vail, there would be 1,559,984 families wholly illiterate. What a spectacle in a land of free Christianity, free Bibles and free schools! 1,559,984 families (shall I say homes?) in which there is not a member to whom the printed page freighted with truth, divine and human, for the blessing of the body and mind and the salvation of the soul, is hardly more than a blank ! But these are the alarming conditions in our rural districts and around our city homes. Do we go up to Jerusalem-they are on all our roads. Shall we pass by on the other side? Possibly we may find, in taking care of them, the only way to save ourselves. From such benighted homes shall it be difficult for the saloons or brothels, for polygamy, intemperance, idleness, impurity and mendicancy, to find their recruits? Where else will the arch enemy of man's good revel with greater success? Let him secure a few sharpened intellects, schooled in his arts, and how rapidly and certainly will the deepest depths of sin and degradation be found. There they shall "walk after the flesh in all uncleanness," "despise government," be given to "riot," "speak evil," "cherish lies;" "spots," "blemishes are they;" "cursed children," "natural brute beasts," that "shall perish in their own corruption."

If you have never studied one of these centers of corruption in our cities, or locked corners of population in out of the way rural districts, you can have no proper conception of the horrors they contain. Erect a light in one of these centers, and how soon you see improvement. Study the history of Five Points or the efforts of Dr. Chalmers or Oberlin, or similar labors among the degraded the world over, and you have the same lesson. They are nigh every one of us. Study the facts gathered by our organized charities or in our police courts, trace the increasing number of tramps in their hiding-places, and you will verify these statements. We need more careful surveys of social conditions. Otherwise, how can churches or pure and cultivated homes most wisely labor for the degraded around them? The laws of sanitation are often violated among the ignorant, and fatal diseases go forth thence to destroy those who would closely guard their health; but immorality is no less communicable. No building of walls will ensure against the deadly influence of surrounding contaminations. The presence of a single illiterate given over to iniquity is a terror to every youth within nis influence. Who does not remember the thousand or more whose corrupted blood was traced to the one Margaret,

the mother of criminals, or the $1,300,000 they had cost the community? Was not a county of intelligent people recently shocked to find that in its institutions for the care of the dependent or criminal over sixty inmates traced their descent to a single ancestor, and he is still alive and an inmate? Does any one believe that the giving to these degraded ones industry, letters, knowledge, virtue or piety will pauperize them? Does a free gospel poured out like the sunlight, do free schools or libraries, pauperize? Shall we wait action till darkness asks for light, vice for virtue, sin for holiness? Did Christ wait till the world, lying in wickedness, sought and welcomed him to home and comfort? Does Christianity wait till paganism gives its greeting, and sustains its agencies and institutions? No, the mission of good to evil is not determined by the hard laws of selfishness.

We err when we regulate our efforts against illiteracy by the law of supply and demand. Again, is it improper to ask here before the Evangelical Alliance of the United States, if there is not something distinctive of American Christian civilization not found in any other than English letters, and not translated into any other than American literature? Else why are our liberties so misunderstood? The Fathers came to enjoy the privilege of a free conscience enlightened by the Scriptures. Out of their planting, by divine culture our civilization has come laden with the richest fruitage for mankind. Many now arrive among us for the same purpose, sharing in the support and benefit of our advancing liberties; but in the great numbers that come-so great that year and year they who cross the wide and separating oceans and are received, all unconsciously, among the homes of our broad land, outnumber the greatest migrations that came from Asia to Europe and joined in that ceaseless flow from the East to the West, transforming nations and races in their savage progress—in these vast multitudes coming hither, there are many who are totally illiterate and many who read in their own tongue, but have never learned of our Protestant Christian freedom, who reject the spirit of our free institutions, and as to the great objects of this American Evangelical Alliance are substantially illiterate, and come not to enjoy and preserve our liberties, but only to get gain, as do Chinamen and others, or to destroy, as do anarchists-to add to the perils associated with the millions of illiterates already among us; trained under the evils of paganism, or no religion, or a perverted

Christianity, whose first fruits are likely to be unbelief and immorality, having lived under governments that are oppressive, used to authority that is tyrannical, and wealth that establishes caste and delights in cruelty. Some of them, polished in intellect by renowned schools, become leaders among us against a pure Christianity, and seek to destroy a free government which offers every man of them a share in its suffrages and offices, and under which the roads to wealth and honor are regulated, neither by descent nor caste, but where they are open to all alike-where the rudest laborer if educated, thrifty and honest, may exchange places with the millionaire-where in all the world man's material condition comes nearest to the untrammeled enjoyment of the healthful operations of organized life; where in moral and intellectual opportunities man comes nearest to the enjoyment in which the highest spiritual life is offered from the cross of Calvary by a dying Saviour to a fallen world.

But you will not expect me to dismiss this subject without some reference to the prevention of illiteracy or its remedy. I remark, first, that illiteracy should have the united opposition of all the agencies that rally under the banner of this Alliance. Illiteracy is a hindrance to all objects which intelligence would promote. Carlyle declares that "all mankind has done, thought, gained or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books." The power of books, and the influence of all human experience, true science, pure literature and art, the rewards of honest toil, the benefactions of intelligence, unselfish or consecrated wealth, should be aroused against illiteracy. Every man who would benefit his fellow should lift up the light that is in him against its darkness

and peril.

Secondly. We naturally expect the church, divinely commissioned to save men, to be among the most active of the organized agencies seeking to prevent or remedy illiteracy. To which of the duties enforced by its divine teachings is not this evil a hindrance? In the discharge of what. one of them is not man's intelligence at once helpful and enlarged? They who do His will shall know of the doctrine; they go on to know the Lord. Every duty offers its reward of knowing. Whence comes a higher motive to learn? What has it not done for man's progress? Has not the church a special mission to teach all nations? Where has it accomplished its work more effectually than

where there is entire separation of church and state? Where produced a better government, or brought about a more general diffusion of light or practice of virtue, or a more universal dissemination of temporal comforts, or a higher spiritual life? But to see how inadequate all these efforts are, glance at what has been accomplished in religious schools and by churches. We only use figures synchronous with the census.

In the three classes of schools-those of theology, those of secondary and superior instruction-under Protestant and Catholic control there is only a total of 139,826 students, and only an investment in productive funds and other property of $82,195,728. Great as the Sabbath worship would appear on the first impression, allowing that there are now 28,170,300 sittings in the religious edifices of all the various denominations, there would be required 21,830,000 additional sittings, which at the average expense of $12 per sitting, would cost $261,960,000; to supply the preachers required at the average of one to every 375 persons, there would be needed 58,213 more clergymen; giving these men a preparation at the usual rate of $100 per year, over and above what they earn, would cost $17,463,900. Their first year's salary, on an average of $500, would require $29,106,500, making a total cost of supplying the preached gospel to the millions now without places of worship over the enormous sum of $308,530,400. Shall I note here also what the church may be expected to do in circulating religious books, tracts and papers, and especially the holy Scriptures? It is believed that our Sabbath-school work, according to accurate figures, does not reach half of the children who can read. Shall the church then turn itself from the religious work specially committed to it, which it is doing so inadequately, and attempt to establish at its own voluntary expense, elementary schools for the instruction of our millions of illiterate children? If it expects to do this by conducting parochial schools, to be under the direction of a foreign potentate, but to be supported by money raised by taxation and paid out of the state treasury, then it makes a proposition which strikes death to the very center of American life, and which every patriot, Catholic or Protestant, should resist to the utmost.

Thirdly. We consider the American plan of elementary education by the state as a prevention or remedy of illiteracy. The state, as no other agency can, touches all the children, equalizes

the expense by a tax upon all property, and has power and agencies to enforce all obligations involved. Qualified teachers, and all needed houses and other provisions, should be supplied, and the attendance of every child upon adequate instruction should be made absolutely certain. What would a single year's ten-months' school do to scatter darkness and let in light? Every state and territory has legal provision for a free school system, but all require improvement. More children should attend, and more remain longer in school. There should be no truancy and less irregularity, better teaching and appliances, and constant progress. In a number of southern states public schools continue for only two or three months during the year. But taking schools as they are, there was by the last census a large increase in illiteracy, and by the school statistics there were 5,754,759 youths of school age not enrolled. Allow that the odd thousands may be provided with private instruction, there would remain five millions for public provision; furnishing these sittings at twenty dollars per sitting, it would cost $100,000,000. Thirty thousand additional teachers would be required, and to qualify them, at the rate in New York, would cost $1,000,000; their pay for a single year of ten months would amount to $9,600,000, or there would be required a total outlay by the end of the first year of $120,000,000. What agency, personal or associated, or of state or church save one and that the nation, is equal to this demand? Besides, these necessities are not equally distributed; where there is larger demand, there are less means. In the late slave states, where public school provisions have mainly begun more recently, there have been great losses; the burden of illiteracy on thrift is enormous, and affairs have been passing through the transition from slavery to freedom. The free school work has gone forward, gaining strength, giving instruction to whites and blacks, raising the school tax here and there above the figures common in places where public schools have flourished longer. The gravity of the situation has seriously impressed thoughtful minds. Peabody and Slater have given their millions, private charity through church and other agencies has bestowed millions more. Thus, Christian effort has established an array of schools and colleges for the youth of those recently slave states, never paralleled in conditions and character in the history of mankind. The principle of self-help is strained to the utmost. Shall it be destroyed by over-tax, and a relapse come,