What is this mammon? How may we make friends of it? friends in eternity? Mammon is the Syrian name for wealth, for the god of wealth. And wealth becomes "unrighteous" directly we make a mammon, a god, of it. Is all wealth then, all property, a mammon of unrighteousness? Not necessarily though few thoughts are sadder than this,-that we can hardly take a single coin into our hands which has not been used for an unfair or immoral purpose, or own a piece of land which has not at some time been polluted with fraud or legal chicane. We, however, may hold our property by clear moral as well as by clear legal right. The little we have may have been gained by honest toil. It may be no mammon to us, although it has been a most unrighteous mammon to others. Yet none the less we

may make an idol of it. If at any moment we love it more than truth or honesty, or if we simply set our hearts on it as the supreme good, the very moment it stands first with us, it becomes to us a mammon of unrighteousness. For it has no right to the first place: nor can it satisfy as our supreme good should satisfy us. God has made us for Himself. And we can know no rest till our supreme good-that which we love and prize most—is as immortal as ourselves. God claims to stand first with us. To put wealth first is to have another God before Him; since mere wealth cannot satisfy us even here, cannot comfort us in many of our afflictions, our losses, disappointments, bereavements, and has no power beyond the grave.

help the struggling; serve the Church; that so, when you have to leave all you possess in this world, you may find friends in the other world-good deeds and kindly services which have gone before you, and which will be your joy and reward for ever."

That is the true moral of the parable; for it is our Lord's moral. Is it not a good and wholesome moral? Does it favour craft, fraud, cunning, employed for earthly ends? It is a whole heaven above any thought so base. It does not teach us to seek temporal comfort cunningly; it teaches us not to care too much for the temporal goods we have, to seek the eternal good wisely and with all our hearts, to value spiritual realities above all the goods of time. It brands the Unjust Steward as an idolater, a worshipper of the mammon of unrighteousness; and it incites us to seek first, far before all earthly aims, the righteousness and kingdom of God. It teaches us the true use of wealth, not a politic and strenuous pursuit of wealth. As we reflect on its moral, and ask ourselves "What shall we do? how shall we make to ourselves friends of the unrighteous mammon?" we remember Zaccheus, who habitually gave the half of his goods to the poor; we remember the poor widow who threw into the treasury the two mites which were her whole living; we remember both those who have used large wealth for the good of men rather than for their own selfish enjoyment, and those who, that they might serve God better, have put from them all chances of wealth, all cravings for it, and out of their poverty have made many rich. "These," we say, "these are they who have made to themselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, and when they died they were received into the eternal tabernacles."

Let us be followers of them. Let us so live in the present as to provide for the future ; that, feeling secure as to the future, we may have peace in the present life. Whatever we have, let us use it for God and man, that we may raise up to ourselves friends beyond the reach of change and time.

Yet we are constantly tempted, like the Unjust Steward, to put wealth first, to care for it more than for integrity and duty; to seek before all things some earthly possession in which we may dwell. Our Lord points us to a more excellent use of wealth. So far from approving the dishonest craft of the Steward, He condemns the very aim he set before him. He worshipped mammon, for he loved and served wealth more than God and his duty to God. "Do not you do that," says Christ; "but, instead of making wealth an idol, make friends out of this idol in the If any object," After all, then, the parable eternal world. Put the wealth, which men only invites us to an enlightened selfishness, lift out of its place, back into its place. So only urges us to deny ourselves a present enuse the gifts and possessions of time as to joyment in order that we may secure a larger prepare yourselves for eternity. Never, to good in the future!" I can only say that the spare your wealth or to get wealth, sacrifice Gospel does at times appeal to our self-love, your truth and uprightness. Nay, do not even which self-love, necessary to our being and care so much for its temporal uses and conve- our well-being, can hardly be altogether an niences, or for the personal good you may get evil. But if our self-love be used as an arguout of it, as for the good you may do others ment for love to God and man, as I admit it with it. Employ it for ends which stretch is in the parable, all I can say is, It could beyond the years of time. Give to the poor; | very hardly be put to a better use.

S. COX.

STA

MACAO AND ITS SLAVE-TRADE.

TAUNCH haters of slavery and the slavetrade in all forins and places, as all good Englishmen are, yet public attention in England has at no time been very greatly and generally excited by the species of slavetrade referred to above, and therefore the welcome news that the Portuguese Government has at length put a tardy, but we hope a final, stop to that wicked system, will probably be to most persons an item of newspaper intelligence read with passing approbation and soon forgotten. There are a few Englishmen, however, whom circumstances brought into contact with this Asiatic slavetrade, who will hail the news with no ordinary gladness and gratitude. It is little more than two years since the present writer last visited Macao in an ineffectual endeavour to recover one of the victims of this traffic. At that time there seemed no hope of any check being put to the flourishing trade in human flesh. In February, 1872, I paced the streets of the "Holy City," as this den of wickedness has been styled, distressed and disheartened by the sight of a grievous outrage upon our common humanity, for which I could see nowhere the faintest prospect of a remedy. I read mocking scorn in the eyes of the coolie-dealers as I prosecuted my fruitless inquiries; and when the steamer bore me back disappointed to Hong Kong, and the beautiful bay, crowned with churches and castles, receded in the distance, I could not refrain from impotent longing for some superhuman power to interfere, and put a sudden end to triumphant inhumanity. The end has come by the operation of ordinary causes, beyond all my hopes, and I cannot but accept it as an illustration of the folly of impatience and mistrust at the sight of evil allowed to flourish for awhile, "like a green bay-tree." Having myself been a near spectator of the events I describe, I venture to think that this brief account will not be unacceptable in the pages of the SUNDAY MAGAZINE.

Macao is one of the tiniest peninsulas geography can point out, only about three miles long, and varying in width from half a mile to a mile and a half. The sea washes one side, and on the other one of the mouths of the great West River of the Canton province enters the ocean. The neck of land which connects the peninsula with the Canton province is only about a hundred yards wide, and an extraordinarily high tide would con

1

vert the peninsula into an island. Small as it is, the surface of the peninsula is remarkably diversified by hill and dale, and it is rendered picturesque by having every height surmounted either by a fort, a lighthouse, or a church. Though falling short of the rich luxuriance of tropical vegetation which the outward-bound traveller has revelled in, at Galle, Penang, and Singapore, Macao is a green and fertile spot, compared with the stern rocks of Hong Kong. The passing traveller would consider it, despite its beautiful situation, a dull, sleepy place. Once the capital of Portuguese enterprise in the far east, its numerous old churches and substantial mansions, with walls five feet in thickness, still bear witness to its age of wealth and power. But the star of Portugal long since set in the Eastern Hemisphere. It paled before the progress of the Dutch, and finally disappeared as the Union Jack attained its glorious ascendancy in all the waters from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan. During our wars with China, Macao, being neutral ground, was visited for brief intervals by the trade driven away from Canton. The peace of 1858, which restored British commerce with China to its old channels, left poor old Macao once more high and dry upon the beach, a mouldering relic of bygone splendour. Since that time, the city has found no better way of repairing its fallen fortunes than the infamous one of offering shelter and favour to the wretched trade of the kidnapper. It owes this unenviable privilege to the advantage it possesses of being the only spot on the long extent of the Chinese sea-coast, besides our own colony of Hong Kong, which does not own allegiance to the Emperor of China. The coolie-traffic was not invented in Macao. When it was discovered by those ghoulish spirits, of whom specimens are to be found amongst all nations (our own not excepted, as witness the atrocities of South Sea Island kidnapping), that money was to be made by importing labour, no matter whence or how obtained, to the slaveregions of the Western Hemisphere, reckless adventurers filled their ships with coolies obtained by any vile practices, in Whampoa, Swatow, Amoy, wherever they found it easy to get a cargo. But in all these places, the consuls of our own and other nations soon discovered the nature of this trade, and by representations to their own and the Chinese Governments, the coolic-dealers were com

pletely driven out of the Treaty ports. Macao offered them a safe asylum. The monopoly of the coolie-trade was lucrative, and a heavy pile of dollars lay like a dead weight upon the conscience of the inhabitants. False representations were sent to Lisbon, and these, supported by the force of the evident fact that the colony, which was lately a burden upon the mother-country, could now show a balance in its favour, prevailed on the Portuguese Government to permit the continuance of the system. It is but justice to say, that the Lisbon Colonial Office made sincere attempts to regulate the traffic and put down its abuses. People on the spot knew all along that these remedies were effectual only on paper; and now, at last, the Portuguese Government has come to the same conclusion.

We have called the traffic in plain English a slave-trade. It was, however, officially styled coolie-emigration. As this euphemistic appellation did excellent service to its promoters in helping them to hoodwink the public in Portugal and elsewhere, it is necessary to explain a little. A steady stream of emigration has been flowing out from the over-populated Chinese empire for some generations. We have no information of the extent of its pressure along the western frontier, but in the north it has penetrated far into Mongolia and Manchuria, the ancient seat of the present Tartar lords of China bidding fair to be one day almost entirely occupied by Chinese. Japan offered no welcome; but southward, Java, Singapore, Penang, Malacca, have long had populous and flourishing Chinese settlements, and the steady bargaining Chinaman now elbows the Bengalee in Calcutta itself. Much more important than this emigration to neighbouring lands, is the enormous outflow of recent years to the vast new countries of the globe, Australia and the great West of the United States. Though checked in San Francisco for awhile by the opposition of the labouring classes, to whom John Chinaman, with his industrious and economical habits, is an unwelcome competitor, the natural laws of supply and demand will surely prevail over a short-sighted, selfish policy. The Chinese race, already estimated on its own soil to form about one-third of the population of the world, promises fair eventually to combine in no inconsiderable proportions with the AngloSaxon race, in subduing and replenishing the wide unoccupied regions of the two new worlds, America and Australia. The importance of this exodus, as yet only in its

infancy, not only on the future of their own country, but on the destinies of mankind, cannot be overrated. No Christian but will view it with deep interest, and desire that it may be dealt with in such a manner as shall make the reflex influence an immense gain to the progress of the gospel in China.

All this emigration is free voluntary emigration, the natural swarming of the full hive, governed and guided, not by human laws, but by the natural laws of political economy. But besides this, another kind has been artificially instituted, which is popularly called coolie-emigration, but which would be better described as contract-emigration. The English, French, Dutch, and other Governments, have all made experiments in this direction, with the best intentions, and not without considerable effort to carry their good intentions into practical effect. Yet the extreme difficulty of executing the work with clean hands has occasioned this kind of emigration to be regarded with general disfavour, and it was, until recently again attempted, practically obsolete. Contract-emigration consists in two peculiarities. Its initiative begins, not with the emigrant, but with the government which invites his services for its planters in distant colonies, and offers him outfit, freepassage, and a certain engagement in the land whither he is taken. In return for these advantages, the foreign government demands that the Chinese emigrant shall sign a contract to serve such master as he shall be appointed to, for a certain term of years, at a fixed rate of pay. Hence the name contractemigration. The scheme looks fair upon paper, and would be fair enough in practice, if the instruments who have the practical working of it on both sides the ocean could be trusted. But between the coolie-broker on the one side, and the planter on the other, a good scheme is easily converted to a bad use; and the less of contract-emigration Great Britain is mixed up with, the more secure we shall be of not becoming unwilling accomplices in injustice.

The Macao emigration was also in form a contract-emigration. It differed, however, in such an essential element of the contract that the similarity reached no farther than the name. When our Government sent coolies to Demerara, England went with the coolies and watched over them there. The contract was with our Government, and not a mere bargain between a labourer in China and a sugar-planter in America. The Government, which acted as middle-man in the transaction, retained its authority, and