polls, and it is the duty of every man to
try to understand them. For if these questions are not intelligently
settled, they will be settled by the ignorant, and the result will be
very bad.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. People sometimes think
that, because our national government is called a republic, and we have
free schools and free libraries and other such free institutions, our
liberty is forever secure. Our government is indeed a wonderful
structure of political skill, and generally runs so very smoothly that
we almost think it will run of itself. Beware!

In order that the government of the nation, of the state, of the city
or the town shall be properly administered, it is necessary that every
citizen be watchful to secure the best officers for its government.

USEFUL INFORMATION

The great obelisk in Central Park, New York, is one of the most noted
monoliths in the world. It was quarried, carved and erected about the
time of Abraham, to commemorate the deeds of an ancient Pharaoh. Five
hundred years later the conquering Sesostris, the bad Pharaoh of the
Bible, carved on its surface the record of his famous reign.

Now Sesostris, or Rameses II, reigned one thousand years before the
Trojan war, so that all the symbols now seen on the obelisk were
already very old in the days of Priam, Hector and Ulysses. The Roman
poet Horace says that there were many brave men before Agamemnon, but
there was no Homer to put their valiant deeds in verse. Sesostris was
an exception. He escaped oblivion without the aid of Homer, and the
figures upon the hard granite of Cleopatra's Needle tell us even now,
after more than thirty-five centuries, of the reign of that remarkable
king.

LESSON LIII

THE SEA AND ITS USES

It is a common thing in speaking of the sea to call it "a waste of
waters." But this is a mistake. Instead of being a waste and a
desert, it keeps the earth itself from becoming a waste and a desert.
It is the world's fountain of life and health and beauty, and if it
were taken away, the grass would perish from the mountains, the forests
would crumble on the hills. Water is as indispensable to all life,
vegetable or animal, as the air itself. This element of water is
supplied entirely by the sea. The sea is the great inexhaustible
fountain which is continually pouring up into the sky precisely as many
streams, and as large, as all the rivers of the world are pouring into