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[ \ d HE NEED of reform in the local governments of our country is felt by all good and patriotic people. caped public exposure of official Few Of our largest cities have es- corruption—and so general is the disease that we discover its symptoms in the smaller communities also. Even the na- tienal government is not free from scandal. At the present time while congratulating New York on its recent deliverance from a despotism of crime and venality, we are mourning over the exhibitlon of civie decadence in the ring-ridden city of Phila- delphia, and wondering at the failure of the great state of Pennsylvania to make ef- fective protest at the shameful invasion of local rights by tyrannical central authority. We read in the magazines the thrilling stories of ‘““I'weed Days in St. Louis,” “The Shame of Minneapolis,” “Pittsburg, a City Ashamed,” “Philadelphia Corrupt and Con- tented"—we read in the proceedings of the National Municipal league these equally ap- palling stories, and we add for ourselves titles of other suffering cities in nearly all parts of the land. Thinking men are look- ing for the cause of this epidemic, and are searching anxiously for a cure. The disease had its season of greatest growth in a long period of indifference and carelessness, wherein nobtody gave heed to the growth of dishonesty, and the alliance of crime and officialism. This period we trust is coming to an end, for in every city and community may be found a slowly awakening civic pride and a more or less numerous body of reformers. It is beginning to be realized that to Le- tray one’s oath of office and to barter the community's interests for personal gain is treason, and that an extension of the evil, or even the tolerance of its present condi- tions means danger to national life and glory. The movements to reform local BOvV=- ernments have in many cases been spas- modie and unintelligent, and often they have moved by combinations or fusions of discordant elements, some of which were anxious only to be “IN."” These movements have not been grounded as they should be on high and continuing moral and patriotic purpese and the:e- fore have not suported each other and have not persisted in themselves against epposition and defeat. There has not been @ more critical period in our national his- tory—nor a period wherein was mare greatly needed the highgst type of moral devotion and love of country, for in this time of prosperity, when we are not en- dangered by blows from without, the very richness of our growth is developing inter- nal rottenness, If we look fairly and speak truly, we are bound to admit that the conceded corrup- tion is not a mere growth of politics, but is rather an extension into polities of methods that are common in business life. Gross cvils are tolerated by business mea in their city governments because they are familiar with similar evils in busine s, Realizing the gravity and the exient of the evil, we lovk about for some extensive organized force through which we may deal with it radically, and instinctively we turn to the chureh. We have a right to turn to the church as a conservator of morals and a fountain of patriotism. We feel that it must be concerned with the ¢ ndi- tions in which the people live, in which characters are formed, in which the de- termining environments of life are estab- lished. It must be concerned with the govern- ment of a city, when that government makes compacts with thieves, gamblers and harlots and opens doors to hell on the public streets so that children and youth may stray therein and be lost. When we realize that governmental cor- ruption has its necessary root in business immorality and in individual laxity, we feel that a live church must know the facts and must put forth a worthy effort to correct the wrong. But truth compels the re- luctant statement that of all sleepy bodies the one which shows the slowest disposition to rise to the obvious opportunity and duty is the church—the very hody which by its foundation, its purpose, its size, its cr- ganization and its general diffusion over the land is best fitted for the task. Let us see what the church in the United States consists of: It contains 28,000,000 communicants. I has 374 out of 567 colleges and seminaries. Its young people's associations are large and enthusiastic. The Chrisiian Endeavor society (interdenominational) has nearly 4,000,000 members distributed among over 60,000 societies, Epworth league (Meth- odist) has nearly 1,000,000 members, The Young Men's Christian association has over 300,000 members. The Sunday schools, the By Frank Moss, President of Young Men's Hebrew association, the Young Women's Christian association, the Women's Christtan Temperance union, the socleties of the CathoMe church, the tles of the Protestant KEpiscopal church and many other smaller organizations arec num- erous and busy, Various denominations maintain publish- ing houses doing immense volumes of busi- ness, and they circulate many newspapers and magazines, (The Methodists alone have fifteem.) The great churches ae splendidly organized, maintain armies of preachers, teackers and workers and meet annually in conference and conventions, The young people's societies have great national gatherings with thousands of de'es gates They make herole efforts to evangelize the heathen The weakness of this grand army is in these two facts: (1) It is divided int which do not work in harmony, ) too many of the local churches arc mere religious ciubs, affording delightful associn- tions and rich privileges for the memboers, but not touching the life of the commun- Ity. This condition is not within the spirit and purpese of the founder of the church, which is in danger of losing its prestige and its rightful priviieges by the negleet of ils duty. Every church society should know thor- oughly the locality in which it is placed and shovld assume a responsibility for iis moral condition, especially as affecting the young, and for the conditions of life af- fecting the homes. Fvery church should go back to an earnest propaganda, and an in- dividual teaching of the principles of the ten commandments. ivery denomination should support its individual churct in these matters. Kvery church should preach business honesty and fair play, should in- sist on honest and faithful public service, and should put these matters as religious essentials. Here should be constant, per- sistent and earnest prayer for city, com- munity and nation—the enthusiasm of the church running into patriotism as well as religion—(patriotic prayer meetings and re- vivals if you like.) There should be national conferences of all religious bodies, for deliberation and prayer on subjects of national honor and uprightness, regardless entirely of political policies or preferences. This would bring life to the church and would help to bring purity to the nation. Until the religious ocle- forces of the country find the way to fras ternize and to attack these moral prob- lems, appropriately and effectively, the fights against corruption will be local and spasmodic, It is not meant that the church should seek to dictate methods or candidates or in any way to control public policies, but simply that, like other organizations of citizens interested in good government, it should be heard and felt for the right. Its deadness in almost every struggle for de- cency is incomprehensible, and its coming into the struggle ppropriately and with its splendid forces and resources would presage victory Fortunately we have an example of what a church may do, in the demand which Bishop Potter and his de nomination made on the then mayor of New York City, that a certain section of the city be made decent for women and chiidren to live in. Mayor Van Wyck re- fused to listen—and the appeal was so righteous, so forceful, so proper that it went straight to the hearts of the people and those of all rveligions and of no religion responded to the inspired leader- ship and delivered not only the district mentioned, but the whole city. The church is a moral organization, esch of its leading denominations covering the land and baving the means of combining thought and effort; and all professing prin- ciples which should permit a fraterniza- tion. 1t exists for spiritual and moral pur- poses and therefore its intelligence and its conscience should be specially acute teo general immoralities tending to vitiate the standards of living. . re is no body or set of sympathetic bodies which should be so sensitive and none which has such powers of opposition to general ovil Its indifference to thoe prevalence of shocking criminality in gove ernment is a plain indication that the con- science of the communities and of the nation s asleep—and [full deliverance, founded as it must be upon aroused and virile public conscience need not be exs pected in advance of the awakening of tha church. When its millions sing and prayy od Bless Our Natiye Land,” with ade=- quate fervor of spirit and consistency off life, a new era of good government and of civie advance will come to the nations New York City, What Caused the Ice Deluge ? (Copyrighted, 1903, by T. C. McClure.) HERE are two brothers that can- not survive separation—water and life. Water is a chemical composi- tion like a thousand others. It has {ts fixed limits of temperature, within which it remains true ‘“‘water,” the liquid thing that is so indispensable to life that no plant can drive its sap, no heart pump its blood without it. Zero—and the water freezes, becomes bard stone. All water on the globe frozen end the whole wonderful machinery of life would stop. Let us imagine the process deve loping slowly. The temperature sinks steadily. All clouds change into snow. Snow piles itself up not only on high mountain peaks, but everywhere. From all the heights slide ice rivers, glaciers. With tremendous violence the veins of ice burst within the rocks, fragmenting them. 8o it procceds until everything is omne flat field of ice, one single boundless Greenland. And in this ice les life, lies humanity, buried like the Siberian mammoths. Those mammoths themseclves played a role in the production of this mental pic- ture of a new ice period. A bit of the nineteenth century must be recalled. In its first half the world begun to learn strange facts. Far away from the moun- tains of granite, geology found vast blocks of granite lying in the flat lunds. Incredl- ble distances away from the glacier dis- tricts of today the hard rocks showed the characteristic bruises and grooves made by the sliding sole of the glacier. Even the lHmestone and seashell layers of the limestone hills near Berlin, in the flat north German plains, showed that a gigan- tic glacier once crept over them. > In the heart of Germany, France and England lay the bones of animals some of which still live in the iciest polar regions, like the musk ox, others of which have been preserved as corpses in the ice of the morth like the mammoth el®phants in north- ernmost Siberia. Old Alpine guides in Switzerland first uttered the belief that the earth once must have known a period of cold vas ly grea e than that of modern days, Goethe arrives at the same idea. At | Agassiz knots together the loose specul. tions and rounds out a picturc—the plc- ture of the *“glacial period.” But Agassiz himself still labors undoer the spell of Cuvier's teachings of gr at world catastrophes. He tells us that the Yast “great catastrophe before the appear- ance of man was not caused by red-hot lava #n the interior of earth, but by Herce cold, numbing i¢e. The mammoths were not boiied iIn scalding waves, but were hurled living into ice and snow and there froze mis rably into mummies, And, rince this was the last act before our time, it gave the world a hint as to what will happen to it. When the inner heat of the earth shall suffice no longer to seize us with fiery arms and devour us the ice glant wiil come. The winter of the Christ child, with the {cicles on the pine trees, becomes the angel of death for humanity, Agassiz has been dead for many years, and the teaching of the glacial perfod has undergone many alterations. In the first place, painful research, which heaped pebble on pebble slcw.y, proved at last that the glacial epcch constituted no gereral world catastrophe. At no time had the cntire earth Leen buried under universal ice, The ice did ocecasionally spread itself out much farther from the poles than it does tocay, so that certain great areas of north- ern Asia, northern Eurcpe and northern Amevica experienced a local glacial pertod to a certain degree. But it cannot be de- cided whether or not the ice swept simul- taneously from both the North and South poles. The glacial traces on the southern hemisphere of the carth need not neces- sarily indicate the same hour in world his- tory as do those of (ha northern hemi- sphere, Under any circumstances there remained room cnough for orgunic life. The mam- moth of Europe became extinct not be- cause tho ice Killed it, but because it wundered away and died out owing to the increased warmth of the earth, which it could not bear. And another creature that lived simul- taneously with the mammoth on the edge of the ice remained in the jand, accom- modated itself to new cenditions and sur- vived through the new time after the ice period as bravely as it had survived the fce period itself and probably a certain perfod before that. This creature was man In the glacial debris of the ice period lie his frst known remalins. And we can pe ive dimly that this mighty winter, instead of ng able to _ennihila the lid child of old nature, had piayed a most decisive part in the most important beginnings of its mental development. Per- haps it was that tremendous Christmas that gave man the gift of making fire by artificial means And with the red fire flickering on the hearth, ché genius to whom the mastery of earth was destined parted forever from the beast. The latest re h permits us to go a littie farther. It is possible that this great glacial period in the time of mammoth snd cave man was not the first of such phenomenon on the earth. It is possible that similar ice formations extended mysterfously in earlier epochs into warm lands. Tnis would take us back into the time of those high-trunked fern forests whose remains furnish us with our coal today, and further back still. But the eviaence is that ewen then the glacial periods were anything else rather than annihilating catastrophes. In the particular tirne wnen such an early period of ice occurred, at the end of the coal period, according to the belief of prom- inent students, a prodigious, crucial ad- vance was going on in the 1ife of animals Out of cold-blooded, lizard-11ke reptiles the warm-bleoded birds and murmmals were be- ginnirg to develop—animals that carried an equable, lasting supply of Reat in their own bodies, and in whose skin the lizard scales were changing to warm feathers, warm furs. And it was directly through this gift of warmth that the mental power of animals was increased immeasurably. Without it the development of man would not have been possible; man, who, later, in the next ice period, continued the progress of the uplifting power of heat by devising the means of fire and the making of clothing. BEver since man has haa the\picture of an ice period or of many ice periods before his eyes he has been geekIng for the cause of them. First there was a simple theory: that the earth, once red hot througmout, then with a cooling crust like a vast cinder, was heated for a long period by the hidden heat of its interior. This heat decreased gradu- ally until the first signs of the cooling of the old planet became visible with the be- ginning of the first glacial epoch, But this theory has been driven into its last lair. It has been ascertained that we living things in the earth's surface receive no heat from its interior. The most simple proof is in the polar regions. In the long months when they are cut off from the sun the surface sinks hopelessly into the grasp of killing cold. And if there should be no sun at all those regions woull be frozen hopelessly. Nothing re:ches them from below to save them. And what is true ‘“‘there is true “here.” And yet we in America, in Germany, in Asia have no polar cold, no ice period at present, and this “present’” dates back for many thousands of years., It i3 the sun that regulates our temperature It does it today, und it did it when the glaciers crept ever our level plains, In the sun we must seek for the cause of periodical jee times Lookirg roughly at the course of the earth around the sun, it describes a circle. That the world knows since Kopernikus, But the finer calculation of a Keppler as- certained that the path is more of the shape of the outlines of an egg. It Is am ellips: In an ellipse the sun does not stand ex- actly in the center of the course. The planet sweeps alternately a little nearer to, alternately a little farther away, from it. Still closer and nicer calculation brought the proof that this ellipse itself wa ceptible to still further oscillations, In the course of thousands and still thousands of years it approaches the true circle at times and at times exaggerntes its elliptical form. In our days the ellipse Is tame, The dif- ference hetween aphelion or sun distance and perihelion or sun-nearness, is slight in the course of a year. What the layman feels as the difference between summer and winter today i3 influenced only inrig- nificantly by that oscillation. 1t is ciused. by another thing, the position of the earth's axis, FFor some entirely subjective reason the earth stands oblique in its course, and owing to this its northern pole and its southern pole alternately turn away ob- stinately from the sun for months, anl thus receive either none or only weak, slanting rays. * But the ellipse does not appear to have been so tame always. It had extremes of oscillation, At times the vagaries must have interfered decisively with the course of the seasons on earth. The hemisphere of earth that happene? at such times to have winter, owing to the obliguity of the axis, must have received g0 little sun that finally there came a win- ter so flerce, so long, that the summer that followed was powerless to combat It, Under the conditions of today it would be the southern hemisphere that woul? suffer, for we in the northern hemisphere always have summer when we are in sun distance, But the position of the axis itself is also subject to periodical changes. We have exact caleulations to show them, The obliquity changes a tiny bit with every revolution of the old earth around the sun, In the course of a certain number of thousands of years this produces a con- dition diametrically opposite to that of today; the southern hemisphere will have its summer when it gets to sun distance, and the north will have winter then, Think now of a time, long thousands of years ago, when the lengthening of the ellipse had reached the extreme point. So it remained for thouvsands of years, for these great oscillations oceupy Immense periods of time, During these thousands of years the south pole and the north pole alternately, ENES (Continued on Page Fifteen.)