fied in saying to their neighbors, "You must either pay us two dollars and a half a day for our work or else support us by your charity."

It will not be possible to furnish work, this winter, to all who will need relief. That is the thing to aim at, and the nearer we can come to it the better. But the need is so unusual and so urgent, and the machinery of relief is in most places so new and inadequate, that we shall sometimes be compelled to give aid to those, whether willing or unwilling to work, for whom we cannot find employment.

The establishment of soup houses and charitable bakeries for the gratuitous distribution of food is the first impulse of many kind-hearted people; but experience proves that the injury outweighs the benefit. It may, however, be safe and wise to establish soup kitchens and cheap restaurants, where nutritious food can be sold at cost. The relief committees might establish such kitchens, in connection with their industries, and pay for their work in orders for food.

The relief committees will, of course, undertake some sort of investigation into the circumstances and needs of applicants. Those who are new to this business will imagine, at first, that they are getting, in a single hurried interview, the truth concerning the applicant; there will be evidence enough of poverty; and the explanation of it will be plausible; but after a few months' experience it will be clear that considerable acquaintance is necessary in order to deal wisely with most of these families. One of the facts most commonly concealed is the existence of relatives who are able to afford the necessary relief and who ought to be shamed into doing so. In many ways the relief committees will find the problem of helping these poor people becoming more and more difficult the longer they study it. Probably it will soon become clear to them that no temporary organization can dispose of the business which they have in their hands; and that there ought to be in every considerable town a thorough systemization of the business of charity. In some of our cities the business has been pretty well systemized, and these cities are much better prepared to meet this emergency than those in which no such organization exists. Yet even here the work of charity organization has been sorely crippled by the sentimental skepticism of multitudes. It has never been possible to convince a great many wellmeaning people of the mischief wrought by indiscriminate and misdirected almsgiving. The attempt to combine the charitable workers in such a manner as to prevent the growth of pauperism is always resisted and ridiculed by a class of effusive philanthropists, who have very little practical knowledge of existing conditions. In cities where the charities are well organized, and where every case of want could be promptly attended to if the applicant were sent to the central office, the majority of the citizens still persist in giving to tramps and beggars at their doors. It is to be hoped that this winter's experiences may throw some light upon this matter, and that the peo

ple of this country may come to some realization of the magnitude of the task which confronts them indealing with the evil of increasing pauperism. It is to be hoped that in communities where the charities are already organized a more cordial co-operation of societies and churches and all philanthropic agencies may be secured; and that in communities where no such organization has been attempted the need of it will be clearly seen. For in dealing with this emergency a great many people are likely to discover that we are confronted with something worse than an emergency; that the acute disorder is terribly complicated with a chronic complaint; and that a thorough course of constitutional treatment is clearly indicated.

There is no room here to discuss the nature of the remedies. I think that they are likely to include: 1. The abolition of gratuitous, official, outdoor relief.

2. The care of the helpless and friendless poor, who are dependent upon the state, in infirmaries, hospitals, almshouses and orphanages.

3. The establishment of work-houses, to which all able-bodied and chronic mendicants should be committed, with interminate sentences. These incorrigible idlers and tramps need a thorough course of reformatory treatment. A work-house to which they can only be sent for brief terms of a few weeks or months is a doubtful good; they should be kept in confinement until their bodies, which are generally saturated with alcohol, are renovated and brought under normal conditions; until they have received some necessary industrial training, and until there is some fair assurance that they will become, if discharged, producers instead of parasites.

4. The provision of some kind of relief institution in every community, in which persons in temporary straits may obtain employment, and support themselves by their labor. It is vastly preferable, I think, that such relief institutions should be organized and managed by private charity; but, as I have already said, it is far better that the municipality should furnish work to able-bodied applicants for aid than that it should support them gratuitously for any length of time. The invariable rule of such relief institutions, whether under public or private management, should be to furnish work that is not particularly desirable, at low wages. The compensation offered should be distinctly less than is given for the same kind of labor in the market.

The thing to be aimed at is this: To enable every able-bodied person to obtain the bare necessaries of life by his labor; and to prevent abled-bodied persons from obtaining a living without labor. Our charities will not be properly organized until both these ends are practically secured.

When all this is done there will still be ample scope for Christian benevolence in ministering to the sick, the infirm and the helpless poor, who ought not to be permitted to become a charge upon the state, but should be cared for in their own homes.

I. THE MIST OF CENTURIES AND

WB

OF SONG.

WHATEVER grudge the New World may bear the Old, for its heritage of ill, it cannot complain that it is stinted in the counterbalancing dower of reminiscences of its romantic past. In the midst of the metallic clink of the coin on the counter and the eager babel of operators in the markets, echoed and magnified by the journalistic sounding boards of the press until the atmosphere seems vocal with dollars and cents, can be heard now and then stray notes of melody from out, "the purple past, the dusk of centuries and of song." These wandering echoes of the clarions of the bygone time come and go like the breath of the zephyr on the Eolian harp. Sometimes it is a name, a place, a date or a person which unloosens the latent music of the world, but whenever it is heard it carries us back in imagination to the vanished centuries which poet, novelist and historian have irradiated with their genius, until they glow with the splendor with which the dawn illumines the Eastern sky.

The name of the present Governor-General of Canada is one of the keys which unloose these chords of the fairy music of old romance. When I was in Chicago the boardings blazed with the ornate posters announcing that a popular actor would shortly appear in one of the theatres of the city in his famous impersonation of Richard the Lion Heart. To-day there lives in the Government House at Ottawa, the direct lineal descendant of the warrior whose arrow slew King Richard before the castle of Charles in Perigord. A chasm of seven centuries yawns between the fatal shot of Bertrand de Gourdon and our own day, but it is bridged by the history of a single family; and the soughing of the Canadian wind amid the pines seems to bring with it far-away echoes of Blondel's song and the fierce clash of Christian sword on Moslem helm in the Crusaders' war. The legendary origin of the Gordons of Haddo, of whom Lord Aberdeen is the living representative, does not lose its value from our present point of view because its authenticity is a subject of antiquarian dispute, or because there are authorities who trace the Gordon genealogy much further back than the days of the lion-hearted Plantagenet. Antiquaries question everything, and if the Gordons were in Aberdeen before the Norman William conquered England, that in no way detracts from the romantic interest that associates their name with the tragic fate of one of the few English monarchs whose story has become an heirloom of the world of old romance.

If the family history of Lord Aberdeen recalls the

minated manuscripts which still attest, in European museums, the glory of Celtic art and the ancient splendor of the Irish race. And among the heroes whose exploits furnish the illuminations to the gilded page, the O'Neills occupy a leading place. They were, it must be admitted, no friends of the English. Nor, indeed, was it possible for them to regard the invader as other than the common enemy of their family and of their race. Had there been a few more O'Neills in Ireland, the course of the history of that distressful isle might have been very different. But the axe and sword and musket thinned their ranks, and although the story of the O'Neills is as fuel for the brooding imagination of the patriot, it resembles all other Irish histories in its record of unavailing valor and of the pathos of despair. In these later days, however, the cause of Irish liberty and Irish nationality has found a repre

sentative in Lady Aberdeen, who from her position in the inner arcanum of British rule may be able to do more for her country in the council chamber than any of her stalwart ancestors were able to achieve for Erin in the tented field.

Apart from the associations of legend and of ro mance that cluster round the family history of the Governor-General and his wife in the dim twilight of the remote past, it is interesting to note that the associations between the Gordons and the American continent date back for two centuries, to a period antecedent to the great schism by which George the Third rent the English-speaking world in twain. John Gordon, of Haddo, was created a baronet of Nova Scotia by Charles Stuart, King of England, and the baronetcy is one among the many titles borne by the Earl of Aberdeen.

Sir John Gordon was a Cavalier of the school of Montrose. When the Scottish people were signing the Solemn League and Covenant with their heart's blood Sir John was fortifying his castle and sharpening his sword, and mustering his fighting men to help the King to govern by right divine. The fates and the Scottish people were, however, too much for Sir John and for his royal master. When the Marquis of Argyle besieged him in his castle of Kellie his Scottish artillerymen, having no stomach for the cause, deserted to the army of the Covenant and Sir John was compelled ingloriously to surrender. There was short shrift in those days for the vanquished. Sir John Gordon was carried as a prisoner to Edinbro, and in the same month of July that Oliver Cromwell on the moor of Long Marston gave the royal army the foretaste of the quality of his Ironsides Sir John Gordon was judicially condemned to death and publicly executed. The lesson was a severe one, but the effect seems to have been most salutary. From that time to this, although his descendants may have described themselves as Royalists, Jacobites or Tories, they have always been true to the cause of liberty, of justice and of progress.

Of this a more conspicuous example was afforded in the person of the first Earl of Aberdeen. Five years after the first Nova Scotian baronet went to the headsman's block the axe of the executioner was employed on the neck of Charles Stuart, but after a time the whirligig of time brought about its revenge, and the son of the beheaded king, having come to the throne, made the son of the beheaded baronet first Earl of Aberdeen and Lord High Chancellor of Scotland. Argyle went to the scaffold, and the Cavaliers, once more in the saddle, pursued their old enemies without ruth. They found, however, that their Lord High Chancellor brought too much conscience to his work to serve as the tool of mere proscription. The Privy Council, finding some difficulty in striking at the heads of some of the Whigs, issued orders that husbands and fathers should be held responsible by fine and imprisonment for the opinions of their wives and daughters. Lord Aberdeen, to his credit be it spoken, declared from the judgment seat that the orders of the Privy Council could not be carried out under any

the rest of his life in retirement. He was, however, sufficiently free from Jacobitism to take the oath of allegiance when Queen Anne came to the throne. He was said to have been the solidest statesman in Scotland, the first of a line of which the present Governor-General is no unworthy representative.

It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that the Aberdeens descend solely from the conservatives or aristocrats of the world. Lady Aberdeen owes her family name of Marjoribanks to the grant of certain lands made by King Robert the Bruce to his daughter, Marjorie, who married the High Steward Johnstone, whose family in time substituted the name Majoribanks for their own more prosaic one. But not only is Lady Aberdeen associated by her ancestors with the patriot hero of Scottish history, there is in her family story one of the most romantic incidents which occur seldom far from that mystic borderland of old romance which divided England from Scotland. Among her ancestors she counts the famous Grizel Cochrane, whose reckless daring saved her father's life. It was in the last years of King James' reign and Grizel's father, Sir John Cochrane, of Ochiltree, was lying in Edinbro under sentence of death. All efforts to secure his pardon failed. The death warrant, signed in London, was forwarded by mail to Edinbro; on its arrival Sir John was to die. Despair gives courage to the most timid, and Grizel Cochrane, seeing that there was only one chance left, seized it with intrepidity. Disguising herself as a highwayman she waylaid the Royal mail, an 1 clapping a pistol to the driver's head compelled him to give up the death warrant. As soon as she possessed herself of the fatal document she rode off and soon had the pleasure of thrusting it into the fire. Whether out of consideration for the heroism of the exploit or because of the Revolution is not stated, but Sir John was ultimately pardoned.

Lord Aberdeen also boasts a Grisell among his ancestors, who, by the way, makes him a direct descendant of John Knox. Among all men born on Scottish soil there is none greater or more universally esteemed than the great Reformer. Lady Grisell Baillie married the son of Robert Baillie, the martyr, who was John Knox's great grandson. Lord Aberdeen's grandmother was Lady Grisell's great granddaughter. Robert Baillie was one of the martyrs for Christ's Crown and Covenant, whose sufferings have done so much to glorify the history of Scotland and to dignify the Scotch character. It is a very pretty story, that of Lady Grisell and of her visits to the martyr as he lay in the Tolbooth waiting for death. It has features which suggest that Grisell was the original of Robert Louis Stevenson's latest heroine. Grisell played her part faithfully and nobly. She could not save Robert Baillie, but her heroism and beauty won the heart of his son George, whom she married after the Revolution of 1688 had made it safe for honest folks to marry and be given in marriage. Lady Grisell was a poet as well as a heroine, and fragments of her minstrelsy to this day enliven the hours of the Scottish peasants.

II. THE PRIME MINISTER. The most notable name among all the ancestors of the Governor-General is that of his grandfather, Earl of Aberdeen, Prime Minister of the Queen in the middle of the present century. How great and good, how ideally perfect a character he was has but recently been revealed to the world. In the useful and interesting series of the Queen's Prime Ministers which Mr. Stuart Reid is editing the most interesting volume is that which Sir Arthur Gordon has devoted to the story of the Earl of Aberdeen. It is a narrative which tends to deepen and reassure our faith in human nature, and especially in the native virtues of the English-speaking race. The discovery of a great personality is to the historian what the finding of a nugget is to the miner who is prospecting for gold. To come upon a pure lump of metal lying in an out of a way place is of much more importance than the intrinsic value of the particular nugget. Its importance arises from the fact that it suggests the presence of other nuggets of equal value which have not yet been discovered, but may be revealed in that gold bearing stratum. You rise from the perusal of Sir Arthur Gordon's monograph feeling that the world, and especially the British public, is richer in human worth and almost ideal goodness than you suspected before you turned over its pages.

Lord Aberdeen as Prime Minister closed his official career amid the dark clouds and sombre discouragement of the Crimean War. Owing to that unfortunate circumstance by which he was overwhelmed in a catastrophe that he had in vain endeavored to avert, his real merits as a statesman were overshadowed, and it was not until his son's biography appeared that men began to appreciate the greatness of Lord Aberdeen as an imperial statesman. The memory of such a man and the story of the services which he was able to render the Empire is a perpetual incentive to his grandson, whose shoulders are not unequal even to the burden of the heritage of so great a name. Lord Aberdeen before he was 30, had to play a part in the history of Europe which is without a parallel. He was sent as special emissary from England to the camp of the allies when coalesced Europe was rising to throw off the tyranny of Napoleon. During the whole of the campaign which culminated in the Battle of Leipsic and the triumphal entrance of the allies into Paris Lord Aberdeen was the intimate adviser and trusted confidant of the Emperor of Austria and of most of the crowned heads of Europe. Seldom had a young man so great a rôle to play, and seldom has any one fulfilled so difficult a part with so brilliant a success. Nature and education had alike fitted him for the position. A rare scholar, familiar with modern languages, at home equally in court and camp, of a transparent sincerity and simplicity, which enabled him to command the confidence of the sovereigns and statesmen with whom he was thrown into constant contact, Lord Aberdeen contributed as much as any man to the success of the great European revolt against Napoleon. In his son's pages we catch glimpses from time to time of this high spirited, chiv

alrous Englishman living in the midst of alarms of war and in the very vortex of the intrigues of half a dozen rival courts without ever betraying the confidence of a friend or sacrificing for a moment the interests of his country. Had he done nothing else Lord Aberdeen would have conferred an inestimable service upon the cause of liberty and national independence by the part which he played in that campaign.

The Gordons have often distinguished themselves in early life. One of the same family fell on the field

GEORGE GORDON, FOURTH EARL OF ABERDEEN.
Memorial Bust in Westminster Abbey.

of Waterloo a Lieutenant-Colonel and a K. C. B., when he was only 23 years old. Lord Aberdeen had been taught statesmanship as a boy at the table of Pitt and Melville, in whose homes he had spent his youth, and who had besides inherited a great tradition of public service broken only by a single link. He had, moreover, been steadied by the responsibilities of the management of his estate at a time when other young men have barely left the university. This, however, is not the place for telling the story of Lord Aberdeen, the Prime Minister, excepting so far as it bears upon the prospects of Lord Aberdeen, the Governor-General. As Foreign Minister, as Colonial Secretary and as Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen

had as much opportunity as any living man in shaping the policy of England, both in Colonial affairs and on the continent of Europe. It is interesting to note, in view of the position which his grandson holds to-day, that the most conspicuous feature of his administration of colonial affairs during the short time he was at the Colonial Office was to draw up instructions to Lord Amherst, whom he proposed to send as High Commissioner to Canada with powers not only to investigate but to settle in the most liberal manner the grievances of the colony. Although Lord Aberdeen was a Conservative and Foreign Minister of the Duke of Wellington, he always set his face as a flint against the doctrine favored by Lord Palmerston of interfering in every possible way short of military force in the affairs of other nations. In like manner, although he was a peer and a member of the permanent majority in the House of Lords he opposed without hesitation what he considered the Duke of Wellington's dangerous policy of throwing out the measures of the Reform Administration. Notwithstanding this, the leadership and management of the Conservative party in Scotland was forced upon him by the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel, who assured him that he had become "the standard of our colonial policy as you were before of our foreign policy." Despite his preoccupation with foreign affairs, he was statesman enough to see that the destruction of the Scotch Church was inevitable unless action was taken to promptly meet the demands of those who subsequently constituted the Free Church of Scotland. His advise was disregarded until it was too late.

During his second term of office as Foreign Secretary it fell to his lot to arrive at two important decisions of vital importance to the Dominion over which his grandson is now presiding as representative of the Queen. When he entered office the relations with the United States were somewhat dangerously strained owing to frontier difficulties and Canadian troubles. He sent Lord Ashburton to Washington on a special mission to adjust the difficulties between the Empire and the Republic. The frontier line which secured British Columbia for Britain was Lord Aberdeen's handiwork. Lord Aberdeen had proposed in the first case to refer the disputed question to arbitration. But President Polk took a high line on the subject and declared that the rights of the United States to the territory in dispute were so clear and unquestionable that he was determined to take active measures to vindicate American rights. Lord Aberdeen was the last man in the world to deal in bluster, but he was not to be bluffed by the President, and in the House of Lords he stated that Britain also had rights in the disputed territory which were clear and indisputable, and these rights, with the blessing of God and their support, he was fully prepared to maintain. After this preliminary defiance on each side, a compromise was drawn up by Lord Aberdeen, and ultimately approved of by the American Senate. By this means British Columbia was secured to the British Empire. But although Lord Aberdeen was very