gives it security against spoliation or sudden and wide changes of values, which, among other social conditions, become the fruitful sources of both poverty and crime. It may avail but little practically to plead for the relative moral and social superiority of country life over that of cities; but in a problem of social science so large a factor may not be disregarded.

Among the most alarming of the social aspects of the times is the evident general loosening of the ties of domestic life, and the small value that is attached to the family relations. Marriages are shunned by the cautious, often at the cost of personal purity; or they are contracted thoughtlessly, to be followed by wretchedness, abandonment, and divorce. Children break away from the restraints of home at ages when these are most needed; or perhaps they are freely dismissed by their parents, that they may plunge into the whirlpool of "business," with the godless and maddening influences of the outside world substituted for the needed protection and discipline of home life. Under this influence comes also the demand for the enlargement of "the sphere of woman," which means, in fact, whatever any may intend, that instead of caring for and illuminating the sacred precincts of the household, and guiding their own families, women shall take the places that nature intended only for masculine force and toughness,-that little girls shall learn trades,—that misses in their teens shall be put on exhibition in salesrooms by day and lodged in vast dormitories by night-orphaned, in fact, at an age when orphanage is most to be deprecated—and that an abler and more educated few shall forego all the special advantages and responsibilities of their sex and social positions to struggle with men, gentle or coarse as may chance, in professional life. The blighting effects of all this on the morals of society are not merely matters of speculation; that crime should increase among such conditions is inevitable; and side by side with this mad crusade for "woman's rights"—often, but not always, manifested in the same person-is witnessed a departure from both the faith and the moralities of Christianity, by which the salutary restraints of religion are taken away and the public conscience vitiated. While it is not believed that there is any general falling away in either the belief or the practice of religion, it is painfully evident that in certain social classes there is such a defection, and that this is operating most disastrously among those so affected.

The influence of intemperance in stimulating every form of vice and in promoting criminal action must be accepted as a constant quantity in the social problem. Drunkenness is not only itself a form of criminality, in certain conditions legally recognized and punished as such, but it is also an ever-present force to quicken and augment every other species of criminality; and although there may be no relative increase of this vice in the country, yet among certain classes there is evidently an increase, and from these classes, which are steadily recruited from the unhoused and unprotected youth and young people of our cities, come a very large share of all our criminals; and as the only partially effective prohibition of the

liquor traffic in certain States or lesser localities have uniformly been followed by a large decrease of crime, we may reasonably infer that its total and universal prohibition would proportionally diminish the fearful aggregate.

The remedies for the evils we are considering must be as various as the causes out of which they spring. Generally we need a better state of public and private morality-better government, improved prison discipline, less squalid poverty, better homes for the poor, more adequate primary education, better adjustments of the industrial interests of the country, a higher standard of political ethics, less drunkenness, less Sabbath desecration, and, to comprehend the whole in one, more of the religion of Christ wisely exercised in unselfish goodness in behalf of all classes and conditions of men. After all, there is no new specific for these modern epidemics of crime; they can be checked and extirpated only by the power of religion.

FOREIGN, RELIGIOUS AND LITERARY.

THE INTERNATIONAL POSITION OF THE POPE.-A prominent publicist of Germany has just given to the world a treatise on the above subject, which is attracting considerable attention, both from its solid character and the timeliness of the theme. It is written with calmness and good judgment, and although, of course, from a Protestant stand-point, it seems very free from any endeavor to treat the matter with other than logical consistency.

The introduction opens with an historical development of the Romish Church, the papacy, and the temporal power of the pope; the latter assuming that this power descends to him from God. For centuries the popes assumed to be only the successors of St. Peter; but by Innocent III. they were declared to be the vicars of Christ and God on earth. But it was one thing to make this claim, and a very different one to enforce it; and the author gives us a long series of facts, proving that down to Pius IX. they never relaxed their claims, though they often could not maintain them. In the famous Syllabus of the latter pontiff it is expressly denied that the Romish popes had ever exceeded their powers in assuming rights over temporal princes.

According to the Curia, this omnipotence of the pope has always existed, but in the Middle Ages it could not always be exercised, because of the rebellious spirit of sovereigns. The well-known Bull of Boniface VIII.-the Unam Sanctam--was burned by an executioner in Paris, and its publication in Spain was prohibited under pain of high treason. Frederick II. of Prussia assumed to control the Catholic peasants of Silesia, and the Bourbon courts of Europe forced the dissolution of the Order of the Jesuits. In Austria Joseph II. assumed the place of the pope, and granted to the Roman pontiff no supreme authority.

Then came the era of the concordats or papal treaties, many of which the author declares were illegal because not ratified by the popular will in legislative bodies. But the more the power of the popes increased the greater became in certain quarters the opposition. The quarrels between popes and councils, and the apostasy of entire nations, closing with the French Revolution, left the papacy in the most abject weakness.

The restoration of the papacy after the fall of Napoleon I., with all the restoration policy of that period, is to be regarded as but little more than an episode; and it was reserved for the third Napoleon to assist the kingdom of Italy in displacing the pope from his temporal throne.

The difficulty now in treating with the papacy arises from the difference between its actual position and its claims, one of the latter being that it has the right of international protection in its struggle with Italy. Against this position the latter country protests with great vehemence; and no power just at present would dare to interfere in the matter. And the position of the author of the work in question is, that the papacy has politically no international rights. The rejection of the modern state on the part of the Curia is logically correct from its stand-point, and indeed necessary to the position that the pontiff has rights over sovereigns and nations. The claims of the two parties are diametrically opposite, and they must therefore collide. The question will consequently, for the time being, continue to be settled as it has been in the past—namely, by the right of might. In the meanwhile the pope will continue to affirm that the spirit of revolution, destruction, and anarchy now abroad among the nations arises from their neglect of his advice and appeals.

"FRANCE IN CANADA" is the title of an interesting article in the last number of the "Revue Chretienne" by the French author and lay worker among the Protestants of France, M. Réveillaud. He is well known among us from his recent visit to this country in the interest of the Reformed Church of France.

He narrates in a very clear and succinct way the result of his experience and thought in regard to the French of Canada, whom he finds to be several centuries behind the age. He is much surprised to see that the French of to-day are as subservient to their priests as were their forefathers at the time of their emigration-paying their tithes, accepting the clergy as their guides in all family matters, and the controllers in the elections. The journals of the country which have tried to break this intolerable yoke have lost most of their subscribers.

Réveillaud explains this remarkable and growing power of the Catholic clergy of Canada about as follows: When New France was ceded to the English, Canada was decapitated, in a social and intellectual point of view, by the departure of the principal families of the country, and the return of the most of the civil functionaries and commercial notabilities to France. But the priests, to whom the treaty of Paris guaranteed all their former privileges, as well as their former tithes, remained, and became the prominent men of the province. They had soon, therefore, the

sole direction of the French population that remained fixed to the soil. They then began to reign without protest over a people who saw in them the representatives of their nationality and institutions. In proportion as the English and Protestant element entered the colony the Canadians gathered more closely around their priests and their churches, and Catholicism soon came to be considered as the palladium of their national independence. Now this same phase of Catholicism soon developed a spirit of routine and reaction, under the influence of which the character of the people became weakened. This spirit has shackled not only all literary growth, but even the free development of trade and industry, and kept them far behind the age.

THE CRIMINAL CLASSES IN FRANCE are a source of great trouble just now, which the deputies are trying to meet with a law for relapsed criminals or "old offenders." The sympathies of the turbulent classes are, of course, always in favor of the criminal; and no festivity of a national character occurs without an effort on the part of the Radicals to have a lot of hopeless fellows pardoned out of prison to return and annoy society and the government. This evil has grown to such an extent that there are said to be in Paris at present no less than thirty thousand of this class, whose occupation is to advance from crime to crime, and become a sort of prison tramps.

The evil has thus grown until it has become unbearable, nurtured to a great extent by the legislators themselves in the endeavor to gain popularity and votes. For instance, the wretches convicted of the most barbarous crimes of the days of the Commune in Paris were scarcely safely landed in the penal colony of New Caledonia, in the Southern Seas, before a political clamor was made for their release. The tocsin was sounded with such vigor that in a little while the authorities consented to liberate the least criminal, and then went a step and still another step further until at last the vilest of the leaders were again in Paris ready to wave the red flag and scatter the kerosene. Enormous sums had been expended in sending them away and then bringing them back again, only to form an audacious band of agitators ready to do and dare any thing in the line of social revolut on and destruction.

But at last the crisis has come, and these relapsed criminals form so dangerous an element of the population of the French capital that something must be done to shield the community and the State from these vampires. Therefore for some time the Chamber has been busy in the discussion of a bill to become a "Law on the Recidivistes." In the outside discussion of these matters the French Protestants are taking a great deal of interest, and the well-known Pasteur of the Oratoire, M. Robin, treats the matter very thoroughly from a philanthropic stand-point in the columns of the "Revue Chretienne."

The trouble now seems to be the danger of making the law too sweeping and severe, as it would pronounce the punishment of perpetual banishment against several categories of individuals who hardly deserve such severe

treatment, namely, vagabonds and beggars. M. Robin appeals for a distinction between the villainously criminal and the lazy and helpless. The latter he would have sent to reformatory institutions, with a view of reclaiming them by enforced labor; and would reserve the fearful penalty of perpetual banishment for the incorrigibly criminal and dangerous classes. He argues with great eloquence that a properly managed prison may be made a shelter and school, and a blessing to many who should be retained where they may have the means to effect this good purpose, rather than to send them to distant colonies to die, and be lost to a country that really needs their presence and their power. The discussion unveils some peculiar points in French national and criminal life, and especially the fact that banishment from France is to a Frenchman the most cruel sentence that can be put upon him. Many of them would rather be executed in France than suffer deportation to distant and lonely islands.

"FREE MISSION PREACHING" is becoming quite popular in Saxony, where, until very recently, the Established Church looked with horror on any unauthorized Christian work among the masses. But the regular preachers found that while they were pouting and neglecting the great crowds that collect in the industrial centers of that country, other Christian workers went among the rough and uncouth, the poor and lowly, and obtained a hearing and attention. In the first place, as a certain report relates, the Methodists went among them several times, remained for a considerable time, and held meetings that were largely attended. This was especially the case in the town and district of Planitz. More recently the Baptists have gone in there and successfully engaged in forming congregations and crystallizing their work. These facts proved to the satisfaction of the liberal Lutheran preachers that the said district was very favorable soil for what they call "free mission preaching," and accordingly a popular pastor of Dresden was invited there to do mission work among the people, and endeavor to retain them in the Church.

Pastor Seidel had evidently learned a lesson from those who had spurred him to the work. He laid aside his dignity, hired a large dancing-hall, obtained some popular hymn-books, and was rewarded with a large audience whose coarseness or indifference was overcome by the novelty and the attractiveness of the scene. He chose popular themes, such as "Divine and Human Love," "Belief in the Child, the Youth, and the Man," and "A Look beyond the Grave." The discussion of such subjects in popular and homely style and language made him an acceptable visitor, and his hearers listened with respect to allusions to some of their vagaries, such as pasturing in the foreign fields of the sects and even of spiritism. The scene of these labors is the seat of a large contingent to the socialistic vote of the country, and which sends a good many members to the Saxon Chambers; and any influence that can be brought to bear on these men to make them more loyal to the country, to religion, and the family is well spent. It is very clear that the German State preachers throughout