icture. But the general view can scarcely fail to be tolerably
correct. Take, then, the sketch of social life as it appears in some
half dozen of the most popular prints from week to week. You will be
sure to find the better features grievously blended with others
fearfully distorted by evil. There are blots black as pitch in that
picture. There are forms, more fiend-like than human, photographed on
those sheets of paper. Crimes of worse than brutal violence, savage
cruelty, crimes of treachery and cowardly cunning and conspiracy,
breach of trust, tyrannical extortion, groveling intemperance,
sensuality gross and shameless--the heart sickens at the record of a
week's crime! It is a record from which the Christian woman often turns
aside appalled. Human nature can read no lessons of humility more
powerful than those contained in the newspapers of the day. They preach
what may be called home truths with most tremendous force. From this
record of daily crime it is only too clear that universal suffrage has
had no power to purify the society in which we live. If no worse, we
can not claim to be better than other nations, under a different
political rule.

This admission becomes the more painful when we reflect that in America
this full freedom of fundamental institutions, this relief from all
needless shackles, is combined with a well-developed system of
intellectual education. We are an absolutely free nation. We are, on
the whole, and to a certain point, intellectually, an educated nation.
Yet vice and crime exist among us to an extent that is utterly
disgraceful. It is evident, therefore, that universal manhood suffrage,
even when combined with general education, is still insufficient for
the task of purifying either social or political life. The theoretical
infidel philosopher may wonder at this fact. Not so the Christian.
Great intellectual activity, and the abuse of that power for evil
purposes, are a spectacle only too common in this world. Look at the
present condition of the most civilized nations. Of all generations
that have lived on earth, our own is assuredly the most enlightened, in
an intellectual sense; mental culture has never been so generally
diffused as it is to-day, nor has it ever achieved so many conquests as
within the last half century; and yet mark how comparatively little has
this wonderful intellectual progress accomplished in the noble work of
improving the moral condition of the most enlightene