ng rich resources it
neglects to develop them; a productive soil but niggard crops. Amidst a
veritable Lebanon of forestry it has shanties for homes; with coal
deposits that are the envy of the world, its shivering women in
stoveless hovels attempt to defend themselves about their domestic toil
with coarse homespun shawls and slat-bonnets. In an age that has
harnessed mechanism, beast, and steam to the plow, scythe, sickle and
flail, these owners of mountains of iron and mines of power still
indolently vex a grudging soil with tools of such barbaric simplicity
that their intrusion is scarcely more than a provocation to weeds.

Here is needless poverty in the lap of potential wealth, thriftlessness
in the face of every seeming stimulus to diligence. Here is a
diversified landscape that should inspire and a climate that should
invigorate, but in place of vivacity and health we find apathetic
endurance and intrenched disease. Scrofula and its parasite kin are
domesticated in the debilitated blood, and pills, calomel, and death
jointly contend for the prolific cradle, and even when temporarily
defeated succeed in transforming childhood into unlovely age, without
the long interval of intermediate active, zestful manhood.

And yet, pitiful as is this exhibit of deficiency, these Highland
dwellers are none the less men and our brethren. Slavery robbed them of
their lands half a century ago, and roughly shouldered them off into the
mountain wilderness dowered with the pauperizing maxims of oppression,
notably the indignity of toil, and their shrewd native mother-wit has
been left to rust to dullard loss in the absence of schools worthy the
name; worse still, their natural devoutness has been warped by unworthy
shepherds, till superstition, bigotry, and gross immorality have taken
fierce possession of many a society, hearthstone and heart. If to-day
the schools are inefficient and some of the preaching blasphemous; if
self-satisfied idleness has turned over this mountain realm to want and
the slavery of low living, and (as ever) made woman at once the servant
and the victim of its barbarism, it is but another historic count in the
awful indictment of human selfishness. And all these crying deficiencies
are but make-weights with our conviction of responsibility to this
mountain flock of God, that often has been misled and unworthily
sacrificed.

The only problematical element in this matter is the measure of our
faith in God a