total revenue of the Province of Ontario is produced by the lumbermen, it seems mere justice on our part and the part of our Government that as many of the benefits of civilization as possible should be put within their reach. The total revenue of our Province is at present about $3,750,000; of this $1,376,000 comes from our woods and forests. Of this revenue $46,000 has been set apart annually for library purposes, but up to the year 1900 not one dollar had been expended for the benefit of the men who brought this revenue into the treasury. The Government now offers a dollar for every dollar spent in books and papers by a public library board. It would surely be no more than just that a similar offer should be made to the isolated workingmen of our country, that is, where a reading camp is provided for that purpose. "What is needed and what is fair is the diffusion of education, not the education of a privileged class alone."

"The average boy," says Mr. Fitzpatrick, leaves the public

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school from the third reader, but there is no good reason why_his education should end there. Provincial Governments give large grants in hundreds of cases schools where the average attendance is from five to fifteen pupils, while camps of from fifty to two hundred men have no provision made for education." This, he thinks, should be remedied. Instructors are absolutely necessary in the camps if the work is to make satisfactory progress.

Why should not the Public Libraries Act be so amended as to aid in supplying books, papers, and magazines, and in the provision for evening classes in the reading camps and club-houses? This would encourage employers to engage teachers, and it would encourage teachers to go to the camps, and relieve the congestion of the teaching profession in the older parts of the province. At present scores of young men teach school for much less than unskilled labourers earn in the woods and mines. Thousands of isolated

labourers are willing to learn. It seems a pity that these classes could not in some way be brought together.

It is cheering to note that so many employers have entered heartily into the spirit of the work. Not a few have had reading camps or club-houses constructed, of which we give some illustrations. The travelling libraries have, it is true, their work. But their work is not final. They are only intended as a forerunner of the permanent library; their mission is to develop a taste for reading in localities where there is no permanent library, and thus lead to its establishment.

The argument that the camps are moved too often to make advisable the building of reading rooms and permanent libraries has a most substantial answer in Mr. F. H. Clergue's construction of portable buildings for that purpose. Besides, a more conservative system of cutting timber is now being advocated. That is to say, the forests would be cut periodically like har

vests, only at longer intervals This would mean the constructing of better roads and a greater outlay in making the shanties more substantial and comfortable.

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Of the needs of our lumbermen our own Chancellor Burwash says: What our noble, hardy men of the woods require first of all is salvation from the deteriorating influences of their peculiar isolated life; and that influence is most of all felt in their idle moments. By giving them good, interesting, healthy books you will give them healthy thoughts, and so purer conversation and better moral foundations; and upon these alone can a true and abiding religious life be built."

"Ralph Connor" (the Rev. Mr. Gordon) is this season opening a reading and recreation room in a mining camp. It is hoped that church bodies and the public in general will assist the movement and that an amendment will be made to the Public Libraries Act, providing grants for instruction in reading camps and club-houses.

mother or sister, and of the better influences of home.

We have been too much accustomed to look a little scornfully upon the young lumberman coming out of camp and squandering his hard-earned wages in the saloon. But it might be better to look a little more carefully into the influences that made him thus. It might make us a little more sympathetic if considered the conditions that have so weakened his character as to make him an easy prey to temptation. He comes out of the woods, where no refining influences have touched him for months-only the solitude of the North lands, the grey trees The church and winter clouds. doors are closed. Music echoes and lights shine under the blinds of the houses he passes. But he has no place there. What is even the wad of money in his pocket? It does

The efforts of the W.C.T.U. and the Lady Aberdeen Association, as well as those of Queen's University, seem to have been much appreciated in this connection. In the beginning of the work three reading camps were built merely by way of experiment. These proved of so much value to the employers in making the men more satisfied with their condition and in maintaining better order in the camp, that last season, which was only the second in the history of the work, there were in all twenty-seven read.ing camps supplied with books, daily and weekly papers, magazines, games, etc. In one camp the foreman's wife has undertaken to act as teacher. One cannot overrate the influence of a woman's presence on the life of the camp. The very sound of her voice will be a daily reminder of wife or

we

not give him warmth and light and companionship. But down there at the corner saloon-there is light and laughter and cheer, and there is a place for him. And so he flees from the darkness to the lightfrom the silence of the woods to the laughter of men.

But if that solitude had been filled with the thoughts of great souls; if the greatest thoughts of the greatest minds had been instilled into his nature out there in those winter evenings; if he had formed a taste for reading and study; if his soul had been thus fortified, how much weaker would be the attraction of the saloon's buffoonery! It is just here that the Church as well as the Government has a duty to perform. Here is an open door through which we can reach fifty thousand of that class and reach them all the more effectively because of their isolation and their needs. The litera

ture put into their hands, the thoughts given them, will make all the deeper impression because of the surrounding solitudes. Many of these men, indeed the majority of them, are young men. We could not surely ask a better opportunity for developing among them strong and manly characters. We have too long forgotten them.

Yet these men have a most important part to play in the work of this young, giant nation. There is no small honour due to the men who fell our forests. They are the advance-guard of civilization. While we stretch ourselves in our Morris chairs and wile away an evening hour reading tales of the days of knight-errantry, there are tales just as heroic and thrilling enacted every day in the old commonplace lumber-shanty. It is said the death

THE CLUB-HOUSE, COPPER CLIFF.

his

and accident rates of the lumbering, mining, and railway construction camps is as high as it is in the British army in time of war. The knight of the battle-axe is gone, but the knight of the broad-axe is still with us. And we have turned away, indifferent to his conflicts; we have not gone down to loosen his helmet or minister to wounds. Future generations will tread where he has cleared the lands; they will put paragraphs of eulogy in our histories, as we have done for our predecessors. But "the bushman's" horny hands will long have been folded. We are glad that there is such a movement on foot to-day for the amelioration of his lot. We are glad there are those who seek to strengthen the fibre of our nation by lighting the lamp of knowledge for the minds

How bright Thy lowly manger beams! Down earth's dark vale its glory streams.

The splendour of Thy night

Shines through all time in deathless light.