  The July issue of The Chautauquan closes the fifth volume of the magazine. In October the sixth volume will begin. The outlook for The Chautauquan for 1885-86 is much brighter than ever before. We shall offer our friends a much improved magazine. The place of The Chautauquan will be taken in the summer by the Assembly Herald. The Herald for 1885 will contain full reports of the work of the Assembly for the summer. A glance at the elaborate program printed in this impression will convince the reader of the value of a paper containing such a course of lectures as that of the Chautauqua platform. Besides the lectures many suggestive and useful reports will be printed, which members of the C. L. S. C. in particular will find helpful. Those who may wish to subscribe for both The Chautauquan and Herald will find it profitable to take advantage of our COMBINATION OFFER, found in another column of this impression. The war rumors of a month ago have subsided almost as quickly as they were aroused. The cries of “On to Khartoum” and “Smash the Mahdi” have died out. Instead of running the frontier below the Soudan, the English have been content to fix it at Wady Halfa. After all the excitement over Afghanistan, peace has been established between Russia and England. The Americans, most of them, have come home from Panama. Riel has been captured. The comparatively easy settlement of misunderstandings between nations is our best hope for the future. Each new victory of arbitration over “bad blood,” even if it be at the sacrifice of a little of our pride and possessions, is so much of a stride toward the millennium. For the third time Mr. James Russell Lowell has been called upon to speak in Westminster Abbey. This time at the unveiling of the bust of the poet Coleridge. In summing up his remarks he said: “Whatever may have been his faults and weaknesses, he was the man of all his generation to whom we should most unhesitatingly allow the distinction of genius, that is, of one authentically possessed from time to time by some influence that made him better and greater than himself. If he lost himself too much in what Mr. Pater has admirably called ‘impassioned contemplation,’ he has at least left us such a legacy as only genius, and genius not always, can leave. It is for this that we pay him this homage of memory.” A series of statistics most suggestive to those interested in the temperance question have of late been published. According to this table there was drunk in the United States twenty-five years ago over 86,000,000 gallons of spirituous liquor, while now, with a population almost doubled, the consumption is decreased by about 15 per cent. To balance this comes in the enormous consumption of light liquors, nearly six times as great as in 1860. But it must be remembered that a large proportion of the latter is consumed by the foreign element introduced since 1860. The tragic fate of the town of Plymouth, Pennsylvania, is one more melancholy example of the result of breaking Nature’s laws. There is no doubt but that an epidemic of typhoid fever is a crime traceable to somebody’s neglect. In Plymouth the refuse from a house situated at the head of the stream which supplied the village with drinking water was allowed to poison the water. This outrageous state of affairs is to be seen in many other towns, and in parts of our cities. If after Plymouth’s suffering a repetition occurs in any part of the country, public sentiment ought to be strong enough to hunt down and punish the guilty authorities that will hold human life and God’s law so lightly. There is one sure way of securing sanitary reform in every city or town with dilatory health board or indifferent council. Arouse the women. The Ladies’ Health Protection Society, of New York City, has done work in that community during the past six months, before which its large Board of Health seemed perfectly helpless. If cleanliness and purity are not to be secured by the civil authorities, there is no more suitable public work for women than to constitute themselves the guardians of the health of their home towns. At the recent commencement of the Union Theological Seminary, of New York, the alumni association elected as president an Indian of pure Choctaw blood, now a pastor in the Indian Territory. His son was a member of the graduating class of this year. We are growing broader. The position that Mr. Phelps will take at the Court of St. James has been agitating the English correspondent of one of our great dailies. He finds that being a minister merely, Mr. Phelps must come in among the ministers, after all the seven ambassadors; and that, alas! he will be literally at the foot of this class of twenty-three. Ministers take social rank according to the length of time they have held their positions, so Mr. Phelps and the stars and stripes trot along after Guatemala and Columbia and Siam and Hayti. The teachers who tried Chautauqua last summer for their vacations, found the spot so suitable for their uses, so delightful for recreation, that they have spread abroad the rumor of her beauty, and in July of the coming summer two State Teachers’ Associations—that of Ohio and that of New York—will meet there. There are very few people unfamiliar with law and its phrases, who have not been bewildered over the complicated expressions and seemingly useless repetitions found in almost all documents. This “iteration in law” has lately been made the subject of some interesting computations by David Dudley Mr. John Ruskin, of Oxford, and Prof. J. Rendel Harris, of Johns Hopkins, have resigned their professorships in their respective universities because, it is stated, vivisection is practiced in the institutions. There is no reason in such hyper-sympathy. The abuse of vivisection is quite probable, but that does not lessen the force of the fact that vivisection has done much to alleviate human misery, and will in the future undoubtedly do more. The question is, if man or beast must suffer, which life is the more precious. Houghton Farm, the headquarters of the Chautauqua Town and Country Club, has an interesting history. Several years ago 1,000 acres of land lying about nine miles from Newburgh, N. Y., were purchased by a Mr. Valentine as an experimental farm. About thirty buildings, adapted to every kind of farm work, were erected; the best of stock, the most skillful laborers were secured. The farm soon became a kind of educational institution. Farmers were invited to inspect its work, and to listen to lectures from the learned managers; children had days set apart for their enjoyment. Orange county has been educated by the Houghton Farm. Now its generous hearted proprietor has extended the work by opening its advantages to all those who will join the Chautauqua Town and Country Club. The strange fascination lurking in dangerous feats which so powerfully affects some minds, was never more forcibly manifested than in the case of Robert E. Odlum, who jumped from the Brooklyn bridge not long ago. For some time the thought had been a passion with him, and although the police were watching to prevent the attempt, he escaped their vigilance and took the fatal leap. His body was three and one-fourth seconds in making the descent of 140 feet, thus corroborating almost exactly the law of falling bodies. He breathed only a few times after he was picked up, being inwardly literally “mangled to death.” His is only one more name added to the list of those who, by their folly, may teach others lessons of wisdom, and so, perhaps, have not died utterly in vain. Although war-like preparations have ceased in the Soudan, and no more troops are to be transported thither to help “smash the Mahdi,” the railroad across the desert is progressing slowly but surely. The correspondent of the Times telegraphs the following: “The construction of the railway is a curious and interesting sight. In advance is a picket of cavalry, while far off on either side the videttes scout in the bush. At the immediate head of the line is a battalion of infantry echeloned, and advancing as the rails are laid. Streams of coolies carry the sleepers from the trucks, and teams of four artillery horses drag up the rails, two at a time, to the navvies, who lay them in a twinkling, and drive the spikes. In the rear are gangs who complete the line, and further back the ballasting parties.” Visitors to Niagara Falls this summer will enjoy their trip as never before. Everything that tends to mar the beauty of the natural scenery is to be removed, and after July 15th, access to all points of interest is to be free of charge. To bring about this happy consummation which during so many long years past has been devoutly wished by all right-thinking men, required a long and hard-fought battle against willful ignorance and greed of gain. General Gordon’s “Life and Letters,” recently published, prove him to have one accomplishment of rare beauty and usefulness, but too often nowadays neglected. He was a good letter writer, and that under circumstances the most trying. Here is the picture his biographer draws of the surroundings under which many of his letters were written: “The temperature is over 100°; the ink dries on the pen before three words are written; books curl, as to their backs; mosquitoes are busy at the ankles under the table, and the hands and wrists above; prickly heat comes and goes. How one realizes, for instance, the whole scene in the over-wakeful traveller’s night: ‘I am writing in the open air by a candle-lamp, in a savage gorge; not a sound to be heard. The baboons are in bed in the rocks.’” The letters which the most of us write under the most favorable circumstances are limited to the narrowest space possible. What we would do in Gordon’s place it is difficult to say. The most beautiful celebration of the month of June is Children’s day. With every season Protestant churches give more time and money to their preparations for it, and it bids fair to take rank in importance with Christmas and Easter. Certainly no day comes at a season when it is more easy to decorate, it being the very heyday of the flower season, and no cause is more worthy our efforts than the children’s. An important discussion has been going on for a few weeks in the New York papers, concerning the advisability of closing the dry goods stores on Saturday afternoons. Clerks have no day for recreation or for improvement except Sabbath. The same is true of nearly all classes of laboring people. The result is that the Sabbath, instead of being a day of religious rest, is turned into one of pleasure, and often of extra work. A half holiday would enable busy workers to prepare for Sabbath. It is a reform in the arrangement of time that is worthy the attention of Christian people particularly. There is a capital hint in the following story, told by a lady prominent in mission school work in one of our large cities: “We had some of our Chinese pupils at a church sociable a few nights ago, and we had at supper some candies which are rolled up in paper with printed couplets inclosed—some of them extremely silly. The Chinese boys read them and looked surprised, but were too polite to say anything. Soon afterward they gave an entertainment, and the same sort of candies were provided; but when we unrolled the papers we found they had taken out the foolish verses and had substituted texts of Scripture printed on little slips of paper.” Here are a few of M. Bartholdi’s interesting figures about his great Statue of Liberty: “The forefinger is 96½ inches in length, and 56½ inches in circumference at the second joint. The nail measures 17¾ inches by 10½ inches. The head 13¾ feet in height. The eye is 25½ inches in width. The nose is 44 inches in length. About forty persons were accommodated in the head at the Universal Exposition of 1878. It is possible to ascend into the torch above the hand. It will easily hold twelve persons.” Compared with other colossi it far outstrips them all, being about three times the height of both the statue of Bavaria and of the Virgin of Puy, and about 58 feet higher than the Arminius in Westphalia. The French Republic would not allow the remains of Victor Hugo to be placed in the Pantheon until that celebrated structure was again secularized. The priests were allowed just forty-eight hours to vacate the sacred precincts which, as a church, they had held uninterruptedly since 1877. This action plainly shows the position of the Republic toward the Church. “French skeptics,” says The Nation, “are not content, like English or German skeptics, with ceasing to go to church.… They insist on proclaiming in every possible way their hostility to the clergy.” The fact that the Pantheon is again restored to its primitive design as “a last resting place for distinguished public men” can but be pleasing to all. |
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