ing them, shallow troughs for receiving the bouquets, plenty of string, and scissors, and a few chairs completed the furniture of the room.

The great difficulty comes with the winter months, when distributing work among the tenements ceases, and the young potted stock must be cared for. Most of the young plants are given as prizes to the children of the many Industrial Schools connected with the society, and a floral festival once a year brings them back again as evidence of the care bestowed. On that day the mothers come with the children, and the spacious audience-room is filled with a mass of green. The girls succeed best, and show their specimens with pride. Often a severe winter kills their pets, but this is much less common since the use of self-feeding stoves began, which even in the coldest nights keep the temperature above freezingpoint.

Thousands of poor families now have their windows filled with beautiful plants. They have learned the art of propagating the hardiest kinds, and ivies, fuchsias, and geraniums flourish under their care. But there is always a lack of pots. Old tin cans with flaming labels, or small wooden boxes, take their place, but the plants can never thrive so well as in pots with proper drainage.

There are floral committees in many of the surrounding country towns, and there is growing interest in the work of flower missions. The season opens about the first of May with bouquets of wild flowers, and closes in November with gorgeous chrysanthemums.

Flowers come in all sorts of ways. Those who understand the work either make them in small bouquets or separate the varieties, laying them in flat baskets with layers of wet cotton batting between. Often they come in great bunches and must be sorted and made over.

Railroads and express companies deliver them free, and each year the interest increases.

Distribution is the heaviest task. City missionaries, Bible readers, nurses, and druggists throughout the poor districts, all co-operate in the work, and last year saw the distribution of over a hundred thousand bouquets and bunches of flowers among the sick and the poor. Four hundred towns in the vicinity of the city are contributors, and Smith, Amherst, and Vassar Colleges also send flowers. Not only hospitals of all sorts, but the homes for the aged and infirm are now included in the work of distribution.

Some donors make a specialty of one flower. Pinks come in profusion from one well-known name; and an unknown contributor, registered as the "pansy-man," sends in thousands of his favourite flower; while from another source, in one year, came eighteen hundred pondlilies. Fruit is distributed to some extent, but flowers seem most desired. Men in hospitals beg for pinks and look after the distributors with hungry eyes. Women prefer roses, and the children clutch at anything with colour and sweetness.

There are as many stories as flowers in this work. In one window of a rear tenement three geraniums bloom and show thrifty growth, which owe their life to the care of the three tots who daily take them to walk with a devotion which even the street Arabs respect. They march with them to Tompkins Square and sit in the sun till the pots are supposed to be charged with it. That they are giving themselves also a bath of healing and health does not suggest itself directly, but indirectly many mother has learned that, if plants would thrive, sun and air and water must be had, and has in degree at least applied the lesson to the little human plants in her keeping.

In the general distribution all

classes are cared for. From the sick child in hospital ward or stifling tenement-house, to the sewing-girl working through the long summer days on the heavy woollen garments that must be ready for the fall and winter trade, there is always the sorrow of the poor and the bitter want that is so often part of the tragedy. Not till one has seen how pale faces light, and thin hands stretch eagerly for this bit of brightness and comfort, can there be much realizatian of what the Flower Mission really does and what it means to its thousands of beneficiaries.

The poorest know it best. There is a grim tenement-house on Roosevelt Street where a pretty child, with drunken father and hard-working, patient mother, lay day after day in the exhaustion of fever. Nothing could rouse him, and the mother said sorrowfully, "He'll go the way of all the rest, an' I'm not knowin' but he'll be better off."

A city missionary, bearing her load of bloom from country fields and meadows, brought in a bunch of buttercups and laid them in the wasted little hand, which closed upon them with sudden energy. The dim eyes opened wide, and the dry little lips smiled faintly as the child looked at the pretty yellow flowers. All that Monday he held them tight, clasping them closer, and his mother tried to take them and put them in water. When he fell asleep she set them in a broken cup close to him, and he reached for them as soon as he awoke. Thursday the missionary, who came with fresh ones, found the withered stems still in the little hand.

On

"Sure I've done the best I could," said the mother, "an' kep' them in water whenever he'd give me the chance, but he won't hear to their bein' anywhere but just in his hand. They'll be the makin' of him, an' now he's willin' to eat, an' I'm thinkin', please God, he'll live after all."

The crippled children show the

same delight, carrying the flowers to bed with them, and watching the distributors with eager eyes. Prisoners in gaol, men and women alike, stretch their hands through the bars for them, and there are women whose life has altered utterly under their influence.

One is "Long Sal," well known as thief, drunkard, fighter, and general disturber of the peace; a powerful creature nearly six feet tall and with muscles of a man, who fought and bit when arrested, and had left her mark on many a policeman. Over and over again she had been sent to the Island, emerging sometimes to a period of hard work which she knew well how to do, and then relapsing into old ways.

Into the Tombs one day came the city missionary with some tiny bouquets, a sprig of geranium and a bright verbena, and "Long Sal" looked at her wistfully. The missionary had not meant to give her one. Indeed there had been no thought that she would do anything but throw them aside contemptuously. But "Long Sal" eagerly took them and retreated to her cell, from which issued presently a call for the matron. This patient and much-enduring woman, who ap

peared in due time, looked with amazement hardly less than that of the missionary at the new expression on Sal's blear-eyed, sodden face.

"I used to have great luck with slips when I was a gal," said " Long Sal." "Gimme a bottle or something with water in it, and mor'n likely this bit o' geranium will live."

The matron brought it silently, fearing to add a word, and Sal tended her geranium with devotion, sending it out regularly by the keeper for air and a sunning. It prospered, and as it grew something grew with it. When Sal's day of

release came she looked at the three new leaves on her slip as if each one were a talisman, and the matron said to her:

"When you are settled, Sal, and at work again, I will give you another plant."

Sal was silent, but as she walked away bearing the precious babygeranium she cast back one look at the matron, an inscrutable look that might mean a fixed intention not to settle down at all.

It is the truest things that carry often the most improbable sound with their telling, and so all are welcome to doubt the tale. But it stands on record that Sal, though yielding now and then to her old

temptation of drink, remained faithful to whatever pledge she had made the geranium, which grows still, a great plant, every leaf cared for to the utmost by the woman who was once the terror of the Ward. She is not a saint even now, but she is no longer a terror, nor is she alone in the experience which bears witness to what power dwells in beauty, and how even what looks most helpless at present may through the ministry of nature in flowers be reached in ways of which man has not yet found out the knowledge.

IT is Mr. Gladstone's conviction, derived, he says, from long observation, that the influence of the negative or agnostic spirit of the day has affected statesmen, "the class engaged in political employment," to a comparatively small degree. "Persons who are habitually conversant with human motive, conduct, and concerns," he says, "are very much less borne down by scepticism than specialists of various kinds and those whose pursuits have associated them with the literature of fancy, with abstract speculation, or with the study, history, and framework of inanimate nature.'

However this may be, it is certain that Mr. Gladstone himself is a shining illustration of a statesman who has been ever ready to champion the claims of the Christian religion, whether in reviewing a book like "Robert Elsmere," entering the lists with Professor Huxley, or crossing lances with Robert G. Ingersoll.

"In

Mr. Gladstone does not find that there is any disposition on the part of the world to abate allegiance to the Bible. deed," he exultantly exclaims, "it has been simultaneously with the undermining and disintegrating movement that the religion of Christ has assumed more visibly than ever a commanding position in the world." Dwelling upon this idea he contrasts the Bible with the other sacred writings of the world. Its claim to authority is absolute. It takes no notice whatever of these other writings. The God it proclaims is the only and the universal God.

"It is supremacy, not precedence," he says, 'that we ask for the Bible; it is contrast, as well as resemblance, that we must feel compelled to insist on. The Bible is stamped with specialty of origin, and an immeasurable distance separates it from all competitors. He proceeds in the following words:

"The Christian creeds, like the Scriptures as Christians in general hold them, teach the doctrine of the Holy Trinity; but this doctrine of the Holy Trinity presupposes, and is based and built upon, the doctrine of the Unity.

"Not only did those Scriptures teach the unity of God, but they taught with an emphasis, persistency, and authority such as no other work of any period or authorship has equalled; and the doctrine of the New Testament on this subject is really no more than an echo from the doctrine of the Old. If this truth was thus taught by the Old Testament in the Law, and the Prophets, and the Psalms, to the Hebrew race, and that through a long course of centuries, while it was everywhere else at least and more commonly denied, we have only to take further into view the generally acknowledged truth, that it supplies the only foundation on which the fabric of a pure religion can be reared, in order to make good, as among the old sacred books of the world, not only the superior, but, so far as regards the very heart, root, and centre of divine truth, the exclusive claim of the Bible. that au

"I do not, indeed, deny thentic traces of this majestic truth are to be found elsewhere in old books and old religions; but it is amid a mass of evil and

ruinous accretions, which grew progressively around it, and but too rapidly stifled and suppressed it. This, then, does not alter the parallel and even more undeniable fact, that it is in all these cases traced rather than recorded, recorded rather than taught, and, if taught at all, taught with such utter lack of perspicuity, persistency, and authority as to deprive it of all motive power, to shut it out from practical religion, and to leave it, through the long and weary centuries, in the cold sleep of oblivion or under a storm of overwhelming denial.”

In development of the same contrast between the Bible and other sacred books occurs the following striking passage:

"What may be held truly wonderful is that the Bible in a translated form seems not sensibly to lose its power. In Palestine, the Septuagint competed with the original Hebrew. In the English tongue, the authorized version bears, and has borne for centuries, the character of a powerful and splendid original. It has greatly contributed both to mould and to fix the form of the language. From Germany we hear a somewhat similar accent of Luther's Bible. In general, even a good translation is like the copy of some great picture. It does not readily go home to heart and mind. But who has ever felt, or has ever heard of any. one who felt, either in reading the English or other translations of the Bible, the comparative tameness and inefficiency which commonly attach to a change of vehicle between one tongue and another?

Is it believed that the Epistles of St. Paul in English have seriously lost by submitting themselves to be represented in a version? At least it may be said with confidence that there are no grander passages in all English prose than some of the passages of those translated epistles. Such is the case of the Bible in its foreign dress. I am not competent to pronounce that it loses nothing. But it retains all its power to pierce the thoughts of the heart; it still remains sharper than a two-edged sword: it still divides bone and marrow. It does its work.

"We turn to the other Eastern books. what a contrast they represent! Certainly the same opportunities have not been afforded them of operating through a variety of tongues which have been given to the Holy Scriptures. But Confucius and the Koran were translated into Latin in the seventeenth century; and in English they have been accessible for more than one generation. They each assumed a German dress

more than a century ago. The presentation of these books in the mass to the modern world is, of course, too recent to be dwelt upon. But the earlier facts show that, had these books been gifted with any of that energetic vitality which belongs to the Bible, a beginning of its manifestation would long ago have been made; whereas there is not a sign that any one of them is likely to exercise, beyond its own traditional borders, any sensible or widespread influence. They appear to sink into a caput mortuum, a dead letter. It is a sublime prerogative of the Holy Bible thus to reverse the curse of Babel. They, and they alone, supply the entire family of man with a medium both for their profoundest thoughts and for their most vivid sympathies which is alike available for all; and once more, in a certain and that no mean sense (so far, that is to say, as the work of language is concerned), they make the whole earth to be of one speech."

The following are the concluding words of Mr. Gladstone's recent article on the Bible:

"Who doubts that, times without number, particular portions of Scripture find their way to the human soul as if embassies from on high, each with its own commission of comfort, of guidance, or of warning? What crisis, what trouble, what perplexity of life has failed or can fail to draw from this inexhaustible treasure-house its proper supply? What profession, what position is not daily and hourly enriched by these words which repetition never weakens, which carry with them now, as in the days of their first utterance, the freshness of youth and immortality? When the solitary student opens all his heart to drink them in, they will reward his toil. And in forms yet more hidden and withdrawn, in the retirement of the chamber, in the stillness of the night season, upon the bed of sickness, and in the face of death, the Bible will be there, its several words how often winged with their several and special messages, to heal and to soothe, to uplift and uphold, to invigorate and stir. Nay, more, perhaps, than this: amid the crowds of the court, or the forum, or the street, or the marketplace, where every thought of every soul seems to be set upon the excitements of ambition, or of business, or of pleasure, there too, even there, the still, small voice of the Holy Bible will be heard, and the soul, aided by some blessed word, may find wings like a dove, may flee away and be at rest.

THERE are great centripetal forces at work in the world which are drawing the states, and nations, and churches, and peoples closer together. The time was when every tribe and clan was a very Ishmael at war with every other. Later we have such federations as the Saxon Heptarchy, the Provinces of France, the Duchies and Grand Duchies of Germany. The progress of integration has gone on till we have a united Italy, the German Empire, an American Union, a federated Canada. An inevitable destiny, we think, is leading to the unifying of the British Empire, and, let us hope, the federation of all English-speaking peoples. We hear much of Pan-Slavism, Pan-Latinism and Pan-Teutonism. These are prophecies of Pan-Britonism).

In the volume under review Dr. Parkin points out not only the manifest advantages but the urgent need for the defence of the Empire, and especially of its outlying members, of such Federation. Our own country has witnessed the develop ment within a generation from a string of disconnected colonies to a great federation, covering half a continent, knit together by commercial, political and social ties. Australia and South Africa are approaching such integration. These great sub-kingdoms are not isolated communities, but are closely connected by the silken bonds of commerce which are growing stronger every year.

Melbourne has grown in fifty years from a village of 1,000 inhabitants to a city of 500,000. Australian commerce now equals that of the United Kingdom of fifty years ago.

Of the 38,000 steamships which passed through the Suez Canal in 1891, seventyeight per cent. were British and eightytwo per cent. of the tonnage; only three ships were American. The foreign commerce of the United Kingdom in 1837 was £210.000,000, and in fifty years it expanded to nearly £1,200,000,000. Canada's commercial navy now ranks fourth in the world. These facts create a more imperious necessity that Britannia shall still rule the waves. Her many colonies will furnish her with friends and allies, with harbours and coal depôts on every shore.

It was a significant fact that Australian

“

volunteers and Canadian voyageurs toiled side by side on the Upper Nile on behalf of the Motherland. The bust of a Canadian premier and the memorial tablet of an Australian statesman are grouped with the tombs of Wellington and Nelson beneath the dome of St. Paul.

"To the Christian, the moralist, the philanthropist," says Dr. Parkin, "no inspiration could be greater than that which might well spring from observing the growing strength of the Empire, and from reflection that this immense energy might be turned in directions which would make for the world's good.'

The sons of the United Empire Loyalists may well cherish the noble ideal for which their fathers suffered expatriation. "Most of them," says Mr. Lecky, “ended their days in poverty and exile, and, as the supporters of a beaten cause, history has paid but a scanty tribute to their memory, but they comprised some of the best and ablest men America has ever produced, and they were contending for an ideal which was, at least, as worthy as that for which Washington had fought."

The existence of French Canada is no bar to the federation of the Empire. It is the boast of Montalembert that the Frenchmen in Canada attained a liberty which the Frenchmen in France never knew. "A happier calamity," says Parkman, never befell a people than the conquest of Canada by British arms."

The position of Australia presents equal cogent reasons in favour of federation. Its population is more purely British than that of any other country occupied by Anglo-Saxon people. Ninety-five per cent. of the inhabitants are of British origin. Nine-tenths of all its products it cannot use, and nine-tenths of all its needs it cannot raise. For the sale of its raw products it is absolutely dependent. on free access to the British market. Some of the more bumptious colonists desire independence, but that would entail an enormous cost for defence without any adequate advantage.

British possessions in South Africa, which have already grown to continental dimensions, need the protection of the Empire. Between the years 1793 and 1797, when the French held the Isle of France and Bourbon, no less than