and linen mills of the world do not rush
to take possession of it. _It is a Niagara Falls already
harnessed for use._ All the textile fabrics could be
manufactured here _cheaper than in any other part of the
universe_. The time will come when this will be recognized, and
natural gas will be extinguished by _the giant gushing wells in
Dakota_."

This vivid writing, this rhetoric of artesian force, may be the result
of an editorial fancy that has long bestridden a western boom, instead
of tame old Pegasus; but, leaving out the manufacturing prospectus,
there can be no gainsay of the statement that, with a million acres of
the opulent Dakotan soil under the brilliant Dakotan sun, tended by two
thousand artesian wells, the great drouth belt of the Northwest would be
the richest agricultural area in the world.

REVOLUTIONARY MEASURES AND NEGLECTED CRIMES.

BY PROF. JOSEPH RODES BUCHANAN.

There is a crime which has run in wild unbridled career around the
globe, from the most ancient recorded time, beginning in barbaric
tyranny and robbery of the toiler, advancing with the power and wealth
of nations, and flourishing unchecked in modern civilization, sapping
the strength of nations, paralyzing the conscience of humanity,
impoverishing the spirit and power of benevolence, stimulating with
alcoholic energy the mad rush for wealth and power, and making abortive
the greater part of what saints, heroes, and martyrs might achieve for
human redemption. But alas! such has been its insinuating and blinding
power, that it has never been opposed by legislation, and never arrested
by the Church, which assumes to obey the sinless martyr of Jerusalem,
and to war against all sins, yet has never made war upon this giant sin,
but has fondled and caressed it so kindly that the pious and
conscientious, believing it no sin or crime, have lost all conception of
its enormity, and may never realize it until an enlightened people shall
pour their hot indignation upon the crime and the unconscious criminals.

This crime which the world's dazzled intellect and torpid conscience has
so long tolerated without resistance, and which antiquity admired in its
despotic rulers, splendid in proportion to the people's misery, is that
misleading form of intense and heartless selfishness, which grasps the
elements of life and happiness, the wealth of a nation, to squander and
destroy it in that OSTENTATION which has no other