the number of cases brought before the courts has fallen 66 9-16 per cent., and the consumption of whisky in the State has decreased 47 6-7 per cent.

The pitch of enthusiasm of Special Features the Prison Congress reached its highest note at the last session, when President Slocum, of Colorado, wove the different strands of the meeting into a harmonious whole in his admirable address on the prison as a great charity, using charity in its broadest sense-the charity which, believing in the higher destiny of the human race, works toward the transformation of paupers and criminals into men and women who may become valuable to human society. A prison system based on this optimistic view would lift its administration out of politics, would introduce industrial labor as a regenerative force, and would give the worker, even in prison, a share in the proceeds of the work which he performs, that his selfrespect might be increased from a knowledge that he could render to the State something like a fair compensation for his maintenance. Of course Dr. Slocum laid stress on the indeterminate sentence as the necessary foundation for the best work. The National Prison Association meets next in Cleveland, with Warden Wright, of Pennsylvania. as President. Delegates to the International Prison Association to meet in Brussels next summer

were elected. The memory of Mrs. Ellen C. Johnson was honored at one of the sessions in a worthy manner. In addition to a brief sketch of her by her friend Mrs. I. C. Barrows, who was with her when she died, there were warm tributes from F. H. Wines, F. B. Sanborn, Charles Dudley Warner, and others, showing how wonderful was her work and how remarkable her own character.

Agricultural Prosperity

Mr. Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture, who has lately returned to Washington from the West, declares that our farmers are now enjoying unprecedented prosperity. He says that crops in the Mississippi Valley are the heaviest ever grown there, that Kansas will produce four hundred million bushels of corn, that Nebraska's yield is estimated at three hundred and sixty millions, and that Iowa and Illinois will have record-breaking crops.

Throughout the Western country feedinganimals are scarce and dear. Heavy exports of corn will result, our great balance of trade will be maintained, and ready money will be brought back to the producers. Agriculture and horticulture are exceedingly prosperous in the mountain States and along the Pacific coast. Our total wheat crop will be short of last year's figures, but all other crops will be superabundant.

Mr. Wilson is authority for the statement that the State of Iowa has a hundred and thirty million dollars idle in its banks, and that other Northwestern States are similarly provided with surplus deposits. All this money came from the soil. Not a dollar of it to-day can be lent in the West, says the Secretary, even at five per cent. interest; indeed, some farm loans are being made at four per cent. Mr. Wilson believes that this present prosperity in agriculture has come to stay. He declares that it is based upon conditions of permanent success in the operation of farms and upon economic laws regulating the prices of farm products, and that there is nothing ephemeral or spasmodic about it. The great Mississippi Valley, he adds, will continue its ratio in the production of staple goods, and will increase it as scientific knowledge of farm management becomes more general. What is true of that section ought to be measurably true of other agricultural communities.