twenty barbarous tribes, speaking to each in his own dialect wherein he was born. To do this it was necessary to encounter a climate so near the equator that a European was reckoned to be able to exist in it only three months of the year. To secure the confidence of his savages he threw himself greatly into their power. His wont was to row in as far as might be and then swim or wade ashore. With his own hands he taught pupils to sweep and care for their rooms; to print and to weave nets. With his own hands he made them garments and performed all menial work, that he might thus lead them to the lowest stage of civilization and show them the nature and the dignity of work. To win their entire trust, this high-bred Englishman, the cultured and fastidious child of a nation that lugs its bath-tubs across every desert and up every mountain the round world over, chose and firmly kept the horrible solitude of close companionship with barbarism, lived among filthy and fetid cannibals, lay down at night in a long hut side by side with forty or fifty naked savages-wildest, beastliest mould of heathendom-and rose up in the morning to shape this dreadful mass into the likeness of God.

And when his work had begun to reveal itself, when he had rescued from their beastliness a group of Christian pupils, loving, lovable, intelligent, devoted to himself, and joining sympathetically in his work, what happened? Labor-ships, ships seeking labor, and commanded by white men, came from afar, decoyed his humble people on board, pretending that the bishop was there, put them under the hatches, and sailed away. After that there was danger. The islanders could not always discriminate between the missionary whites and the kidnapping whites. But the greater the danger the more steadfastly the bishop persisted in landing alone, whenever it was not certain that he was well known and there was fear of attack from the alarmed and exasperated natives. Like his Master, his kingdom was not of this world, and, therefore, also like his Master, he would not let his servants fight. And so one day his dear pupils found his boat afloat in the lagoon, and in the boat lay the bishop, dead, with a smile on his face, with a palm-leaf fastened with five knots on his breast, and under the palm-leaf five wounds.

Each wound was the vengeance for a stolen friend.

Christianity is at present the crowning religion of the world, and it is carrying the good news to the new Free State on the

Congo; but the same small vessel in which a Lutheran missionary sailed, carried over also one hundred thousand gallons of New England rum. The evil thus poured into it from the enlightened world threatens to overwhelm all the good which is but slowly transferred. Five years ago, liquor was unknown among tribes which are now perishing under its ruinous influence, and that liquor comes to it, not from heathendom, but from Christendom.

In the heathen nation of India, a missionary, still actively engaged in disseminating Christianity, declares that "the destructive influence of Western civilization is at present far more manifest than the renewing power of Christianity. A critical and scientific education, which trains the intelligence and not the will, has succeeded in upsetting altogether the religious faith of multitudes, and with it many moral and social restraints, a condition of things which, if uncared for, must bring blight and death upon the nation."

In the Parliament of Cape Town, Africa, not long ago, a bill was reported to be introduced, placing restrictions on the sale of brandy or "Cape Smoke" to the natives. But the farming legislators, most of whom are engaged in the manufacture of brandy, and all of whom are loud in their professions of Christianity, strongly objected. If the natives, they said, were really men, they were not to be treated as children. They were to be left to their own discretion as to how much they should drink. As soon as this restrictive bill was defeated, another bill was introduced giving the natives the franchise. It was at once opposed and defeated by the same members, on the ground that the natives had become sots and were not fit to be citizens.

If the religion of the heathen world is to be adjudged wholly and always corrupt, because Paul denounced the unrighteousness which he found in Rome, in Corinth, in Athens, and among the foolish Galatians, by what token shall a religion be accounted divine whose faith hardens into formula, whose children for greed will imbue their hands in the blood of its martyrs, whose professors will carry shame and degradation, ruin and death to the heathen with swifter feet than it carries to them the good tidings of great joy meant for all people? Is it for a religious system which bears life in one hand and death in the other, to cry out that all other systems had no life in them because they had the savor of death? GAIL HAMILTON.

THE ANTHRACITE COAL POOL.

WHAT terms of condemnation are too severe for combinations to control the supply and enhance the price of the necessaries of life? Imagine that the capitalists engaged in the transportation and distribution of breadstuffs should decide that bread is too cheap. To remedy that unique evil, they combine the transportation routes of the country; gain possession of all the wheatraising lands; cut down the wasteful and extravagant production of 400,000,000 bushels of wheat to 300,000,000; and by that means advance the price of flour from the ruinously cheap level of $4.50 and $5 per barrel to $6 and $7; enforcing upon the consumer on one hand, the lesson that he can subsist on less bread when his money will only buy three-fourths as much flour as formerly, and upon the laborer who raises the wheat, the practical demonstration that he must accept whatever wages may be allotted him. There is no doubt that such a plan might maintain an ideal prosperity for the capital engaged in it; but there is still less doubt that all the rest of the community would perceive in it a grave attack on their rights and welfare. Bread riots, insurrections, and plans for the redistribution of land which such schemes have provoked in ancient times are conceded by modern enlightenment to be blameworthy mainly for the ignorance and violence which made such protests injurious to popular welfare, rather than effective in abolishing the abuses that provoked them. Fortunately the production of food in this country is too vast, and the methods of transportation too varied, to permit a monopoly of food. Twenty years ago, we might also have thought that the laws of commerce were too well understood and the principles of justice too powerful, for the possibility of such schemes. But the success since then of projects differing from this only in the degree of their apparent impossibility, forbids us to longer rely upon

the conditions of our social system, as a guarantee against combinations to monopolize the necessaries of life.

For the question is getting itself asked in rather imperative tones: How much better is it to tamper in this way with the fuel of the people, than with their food?

Substitute anthracite coal for wheat and flour in the above imaginary case, and it is a mild summary of the combination to which Governor Pattison of Pennsylvania, and his Attorney-General, recently directed their attention. This alliance of railway interests was described by Mr. Lloyd in a former number of the NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. It has been told that five railroad companies, engaged in transporting this fuel from the mining regions of Pennsylvania, consolidated their control by first gaining the ownership of seven-tenths of the anthracite coal lands, and finally uniting their action to restrict the total output of coal, allotting to each company a stated percentage of the arbitrary total. Mr. George's recent articles also included a graphic picture of the condition of labor in the anthracite regions under the rule of this combination.

The latest manifestations of this railway alliance induced the Governor of Pennsylvania to invoke the action of his AttorneyGeneral, holding that such combinations are opposed to the general welfare, and violations of the Constitution of Pennsylvania, which declares that "all railroads and canals shall be public highways, and all railroad and canal companies common carriers;" that every one shall have full right to the transportation of property over them, without discriminations; and that no common carrier shall be interested "in mining or manufacturing articles for transportation over its works." This official assertion that the combination of railroads is illegal, oppressive to the individual and subversive of public policy, has elicited some not very consistent rejoinders from the gentlemen managing these corporations, some of them declaring that there is no combination but only a tacit understanding, while others acknowledge its existence but justify it as a device to keep up wages by keeping up the price of coal.

That the denial of the combination is only a pro forma plea in the court of public opinion, is shown by the words and acts of these gentlemen among themselves in administering its affairs. The Secretary of the combined companies writes to the officers of

the Pennsylvania Railroad expressing the wish that the latter corporation "should unite in the policy of restricting the output of anthracite coal." Meetings of the managers of these companies have been held at stated periods for years, with the result of limiting the production for one month to 2,500,000 tons, for another to 2,750,000 tons, and another to 3,250,000, at the same time advancing prices in one case 35c. per ton, in another 15c., and in another, "after considering the question of advancing prices," concluding not to do so until November 1. The effect of these frequent consultations was to maintain an arbitrary restriction of production several hundred thousand tons less than was actually sold in the same months of the previous year, for the undisguised purpose, by means of that artificial scarcity, of establishing an advance of 50c. per ton, with the hope of even higher prices.

The claim that this advance in price brings an advance to the wages of the miner, is best answered by the facts. No increase has been given to the miners on account of the late advance in prices, and Mr. Lloyd's article two years ago told how the early form of this combination vetoed an advance in wages by the device of prohibitory freight rates on the shipments of the private mine owners who had granted it. The dry statistics of census and labor reports also tell a startling story of the effect of this corporate union on the labor under its control. The United States census report on "Wages and the Necessaries of Life" shows that in the first decade of the combination, the average weekly wages of the miners were reduced 361⁄2 per cent., while the retail price of coal in Philadelphia only declined 163 per cent. The Pennsylvania Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, in the early years of the present decade, that the average cost of all labor represented in a ton of coal mined and ready for shipment was $1.06 to $1.10 per ton, while the retail price in Philadelphia was maintained at $6.00 to $6.50 per ton. A table of the comparative cost of mining, published by one of these corporations in 1878, shows the reduction in the five years previous to have been nearly 60 per cent. If this were all, it would be a sufficiently severe commentary on the claim that this policy keeps up wages; but there is more behind. For the scheme of benefiting labor by restricting production issues orders by circulars that, "the anthracite coal interests have agreed upon a suspension of coal mining" on specified dates, aggregating two working weeks of a single month, and that, "it is essential that the min