hey are
not to be trusted. Look at our institutions and see what we are
doing for the poor. Study statistics and see how comfortable they
are!"

This is the word of a recent correspondent of a Podsnapian turn of mind,
who proceeded to present facts and figures bearing out his theory. And
on a Sunday shortly after, he was confirmed in his faith and greatly
strengthened and comforted by words from a popular preacher, long owner
of a popular pulpit, who, standing there as the representative of a
master whose message was to the poor, and who turned to them from the
beginning, as the hearers who alone could know most truly what meaning
the message bore, spoke these words:--

"Moreover, all this hue and cry about so much destitution and
misery and the unscrupulous greed of employers is groundless. I am
convinced that more than one half--yes, fully three quarters--of
the pauperism of which you heard so much in the late campaign
exists only in the minds of the Georgeites. The picture drawn of
New York's misery is over-colored, and its inspiration is in the
distorted imaginations of the George fanatics.... The rum-holes are
the cause of all the misery.... I have been watching for
thirty-five years, and in all my investigations among the poor I
never yet found a family borne down by poverty that did not owe its
fall to rum."

This most extraordinary statement, from a man who in one year alone
could not have listened to even half the appeals for help likely to have
come to him in his position, without discovering that death and disaster
in many forms played, if not the chief part, certainly that next in
order to rum, can be accounted for only on the ground that a hobby
ridden too hard has been known to bear off at the same time both the
common-sense and power of judgment of the rider. Prohibition appears to
him, as to many another, the only solution; the gospel of negation the
only gospel for rich or poor. Since the Church first began to
misinterpret the words of its Founder, since men who built hospitals
first made the poor to fill them, the "thou shalt not" of the priest has
stood in the way of a human development that, if allowed free play, had
long ago made its own code, and found in natural spiritual law the key
to the overcoming of that formulated by men to whom the divine in man
was forever unrecognized and unrecognizable.

This is no place for the d