cost to each defendant, the laws you cite me and which seem so simple and appear to afford such adequate remedy, were found ineffective. Nor does this involve a criticism of the law. The administration of justice is not mechanical, but human, and when the law is made with enough safeguards to protect the rights of the innocent, it of necessity affords technical refuge and delay to the guilty: Every defendant demanded a jury and exhausted every dilatory privilege in its selection, so that at one time there were so many jury cases pending in the police court that trials were continued for six months and longer, only to be recontinued because of the inability of the courts to deal with the multitude of cases; and in the end all of the cases were dismissed. There was no other practical result than a demonstration of the inefficiency of this method of enforcement.

"If the same method has been used in many cities besides our own and we can find no city in which an actual and permanent victory has been won, are we not justified in doubting the advisability of going back to it in Cleveland?"

The theory of administrative repression by direct police intervention is next noticed at length. It is the method systematically employed by Mayor Johnson, and the results, he believes, fully warrant the contention that it has proved the best method for the morals of the city that has yet been attempted. Under it he claims that "gambling has been practically wiped out in Cleveland." "Winerooms have been abolished," and "the most dangerous class of saloons, namely those with the bar in front, connected those with the bar in front, connected directly with a disorderly house in the rear, have been stamped out by means of this policy."

"In regard to the liquor laws," he observes, "our policy has been to repress in cases of flagrant violation; that is, where a place was open at forbidden times and where brawling or disorder was permitted or where men were allowed to

drink to intoxication. Beginning with the worst of these, we struck at them by stationing uniformed officers at their doors until their trade was driven away, and the idea was forced upon their proprietors that it was better 'business' to limit their excesses than to try to run in disregard of order and decency.'

sion would result in general resistance He argues that indiscriminate suppres

and evasion.

"It would create, what does not now exist, a community of interest and purpose between orderly and disorderly saloon-keepers. It would open the way, moreover, for the resumption of business by the indecent and disorderly saloons which are now repressed. These considerations suggest to me the desirability of continuing the present distinction between orderly and disorderly saloons."

The Mayor does not defend adminisbut has resorted to it because after the trative repression as a general principle, deepest and most earnest and conscientious study of the problem he has become convinced that it is the only practicable method of general enforcement under conditions that now obtain and is the method that will best promote the moral welfare of the community.

ditions in Cleveland are ideal, nor that "I do not claim," he says, "that conthere is not much yet to be done; but I do believe that this policy of repression, operating as it does directly upon the persons guilty of excesses and untramcourt proceedings and delays, has been meled by long drawn out and technical successful. My belief in this regard rests upon the fact that Cleveland is freer now from gross forms of vice and lawbreaking than at any previous period. And comparison of the conditions in Cleveland with those of any other city of her size, where either the first or second policy to which I have referred is followed, will satisfy you that the results of the policy of this administration are good.

Mr. Johnson is not content, however, with frankly meeting the question of the clergymen and justifying his course by citing results as they are exhibited in Cleveland as superior to those that have followed other courses of procedure in the city in the past and in other municipalities; for he is profoundly convinced that there is a far “deeper and more fundamental condition" which imperatively demands the most thoughtful consideration on the part of clergymen and others in positions to influence public opinion, because it lies at the root of a vast amount of vice, crime, poverty and misery. And it is to these views of the Mayor that we wish especially to call the attention of our readers. They are the utterances of a true statesman--the ideas of a genuine apostle of true democracy who not only thinks deeply but who dares to speak his thoughts and live the truth he believes holds redemptive power for society.

"Crime and vice," he observes, "are not the natural consequences of normal human impulses. They are largely if not almost wholly products of environment. Society itself creates the economic condition in which the people live, and the pressure of the means of subsistence upon opportunity is such that men are driven out of their true course as a result of the despair caused by inequality of opportunity and the hopelessness of an unequal struggle. More men drink because they are miserable than are miserable because they drink; and the unfortunates who lead lives of vice do not choose that occupation from natural preference or waywardness of disposition, but are forced to begin and to persist in

such lives by the pressure of conditions which make the earning of an honest and adequate livelihood difficult and sometimes impossible. I do not believe that the whole penalty of society's aggregate sin should be visited upon its weakest sinners, nor that wholesale arrests and indiscriminate fines can do more than harden the lives and condition of those who are driven to vice and crime as a des

Perate resort. That society must protect itself and restrain law-breaking goes without saying; and this administration, by the direct pressure of the police force, and by the arrest and punishment of those who in their wrong-doing pass beyond technical law violation, and foster the growth of worse forms of crime, is attempting to do that thing. I earnestly invite you, however, to join with me in an effort to do the larger thing-to alleviate the hard social conditions which

produce the environment out of which this crime and vice grow. To remove causes is better than to deal only with effects. As a temporary measure and until the fight on the causes shall be won, effects; but we must never regard these direct repression must be applied to the measures in the light of remedies, for back of it all lies the source of the evil— involuntary poverty.

"When I became Mayor of Cleveland, it was with certain very definite aims directed to the accomplishment of this larger good which I have pointed out. I have never lost sight of that as the main thing. Yet the critics of this administration are forced to admit that as an incident to the accomplishment of these larger things, good government even in the ordinary sense of honest and efficient administration has been achieved. By following the policy which I have outlined, the conditions in Cleveland have been vastly improved. We found it a city of unregulated vice and crime, and now gambling has been driven out, the wine-room closed, the combination saloon expelled and a far better condition of

every heart, thus bringing on earth the kingdom of God. And with this new view of age-long truth illuminating their lives, they would go before the world with lips touched with divine fire, with hearts burning with the love that places the rights and the weal of humanity above all baser things, and with brains aflame with a passion for justice, so that no thought of material wealth from questionable sources, for church or school, and no thought of personal ease or comfort could influence them or swerve them from their high mission, any more than Jesus, the prophets or the apostles could have been swerved from their mission by the temptation of material wealth or power.

If clergymen should awaken to this new demand of our wonderful age and become the apostles of justice, human rights and love, a marvelous transformation would result. In the first place, they would find their empty churches crowded to overflowing. They would find to-day as in the earlier days the poor-the great surging masses of the poor-would hear and hear gladly the gospel of truth and justice, and they would soon find themselves again the moral leaders of the age and in the very center of a great new spiritual renaissance such as has ever been witnessed when the pulpit has placed justice, love and the rights of the people above dogmatic theology, churchly rites and creedal theories. They would find the church again that great moral power that it was in the infancy of Christianity, while it was yet pure and uncorrupted by the lure of wealth and power (when the words of James relating to the acquirers of tainted gold weighed as living truth with the ministers of the gospel). For the heart of the people yearns for that spiritual truth that expresses itself in the Golden Rule; it yearns for that religion that translates itself into a life of consecrated service to mankind—a life that contrasts with the lives of those who devote themselves to abstract and general issues, to

theological dogmas and creeds, even as the life of service and ever-present helpfulness and the teachings of human love and world-wide justice of the great Nazarene contrasted with the endless disputations and dogmatizing about the Mosaic law and questions of theology of the religious leaders of Jesus' day.

We believe most profoundly that if our clergy, or any considerable part of them, should experience this new spiritual birth which awakens a deathless love for humanity, for the poor, the crushed, the weak and the defenceless ones, we should see in the brief space of a decade as great a change as that which marked England when Whitefield and the Wesleys galvanized the nation with spiritual life.

There is a striking resemblance between the England of Horace Walpole's administration and the Republic to-day -so much of a similarity indeed, that a glance at the period that preceded the advent of the great founders of Methodism will, we think, serve to emphasize the thought we wish to impress.

In the days when Horace Walpole was at the zenith of his power, the business, economic, political, social and religious life of England was under the spell of a soul-deadening materialism. Then as now political corruption was rife. Low moral ideals had taken the place of the austere concepts of the Puritan period. The bitter religious and theological controversies of the earlier time had given. place to nation-wide religious indifference, very noticeable in the life of the people in every stratum of society, though many whose lives gave the lie to the ethical teachings of Jesus still outwardly conformed most punctiliously to the rites and observances of the church and posed as its supporters and defenders. Everywhere was seen that moral lethargy always apparent when the civic life of a nation is at a low ebb; when the eternal

The historian Green, himself an ardent churchman who could not be accused of having undue sympathy with the NonConformists, has not only given us a vivid picture of the state of business, political, social and religious life preceding the advent of the great Methodist clergymen, but he has also shown how society, hungering for the bread of life, for justice and love, quickly responded to the message of Whitefield and the Wesleys in such a manner as to change the whole face of national social and religious life.

It was in the midst of the long and masterful political sway of Walpole that we see English life come compellingly under the spirit of materialistic commercialism. A craze for the quick acquisition of gold became a master-passion, drying up, as is ever the case when the insanity of the gambler infects society, the wellsprings of that spirituality that is as essential to the upward sweep of civilization as oxygen is essential to physical life.

"The sudden increase of English commerce," observes Green, "begot at this moment the mania of speculation. Ever since the age of Elizabeth the unknown wealth of Spanish-America had acted like a spell upon the imagination of Englishmen, and Harley gave countenance to a South Sea Company, which promised a reduction of the public debt."

In return for special privileges desired, a band of promoters and speculators, after the manner of the Wall-street gamblers and public-service franchise grabbers of our day, held out promised benefits never to be realized. Only in a period of civil decadence and moral lethargy would the nation have yielded to the lure. “It was in vain that Walpole warned the Ministry and the country against this 'dream.' Both went mad; and in 1720 bubble Company followed bubble Com

pany, till the inevitable reaction brought a general ruin in its train. The crash brought Stanhope to the grave. Of his colleagues, many were found to have received bribes from the South Sea Company to back its frauds. Craggs, the Secretary of State, died of terror at the investigation; Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was sent to the Tower."

When moral idealism is eclipsed by the gambler's greed, when the materialism of the market obscures the cause of justice, exalting the dollar above the man, corruption in government as inevitably follows as night the day. Hence we find, according to Green:

"The wealth of the Whig houses was lavishly spent in securing a monopoly of the small and corrupt constituencies which made up a large part of the borough representation. It was spent yet more unscrupulously in parliamentary bribery."

Nor was this all, or even the worst. Whenever the mania for gambling dominates the public imagination and the demands of commercialism weigh more heavily than those of justice and equity, there is a rapid drifting downward seen in every stratum of society. Religion— the pure and undefiled religion of the apostle James-is everywhere at a discount. Hence it is not surprising to find these conditions prevailing among the educated and wealthy classes.

"In the higher circles 'everyone laughs,' said Montesquieu on his visit to England, ‘if one talks of religion.' Of the prominent statesmen of the time the greater part were unbelievers in any form of Christianity, and distinguished for the grossness and immorality of their lives. Drunkenness and foul talk were thought no discredit to Walpole. A late prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, was in the habit of appearing with his mistress at the play. Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow were sneered out of fashion; and Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to