it found expression in the life and teaching of Christ? "The poor ye have always with you." Yes! But in what sense? An English statesman, not long deceased, said that affairs of State were for the handling of sovereigns and statesmen. Not only were they so in days gone by. They were also handled entirely in the interest of sovereigns and statesmen. The poor were too often the mere implements handled by those in political or in social power for the advantage of the powerful. The exploitation of humanity was not confined to the Southern States of the Great Union. Whatever the French Revolution may have done in the way of shattering the institutions of a single nation, and thereby leaving it a long lease of anarchy and misrule, it was the vigorous assertion of the rights of humanity "as humanity." It taught the useful lesson that these masses cannot be for ever suppressed that they may even at times burst out with volcanic violence, and bury with lava streams of terror many a fair valley of luxury and refinement. When this came about, sovereigns and statesmen, in their limping fashion, were reluctantly compelled to bethink them of a pill to cure the earthquake. Many pills they have tried, but the seismic symptoms have not sensibly improved. Still the strange alarming

mutterings from beneath may be heard; and statesmen are sorely perplexed to know how to quiet them. Slowly but surely, however, they are being brought by the tutorship of fact to see that the great function of the modern state, as Christ taught nineteen centuries ago in His revelation of the ethic of nature, is that of ministration. The cunning of diplomacy, the prudent economy of a nation's resources, are not ends in themselves, as statesmen have mistakenly thought; they are only means to the great end of all social activity-how to make the unfit fit to live, how to co-operate with the Supreme Power in realising the ethical ideal in the life of the nation by incarnating it in the life of the individual. And so the question which more than all others troubles the mind of our still bewildered politicians, is, what are we to do with our proletariat? A practical friend, for whose judgment I have much respect, thus at some length expresses himself:

"Is there any comfort to be got from the fact that only some 2 per cent. of those who are destitute are both able and willing to earn an honest livelihood if they got the chance? The remaining 98 per cent. are either persons who have not the ability to earn a decent living, or sutlers of the careless and criminal type, who hang,

for purposes of plunder, upon the skirts of the industrial army. It may be feared that not a few respectable people do take comfort to themselves that such is the true state of things, and have a feeling that it absolves them of all responsibility. There is a lurking thought which almost ventures into the daylight of consciousness in the garb of the familiar but not very charitable expressions-Serve them right;' 'If people will not work, they deserve to starve.' The instinct of retribution, which has received too much countenance from past legislation, stifles the still small voice of charity that would fain dictate a milder judgment. Men are too apt to look down on the proletariat with as much anger as pity. Inveterate individualism compels us to regard every man as more the master of his destiny than he really is. It is difficult to realise the truth that moral disease may be as little caused by a man's own volition as a typhoid fever or a consumption. In one case, it may be the outcome of an inherited tendency. In another, the contagion may have been caught in circumstances from which there was no escape. Or the poison may have entered the spirit in an hour of fancied security, as the Prince of Wales caught typhoid fever when he was the honoured guest of a noble family. It is

not by a direct act of volition that any one belonging to the proletariat class is where he is. Criminals of the Jackson type, who practise burglary as a fine art, and are impelled to gratify their hobby at the peril of their life, are exceptional characters. The great mass of the idle, the thriftless, and what we call the confirmed criminal class are the melancholy wreckage that has been flung upon the beach in the ebb and flow of the great ocean of life. They have often as little control over their destiny as a wavetossed spar of some goodly ship that once took part in the traffic of the ocean highway. To one who penetrates through their tattered outer garments of mal-odorous behaviour and provoking imperviousness to friendly counsel, the fact that no less than 98 per cent. are unable to seize a chance of rescue, if it were presented to them, is more fitted to melt the heart to deeper pity than to harden it to censure. So-called wilful crime is, perhaps in all cases, the result of moral disease. It would be as sensible to introduce into our hospitals the discipline of the treadmill, as to approve of our too commonly practised moral therapeutics. That the men will not do any better is the most melancholy fact of all. It is the most formidable symptom of the disease. It declares that the enemy

we have to cope with is no temporary disturbance of the spiritual organism, but is in the spiritual constitution of the class, and that mere repression of the symptoms, however necessary in a measure it may be for the safety of others, will only, in the case of the principal sufferers, aggravate the malady.

"If such is a correct diagnosis of the proletariat case, what ought to be the course of treatment? Not doses of indiscriminate charity. These are the mischievous sweetmeats with which good people gratify their easy good-nature by administering them to patients whose ready acceptance is no more blamable than the careless offer. Neither must we accept the American quack remedy of nationalisation of land by a great act of 'appropriation,' which would certainly commend itself to the poor proletaire as having a wonderful family likeness to the familiar doings of certain of his more unfortunate brethren. Homoeopathic treatment of a moral ailment would be a dangerous experiment. But the further risk of magnifying the pilule of moral poison to the dimensions of Mr Henry George's patent article, and administering it undissolved, is one which will not be countenanced by the faculty. Suppose you have succeeded in 'appropriating' some ducal park, and have transported thither a