Mr. Wm. Jones says:

"The wages of the laborer are pitifully small,

SELDOM MORE THAN TWENTY CENTS A DAY,

and often less than this; and in many districts want of regular employment robs them of a portion of this miserable pittance.

The Secretary of the Parliamentary Commission says:

"It is almost impossible for agricultural laborers to put by any savings, their earnings on an average being less than $50 a year; indeed, to many of them meat and wine are unknown luxuries."

Mr. Jones asks:

"Is it wonderful that these men

SHOULD SOMETIMES RESORT TO BRIGANDAGE;

and that they should lend

WILLING EARS TO SOCIALISTIC AGITATORS,

who raise their hopes by projected division of the land? To hungry men (and there are so many hungry in Italy), the doctrine of the spoiling of the rich and distribu. tion of their goods among the poor has a powerful charm in it."

The Voice of a Peasant, widely circulated, says:

"When the Contadino (peasant) approaches the palace of his Seigneur, on be. holding the profusion of riches—the columns, the marbles, the gilding of all these splendors he says to himself, Here is so much luxury, while in the barrack I inhabi:, the joists crumble in rottenness; here so much money lavished, and when I ask for a pane of glass in the window of my sleeping chamber, they reply that they have not wherewith to satisty my fancies. There the works of celebrated painters and magnificently decorated ceilings, and the walls of my hovel are black as the mouth of a furnace. There the finest work of the sculptor, and my home, a cavern ; there a pavement of elegant mosaics, my floor the bare earth, full of holes, that trip up the feet of my little ones. There the costliest furniture; at home, alas, not even a chair to sit on. And who am I, indeed? Well, is it not I who work the land of the Seigneur from morning to night, winter and summer, and often have nothing to appease my hunger with? Is it not I who produce the riches? And what remains for me? An empty stomach and sufferings untold. Say, O Seigneur, is it for this that I was created ?"*,

M. de Lavaleye in his "Lettres d'Italie," quoting from a leading journal, the Rassegna, shows the misery in Sardinia, aggravated by the crushing

taxes:

"The treasury continues to expropriate many little properties because they can not pay the taxes. In this way the domain of the state is continually on the increase, at the expense of private proprietors. But the state draws no profit from it; it has to pay the communal and provincial taxes, and it can not hope to sell the confiscated properties, for no one is willing to buy them."

Of Sardinia and and Italy, M. de Lavaleye writes:

"If the money of these poor Sardinians were not taken to pay for employes, for fortifications, for repeating guns, and for iron-clads, they could have made themselves roads, provided drinking water, and improved their farming. Military and bureaucratic centralization crushes these poor people who scratch the earth.

IS IT SURPRISING THAT SOCIALISM AND NIHILISM SHOULD ARISE TO THROW DOWN. ALL THESE ENGINES OF PAUPERIZATION?

How many villages have to be ruined in order to construct one war steamer such as the 'Lepanto?' Would all the confiscations of Ottana suffice to pay for the engines alone? No, scarcely even to buy one of its famous hundred-ton guns. The official personages who may witness the launch of the formidable iron-clad, the pride of Italy, will they think of the tears, of the sickness, and of the ruin that it will have

cost?"

THE TERRIBLE PELLAGRA"

Is the specific disease of militarism—of poverty, of bad and insufficient diet,

*NOTE.-This brings to recollection Lord Beaconsfield's epigram, uttered more than thirty years ago: "The palace is not safe where the cottage is not happy."

and of unwholesome habitations. It numbered last year in Lombardy alone 40,000, and in the Venetian provinces, 56,000 cases.

MADNESS AND SUICIDE ARE ITS, GOAL.

The families of pellagrous persons usually consist of about five persons, who have to live on the wages paid to the father and mother-viz., an average of $85 a year, which cannot give more than four cents a head per day for food, the result is that their diet is truly described as "polenta, and too little polenta." Statistics prove that these miserable families do not get more than half the necessary amount of their wretched food.

Thus does taxation for militarism in time of peace, not only increase the poverty of the nation but it destroys its physique and its future progress. "Princes and Lords may flourish or may fade;

A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,

If once destroyed can never be supplied."

The cost of each Italian iron-clad was $5,000,000; the cost of each 100ton gun was $200,000. One steel shot, 1,400 weight, cost $500. What misery, suffering, tears, crime and folly does each ship and shot represent!

How disastrous the preparations for war!

The army and navy are

THE CAUSE OF ITALY'S WEAKNESS,

Of her poverty, of her want of capital, of her backward agriculture, and of her dense ignorance. Italy appreciates her evils and is anxious to remove them; but there is no money.

Italian workmen begin to see that their monster enemy is militarism. They will soon be ready to combine with the workmen of the world for " the desire of all nations," for peace on earth. May the struggle be pacific!

IN RUSSIA,

Race hatreds continue. The burdens of the people, both rich and poor, are greatly enhanced. The Conscription presses, with terrible force, on all classes. The masses of the population are being embittered and

DRIVEN TO SOCIALISM, COMMUNISM AND NIHILISM.

Their protests and cries being disregarded by the military Monarchies and Courts, they are beginning in their desperation to have resource to riot, dynamite and assassination.

The gold, taken from the suffering Russians, is used

TO CORRUPT THE PEOPLE OF OTHER LANDS,

Whom the Czar buys to favor annexation and disruption..

Russian gold "half imperials" were found on the bodies of the slain Afghans around Cabul in 1879.

Rev. Dr. Behrends, of Brooklyn, in a late sermon, thus speaks of two "evils of modern civilization that have sorely aggravated the misery of the poor and opened new paths to ill-gotten wealth,-national debts and standing armies

THE HEAVIEST YOKES OF IRON UPON EUROPEAN INDUSTRY..

The aggregate debt of Europe is not less than $20,000,000,000, a perpetual mortgage of $300 on every family of five, upon which an annual interest of $45 must be paid. And where are these thousands of millions? Lying in the coffers of the rich, and constituting the heaviest single item of taxation. How can such a tax be paid? How long ought it to be paid? There is equity in the demand that each generation shall pay its own debts, and not mortgage the industries of its successors. But the standing armies of Europe are its greatest industrial menace. In times of peace Europe has nearly four million able bodied men under arms, seven and a half millions can be commanded at a month's notice, and fourteen millions constitute the war footing. Greece, with a population of less than two millions, has an army of twenty-nine thou

sand men. On the basis of the Continental policy, we would have a standing army of 600,000, to be maintained at an annual cost of $600,000,000, with an additional reserve force of not less than 900,000 men. The cost to Europe, in a year of peace, of its military camps is not far from $1,000,000,000; and the annual loss in productive income from this enforced idleness must be at least three times as much more, all of which must be added to the interest of the national debts. Is it surprising that

SPAIN, AND ITALY, AND TURKEY ARE BANKRUPT,

And that everywhere the poor are sunk in hopeless misery? Nor are there any encouraging signs of improvement. The fever seems to be mounting. The last ten years have everywhere increased the burden, and the madness must soon reach its height. Meanwhile the monster fattens on the blood of the poor. Beggary fills the fairest and the most fruitful lands of Central and Southern Europe; while only in Norway and Sweden is there relative and general comfort. The winters of the North are not so cruel as the muskets of Austria, Italy, and Spain. Wars must cease and standing armies disappear before the industrial millenium can come. The days of peace! The weary world waits for them."

Rev. Dr. Theodore L. Cuyler, in "From the Nile to Norway," says: "All through the Orient,—yes, and all through Europe,

THE PERPETUAL EYESORE IS THE UBIQUITOUS SOLDIER.

In his various uniforms, white, scarlet, or blue, he is everywhere. Except in their modern equipments,† these colossal standing armies seem like monstrous relics of the dark ages. Whatever were my impressions of various countries, one thing is very clear, and that is, that the American republic is making a prodigious impression upon the older continents. It is not merely the coming nation; it has come! The great battlefield of the next century lies between Plymouth Rock and San Fran. cisco. If the devil gets America, the progress of humanity goes back more than ten degrees on the dial-plate. If the Lord Jesus Christ (the Gospel of Peace) gets America, then all the sooner will the millenium dawning break. It is not a matter for empty boasting, but it is a matter of momentous responsibility to be an American citizen, and to bear even the humblest part in shaping its moral destiny.

"If the doctrines of the Society of Friends were universally known, accepted, and adopted, it would bring about the millennium."

Various causes render the deliverance of Europe from its curse of militarism difficult.

MONARCH AND COURTS FAVOR THE WAR SPIRIT.

MACCHIAVELLI'S instructions to his prince were: "A prince must have no other design, nor thought, nor study, but war, and the arts and discipline of it."

FROUDE wrote: "The arts which have made the greatest progress are the arts of destruction."

The education of the young is military.

THE THREE GREAT CHRISTIAN CHURCHES,

(The Roman, the Greek and the Anglican), hold the truth of the primitive church as to war in unrighteousness or passivity. The ministry pays homage to the warrior.

With the people must

THE WORK OF ARMY DISBANDMENT

Begin and end. The disarmament may begin with the armies themselves.

† NOTE. THE Dress of Europe,

Not long ago, was fashioned after the harlequin style; it affected strong colors and strong contrasts. This taste belongs to rude ages, and has quite passed away with the progress of civilization. The military dress alone has escaped reform. The military dress is the only harlequin attire left us from ancient times. Is it not time for this dazzling finery to disappear, no longer corrupting the young, and throwing a pernicious glare over a terrible vocation?

While standing armies are the familiar agents of despotism, they sometimes side with the people. Armies sometimes think. In Spain, they several times sympathized with the people and overthrew the government. They may revolutionize Russia, Germany and Austria. They could do it in a day.

Let the people bestir themselves but peacefully for their own protection from the manifold curse of militarism.

THE QUICKEST RELIEF TO THE TOILING MILLIONS

Of Europe is for the armies of more than 10,000,000 soldiers, that prey on their substance to the extent of $2.840,000,000 (cost of European armament direct and indirect every year), to be disbanded and restored to industrial pursuits. This will check wholesale emigration to our country to escape from army bondage. It will check conspiracies and assassinations, threatening the foundations of society. Philanthropy can find no higher call to duty than that of disarmament of nations.*,

*

*NOTE. NAPOLEON, THE GREATEST SOLDIER of the world,

In his island prison, uttered the truth that the nations need to-day "Study war no more-disarm the nations.' Then will the prophecy of the "Little Corporal," uttered on the wave-washed rock, be fulfilled — of the "grand and magnificent spectacle of universal peace, and of greatest happiness and prosperity."

It would be difficult to compute in figures the saving of money that would follow upon the disarmament of nations, the restoration to industrial pursuits of nonproducers, and upon the adoption of any tolerably satisfactory method of settling, by arbitration, international disputes. The very thought almost makes one's head dizzy; and yet this consummation in the near future is indicated more distinctly by the drift of thought than were some of the most prevalent ideas of to-day foreshad. owed by the literature of only one hundred years ago.

DISARMAMENT.

"Put up the sword!" The voice of Christ once more
Speaks in the pauses of the cannon's roar,

O'er fields of corn by fiery sickles reaped

And left dry ashes; over trenches heaped

With nameless dead; o'er cities starving slow
Under a rain of fire; through wards of woe
Down which a groaning diapason runs

From tortured brothers, husbands, lovers, sons,
Of desolate women in their far off homes,
Waiting to hear the step that never comes!
O men and brothers! let that voice be heard ;
War fails, try peace; put up the useless sword.

Fear not the end. There is a story told

In Eastern tents, when autumn nights grow cold,
And round the fire the Mongol shepherds sit
With grave responses listening unto it:
Once, on the errands of his mercy bent,
Buddha, the holy and benevolent,

Met a fell monster, huge and fierce of look,
Whose awful voice the hills and forests shook.
"O son of peace!" the giant cried, "thy fate
Is sealed at last, and love shall yield to hate."
The unarmed Buddha, looking with no trace
Of fear or anger, in the monster's face,

In pity said: "Poor fiend, even thee I love."
Lo! as he spake the sky-tall terror sank

To hand-breadth size; the huge abhorrence shrank

Into the form and fashion of a dove;

And where the thunder of its rage was heard

Circling above him sweetly sang the bird:

"Hate hath no harm for love," so ran the song ;

And peace unweaponed conquers every wrong.—Whittier.

Rev. Dr. ABEL STEVENS, after a ten years' residence in Europe, writes that the growth of the anti-war sentiment of Europe, and especially of England, is wonderful. Thoughtful men everywhere begin to deprecate war as a sort of practical solecism in our times—a traditional barbarism wrongly retained from the "age of chivalry," in our new age of industrial progress.

THE STATESMEN AND DEMAGOGUES, WITH WHOM AMBITION

And military glory are naturally traditional, have not yet, indeed, appreciated the force of this undercurrent of modern thought. Nothing, perhaps, is more effectively converting public opinion against war than the actual and intolerable military policy of these states-the incredible waste of money; the oppressive military service of young men in barracks through their best years; the habitual anticipation of war, and the frequent suspense, or weakening of confidence in the business world. We have entered a new era.

An imposing example was set by England and America, in the famous case of Geneva; a case which is commemorated in this city (Geneva) by the consecration of the hall of the Hotel de Ville, where it took place, and by significant inscriptions and other memorials. When the Geneva example occurred, the whole enlightened world rejoiced over it, as a great event, but still more as a great precedent. It was hailed as the exemplification of a new mode of settling international disputes—a competent and rational substitute for war; one that befitted our advanced civilization, and which could hardly fail, sooner or later, to change the military relations of nations. Reflecting opponents of war have never abandoned this hope; they know, indeed, that the inauguration of such a revolution in the life of nations requires prolonged time; for it would be a

RECTIFICATION OF THE TRADITIONAL POLICY OF ALL NATIONS,

Through all past ages—a policy over which has been thrown the chief "glory," the " chivalry of the world; but believing this "glory" to be traditional barbarism, a stupendous fallacy, incompatible with modern civilization, they have held fast to their confidence; they have assumed that the Geneva example would, sooner or later, be repeated, and that a few repetitions of it would effectively render it a permanent policy. All the best interests of modern civilization, all the highest sentiments of modern life, are on its side.

In the last International Congress for the Promotion of Peace by Arbitration at Berne, Switzerland, were assembled some of the best representative men of Europe and America, including many eminent jurisconsults. They discussed

THE PRACTICABILITY OF A PERMANENT TRIBUNAL OF ARBITRATION, And sent out to the world their opinion that the time had come for such a grand innovation in international jurisprudence. It was a decision befitting our age. They did not embarrass the subject with any theory about "abstract right or wrong of war. What need is there of any such theory? War is "concretely so monstrously wrong, so disastrously inconsistent with our advanced civilization, that our age should insist on some rational substitute for it, whatever can be said of its abstract ethical character. And this rational substitute the congress affirmed could be found in arbitration. The Russo-English dispute led to a revelation of

"

THE GROWING SENTIMENT OF EUROPE AGAINST WAR,

in spite of the military policy of the cabinets for some years past. This threatened conflict was deprecated by many of the public journals (though with important exceptions) as a common calamity. It might disturb generally the industrial relations of Europe. England especially deprecated it. Public meetings were held in favor of peace; many influential journals (in spite of some notable exceptions) contended for the utmost exertions of the government to avert it; the government itself, while firm on ultimate points, was conciliatory, not to say concessive, to a degree seldom, perhaps never, known before in its history.

The settlement of the late Russo English difficulty was a net gain for peace.