ing God. These, if faithfully prosecuted, will embrace the whole family in a golden circle for the study of God's Word.

EPWORTH LEAGUES.

Never were our Epworth Leagues doing a nobler work for Christ and his Church than to-day. Never was more prayerful study, more earnest effort, more kindly co-operation put forth than now. But they have not reached the full ideal of their full usefulness. They may exert an influence of untold power upon the young men and young women in our towns and cities, who through the exigencies of our industrial civilization are often severed from their homes and exposed to social perils and estrangements from the house of God. What is a young man or woman to do who has no place in which to live except a little seven by nine room, in an alien and often unsympathetic environment? It is the duty of the Church to act the part of father and mother to these homeless young people, to extend the hand of cordial greeting, to show a kindly sympathy and interest, to bid them welcome, not merely to the classmeeting or prayer-meeting, but to its social gatherings and entertainments. Hence the General Conference directed that wherever practicable church parlours for reading, music, rational culture, and social enjoyment should be opened.

Nor may the Church frown upon the desire of its young people for out-door recreation and athletic games. These will, under proper guidance, conduce to those twin essentials of moral wellbeing, a sound mind in a sound body. These will prove a powerful antidote to the saloons and pool rooms which too often spread their allurements and beguilements around the path of our youth. We are glad to know that in some of our churches these reading parlours and gymnasia are being organized, that in connection with others playgrounds are being prepared for the children of the schools and for children of a larger growth.

OUR SUMMER SCHOOLS

are annually enlisting increased numbers of our young people to seek the advantage of our college halls, and Biblical instruction and missionary inspiration. These possess the potency and promise of great spiritual blessing to our Church. Our college halls are filled as never before with eager young

souls who are coveting earnestly the best gifts, seeking the best training for life and its duties. Analogies of the Holy Club at Oxford, out of which grew the Methodism of the world, are not wanting in these institutions of learning. It is cause for gratitude that they are instinct with Christian spirit, inspired with missionary zeal, and better equipped than ever for the higher culture of heart and mind and brain of our young people. Many parents have made strenuous efforts, even to great self-denial, in the past to secure this precious boon of higher education for their children, and have been abundantly rewarded by their increased usefulness in the world. May their number be greatly multiplied.

No Church has provided more largely and liberally than the Methodist Church in this land sound and wholesome periodical reading for all classes of the household. We urge upon our people the duty of making the widest and wisest use of this provision. Amid the flood of fiction, frivolous and often pernicious in its character, it is the duty of parents to see that their households are well supplied with that which will interest, instruct and religiously profit their members.

SOCIAL QUESTIONS

The Methodist Church is not indifferent to the great sociological problems of the times, and an advance was sounded all along the line in the unending war against the liquor traffic, Sabbath profanation, the gambling spirit of the race-course, pool-room, and other forms of making haste to be rich.

There are some aspects of our national life that arouse deep solicitude. In the material prosperity by which we are surrounded we should not be full and forget God. If riches increase we should not set our hearts upon them. We should not in the greed for gain join in a chase for worldly riches at the cost of better things. We may not despise the plodding industry of our fathers, slow, perhaps, but safe and sure.

In the emphatic verdict given by the people of this province when the liquor bar was up for trial, the voice of the Methodist Church was heard in no uncertain tones. But the bar is still with us, and doing its deadly work. There must be no faltering nor failing till these death-traps, in which Canada's most precious treasures are lured and

limed, are for ever banished from our land.

A new evil has within a few years developed whereby even young children are sacriced to the Moloch of sordid greed. The deadly cigarette is poisoning the blood, dwarfing the lives and perverting the natures of children, often of tender years. The noble efforts of the Women's Christian Temperance Union to procure the suppression of this crying evil call for our warmest sympathy and most earnest co-operation.

The chief bulwark of our holy religion, the sanctity of the Sabbath, is being assailed at many points by the greed of organizations of travel and traffic. This must be guarded with greatest vigilance, and protected with most earnest endeavour.

cured. The greater dominance of the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule would remove these evils which estrange class from class, and man from man. No man liveth to himself. We are interdependent one upon another. Let the whole body be fitly joined together, and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, making increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.

The visits of Our vivacious and vigorous, and ever-youthful General Superintendent are always an inspiration and a blessing. His ardent optimism, his fervent loyalty to Christ and His kingdom, and to the Empire of which we form a part, create a kindred enthusiasm in those who hear his utterances. In a remarkable manner his visits to the Conferences, from Newfoundland to far Vancouver, and sometimes to Bermuda and Japan, maintain a uniformity of administration and a unity of feeling which are essential to the well-being of this farextended Church. The brethren go forth to their varied fields of toil, feeling that Methodism is a mighty unit, is a brotherhood the wide world over.

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A HUNDRED YEARS OF PROGRESS.

It was eminently fitting, says The Christian Herald, that the first national celebration, in connection with the World's Fair Dedication, should have been that of the Louisiana Purchase, which was observed on April 30th and the two succeeding days in the Exhibition City. That purchase, which gave the United States the vast territory now occupied by practically all the States bordering on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, was an event whose importance can never be lost sight of by posterity.

When Napoleon signed away France's American possessions for $15,000,000, the United States territory, which hitherto had been bounded on the west by the eastern bank of the Mississippi, was at once extended to include the great States shown in our map. At the outset of the negotiations, it was proposed to purchase only that part of the province of Louisiana which included the city of New Orleans; but the French Emperor, whose schemes of European conquest were then expanding to colossal proportions, himself proposed that the negotiation should include all the territory owned by France in the central part of the Western Continent -nearly a million square miles-very

-From The Review of Reviews.

little of which had been explored by the whites. This new turn to the negotiations opened up vast possibilities, and the rich possessions, of which France had once dreamed that she might make a second Canada, passed from her control. Napoleon foresaw the difficulties that would arise in attempting to hold so extensive a territory against the American colonies; but he could not have foreseen the mighty development that was destined to take place along the great Mississippi highway.

When this magnificent territory was added to the Union it was but little known. The upper Missouri had been visited by a few daring travellers, but the country was wild and filled with hostile Indians. St. Louis was a mere French trading-settlement, and beyond it all was wilderness. Two years after the treaty, a strong expedition visited the upper Missouri River, and returned with glowing reports of the character of the country. What was then a wilderness, nominally Catholic but largely heathen, has since become a cluster of Christian States. Populous cities and thriving towns and villages have sprung up on every hand; railroads bridge every stream and chasm, and tunnel the mountains; river transportation lines have opened up the country to com

merce along the waterways; the great fertile areas supply cereals to feed the nations, while a thousand varied industries swell the tide of commerce that flows through what a century ago was almost an unknown land.

It is impossible to overestimate the influence of this act of territorial expansion upon the fortunes of the nation. The Louisiana Purchase was a conquest of peace. Recognizing this fact, the French people are to be represented on a larger scale in the Exposition than any other country on the continent of Europe. There are no regrets, no recriminations, no aftermath of bitterness over France's lost possessions.

A CENTURY PLANT.

Our cartoon expresses the American idea of the value of their century plant. The price paid for this great purchase was fifteen million dollars, just the amount which was paid by the Hudson's Bay Company for the vast fertile area covered by Manitoba and

BURYING THE CLUBS.

John Bull and Ireland bury a few, and will set out the Irish Land Bill on their graves.

Amid Mr. Chamberlain's expansive ideas of empire building, the happy consummation of peace and prosperity in dear old Ireland is for the time overlooked. Our thumb-nail sketch shows how long-estranged friendship is being re-knit. The old foes are burying the hatchet and smoking, the pipe of peace.

BRITAIN IN WEST AFRICA.

Another kingdom added to the Empire, says the London Spectator. That strange "destiny" which drove a few English merchants owning a few square miles as trading stations to the conquest of the Indian peninsula appears to be again driving us forward in West Africa. Nobody that we know of deliberately designed the conquest of the vast regions which we describe by those two words. The British people as a body know absolutely nothing about it, not even its geography, and do not feel the slightest inclination when they hear that "Sokoto has fallen" either to cheer or to "maffick." The army regards victories there with something like dismay, lest they should imply the

formation of more stations in "Godforgotten holes," and the Imperial Government itself discourages expansion as much as the East India Company ever did. It is sick of its everaccumulating responsibilities, and does not supply its agents in West Africa either with sufficient troops or adequate resources for administrative expenditure. Nevertheless, the work goes forward. State after state passes, as if through some invisible compulsion, under British authority, and as it passes produces a situation demanding in the eyes of all local experts a fresh advance, till we are already responsible for fifteen kingdoms in West Africa, each with its history, and for a population which is greatly underestimated at twenty millions. There is little use in resisting the process, which is directed by some force, be it Providence, as we think, or Necessity, as others think, and no moral reason for doing it.

GOVERNMENT BY ASSASSINATION.

The Government of Russia has been described as "a despotism tempered by assassination." The saying is largely true of the turbulent southeastern principalities of Europe. Recently relieved from the tyranny of Turkey, some of them have fallen prey to the petty tyrannies, misgovernment, and oppression of its successors. "The smaller the cockpit the fiercer the fight," and the smaller the kingdoms often the keener the animosities, and more unscrupulous the strifes of rival factions.

All the world lifts its hands in horror at the wholesale massacre of the recently ruling house of Servia. Neither Alexander nor his wife Draga were model rulers, but their faults are largely forgotten in the hideous manner of their taking off. Such ruthless and reckless butcheries find no parallel in European history since the days of the later Roman empire and its still more degraded Byzantine

successor.

The question is, What will Europe do about it? Will it allow the enthroned assassin to defy the public opinion of mankind, or will it wipe out the Servian kingdom or annex it to some other more civilized nation. But for the conflict of rival races in the Austro-Hungarian empire, it would naturally gravitate to that country. Yet on the death of the aged Francis Joseph, chaos may come throughout his wide dominions. Our own personal observation of travel in both Bulgaria and Servia makes us feel that under Austrian rule they would reach a higher civilization than as independent governments. The tendency to integration of nations favours also this result.

TO RUSSIA.

This vigorous poem of Joaquin Miller's, says The Epworth Herald, is especially pertinent just now. Russia is reviving, with new and revolting cruelties, the race-hatred which has made the wandering Jew a shrinking, pitiful fugitive on every highway of the Old World. Meanwhile, Mr. Car