their six. Or put another way, they worked for six days and then kept holy the seventh, whilst we could live as they did if we worked on one day alone and kept holiday the rest of the week.

Then what must we read-what only can we read in these tremendous facts? Hope, buoyancy, abundance. The efficiency of man has been trebledsextupled-in a hundred years. Man by his labour lived in a certain degree of miserable comfort a hundred years ago. Man, with his added powers, must live in abundance in the years to come. What should abundance mean? Properly directed it should mean morals, education, and refinement: the triumph of the mind, the awakening of the soul, and the exaltation of the intellect over the mere corporeal and animal passions of human nature. What should abundance mean? It should mean that men as units may live in brotherhood; it should mean that nations may live in fellowship and goodwill. Yes, what should abundance mean? It means that a league of nations should be no fanciful dream, but only the giving expression to the hazy thought of a war-weary world. Abundance is not restricted to any one land, nor peculiar to any one people. It is throughout the world that man's power has been multiplied, and the only limit to a nation's prosperity is its own industry and its own habits; and every nation may be prosperous and contented, and the more so for the like prosperity of every other nation on the globe.

Yes, assuredly all this is what abundance should. mean. With anxiety we ask what has it meant? This cruel war; this wild talk; these bloody massacres; this insane grabbing for more and yet more. Surely it is not enough for nature to shower every blessing upon man without also endowing him with wit to turn such blessings to account. But it is early yet to be cast down. The world is in the throes of a new birth, and the day of its deliverance is not yet at hand. For the moment man has not yet awakened to his new conditions; for the moment his intellectual expansion

fails to keep pace with his material development. Our ideas are still prehistoric, our mentality still of the time when abundance was unknown and a fight for existence a reality, and hunger more than a menace. A hundred years has sufficed to revolutionize our productive science, but has proved insufficient to readjust our mental equipment. In the past the fight for existence did mould our life, our habits, and our thoughts, it determined our mentality, and that mentality is still unchanged. Thus still we must quarrel and wrangle as in an age when days were evil and life was hard and as ever wild platitudes devoid of understanding and appeal to man's basest passions is often the shortest cut to wealth and fame. So, meantime, however optimistic our nature, it is not enough to have regard only to what perfect wisdom may teach, but to what most imperfect man may do. And yet, notwithstanding these facts, notwithstanding it is hampered at every turn by man's spiritual want of development, we still find the material will not be denied. Surely, silently, resistlessly, the material has been working for good in the development of man. Whilst man has been and is still talking it has been quietly acting. With the advance of physical science and its achievements man has also made progress in the way, and largely in spite of himself-certainly so far as these islands are concerned. But he has advanced. For example, without knowing the why or the wherefore, his ethical outlook has changed, and changed for the better in many directions. Contrast our ideas on many a social problem with those of our great-grandparents only. How terrible seem to us their hours of toil, their depth of ignorance, their appalling punishments! And why this change in ethical outlook? Is it that we are more humane? Race characteristics do not of themselves change in a century. No! but simply that progress in material conditions has already brought about this progress in our views. In those days life was hard, and small the margin between subsistence and actual want. Of necessity hours were long and

the conditions of labour intolerable, and only less intolerable than such conditions in a state of nature itself. With food enough to keep the wolf from the door-a pregnant phrase in those days-a man was happy, and with two suits to wear instead of one he was actually rich. As for education and such amenities of life, there was little leisure to permit of such drafts on labour. But they hanged-yes, hanged-a man for stealing a sheep. And with general consent. He made a hard life still harder and was the enemy of his kind. And so our attitude to the slave trade. We associate it with everything horrible. It is far different in our eyes to theirs of but a few years ago, and why? We can harness a slave worth a nation of blacks when we harness steam to our machinery. As long as material conditions were otherwise and the want of the world was power, it was intolerable that man or race who could work should not do so. Thus even Christianity itself did not condemn it. On the contrary it saw in the slave the descendant of Ham, marked out by the Almighty Himself for slavery from the beginning. In fact, till steam came and made the slave superfluous, there has been only one force which has consistently tended to alleviate his lot, and it we regard as a foible at best-Snobbery. What Roman, for instance, could pose as a man of fashion who could not afford a separate slave for every separate office of his establishment? *

Thus we may rejoice, and rightly rejoice, in our more humane outlook, but for all this should do so in all humility and without sitting in judgment on those who have gone before. Their conditions were not ours, and in our conditions they would have been no whit other than ourselves. Nothing is more wanting in comprehension than talk of the wrongs of the past. As for trying to right a past wrong by a present reform, when wronged and wronger in God's acre are

*Exactly as in pre-war days, when the lady of the house "could have sunk through the floor" when, her waitress being away, her cook had to open the door to a visitor.

together sleeping their last sleep, it is as hopeless as to bid the dead arise or their dust renew its youth and prime. And to so try is to sow dragon's teeth, to harvest a new crop of woe on woe. No; would we enter into our inheritance, with us it must be to Let the dead past"-a past of which the wisest of us know but little-"Let the dead past bury its dead," and to try and work out our future with good will and a true understanding. And do this, and other signs are full of encouragement. We note this change in ethical outlook, and we equally record the parallel change in our very children of to-day. In all the world's story never has more glorious tale been told than that of our first million volunteers. Who realized that England boasted so many noble sons? And they both saved her and proved her worth saving by one and the same devotion. Had they failed, and we had gone under, would the world have been much the poorer for our exit? Why are we mistress of the seas? Because, as beautifully put by an American, so many of our sons have found their last home in the depths of the ocean. Strange, but true! But that nation alone is worthy to live which knows how to die.

Thus we visualize our race in trial and war: now problems of peace perplex us. And this very abundance seems to have brought about almost the most insoluble problem of all-that of leisure. Science has brought abundance, abundance leisure, and the crying need of the hour is to learn how to use it. Before the war many of us solved it with bridge, with golf, and other like elevated pursuits. It took a war to teach us the vanity and emptiness of a life so spent. On the other hand, for our millions the greatest boon our country has known is the bicycle. It has been the great temperance factor of the age, for it has found. the worker a new interest in life. And now why only a bicycle? In the States they have one power-driven vehicle for every forty of the population, we only one for every four hundred. Why is the motor to be a toy only for the rich? To many a craftsman a motor

cycle is well within the capacity of his purse if he will but think a little, save a little, and put his soul into all that he does, his work included. And properly enjoyed, leisure is a glorious gift. We would have no life all toil, nor is there need for all toil. We would have our nation a joyous nation, a holiday-loving nation, if only it will enjoy such holidays aright. And taking a calm view of the whole matter it would seem we may truly say that our people are gradually learning to use such leisure reasonably and rightly.

No doubt this question of leisure born of abundance is the great problem of life before us. On its solution will depend the very future of the race. As to other subsidiary problems, such as free trade,* or tariff reform, or ca' cannie policy, of which we hear so much, they will all work themselves out when once we realize as a nation that it is not more abundance we want, but how to use wisely the abundance already given us.† Of course, as regards ca' cannie, it goes to the very root of the abundance of which we speak. It is obvious the less honey that is brought into a hive, the less there will be to divide. If one set of bees decide to bring in only half loads, all other bees will follow suit, with a consequent loss to all. No doubt this policy is due to an entire misapprehension of facts: our worker has been told that the only way he can secure a fair reward for his toil is by going slow. Colour is given to such talk by the steady increase in his wages during the past few decades, which he credits to this theory and practice. But such increase has been the sole result of the general material advance which we have noted, and has been in spite of and not due to such reduced production, which in fact has.

*As missionaries of a magnificent ideal we may preach Free Trade, but can we justify dispute over it for any other reason?

That is when, as individuals, we learn to say, "I have enough," not that " you have too much." This the world has been ready to say through all the ages.