tial and indispensable to its fitting performance, and that the lack of these would utterly vitiate its character. It would be far too much to claim that perfect fairness is always secured; but it is not untrue to say that the necessity of it is kept daily and hourly in mind.

We ask your counsel and prayer to the end that this agency which you have established may be helpful to our churches and may be approved of God.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE AGAINST GAMBLING.1

Efficient restraint is irksome, and the efficiency of recent efforts to restrain gambling is indicated by attempts made in the legislatures of 1897 and 1898 to relax our present statutes so far as to permit the sale of pools at races. Your committee took occasion to call the attention of several members of the present legislature to this proposition in order to request the maintenance of the present law.

So far as we can learn, no effort to impair the strictness of the present statutes has had enough vitality to command any attention from the legislative body.

Again, so far as we can find, no municipality in this Commonwealth that has once taken issue against gambling at races has ever allowed the revival of it. It is therefore encouraging to note that the efforts made a year ago in the eastern part of the State succeeded, and Medford, Saugus, and Dedham suppressed race-track gambling. Northampton did as well. There are, however, three places in the Commonwealth, for which even the charity of your committee could not claim that they suppressed pools at races, but as they are only three your committee do not consider extensive report called for at the present time. It desires, however, to acknowledge the activity of the Watch and Ward Society and the continued cooperation of the ministers of our denomination in Medford in maintaining and extending the enforcement of the law against gambling in Eastern Massachusetts.

We recommend the continuance of a committee against gambling.

We hope henceforth to spare you long reports, but such a body is needed for restraining grace so long as even three laggard municipalities fail to enforce the law, as well as to watch that the gains now so largely made be not forfeited, either by lapse of enforcement, or by stealthy manipulation of legislatures.

REPORT OF TEMPERANCE COMMITTEE.

WE ARE GAINING ON THE ENEMY.

A body of believers who are actuated by Christ's spirit is his church. The dominion of his spirit in every human heart is the object for which his church labors and prays. No question in its relation to this object outranks as a deterrent force what the people on the continent of Europe call "the curse of alcoholism," and what we call the vice of intemperance. Therefore when we ask: What are the signs of the coming of his kingdom, whose right it is to rule and reign in every human heart, anything like an accurate answer will include careful note of the progress of this handmaid of "the kingdom" - the temperance cause.

We are asked to present a report of that cause for the State of Massachusetts, but such is the solidarity of our modern human life, that our progress is relative and dependent upon that of other parts of the world.

Philip II., of Spain in the sixteenth century, to exclude the doctrines of the Reformation, isolated the intellect of Spain from all the rest of the world by forbidding on pain of death, any citizen to leave Spain to read, learn, or teach anything, or to attend any university or place of learning in any country outside of Spain. The provincial, intolerant Spaniard of to-day is the result.

Never more than now was the cause of temperance in one place related to that cause in other parts of the world, for the whole problem turns on the answer to the question: What is the nature of alcohol as a beverage?

If used in moderation it is a safe drink, then opposition to its sale and use is fanaticism. But if on the contrary, it has the power when taken in small quantities to create an uncontrollable appetite for more, and if the gratification of that appetite blunts the conscience, hardens the heart, impairs the judgment, injures working ability, and causes, as Gladstone said, "worse human disaster than have war, famine, and pestilence combined," then is it a foe that must be met and vanquished before the kingdom of Christ will come.

Whether it must be vanquished depends, as already said, on the answer to the question: Is alcohol as a beverage a friend or foe?

History points to the long roll of ruinous consequences that follow in the wake of alcohol, but it cannot tell us whether these are due to the weakness of the drinker or, as was formerly supposed, to the nature of the drink. Science alone can answer that question, and as she continues her investigations with instruments of modern precision, and in many different lands, her testimony is increasing in volume and in uniformity of statement, all proving that alcoholic drinks are by nature subtle;

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dangerous foes to the moral, mental, and physical well-being of man; that a little alcohol, as found in the lighter liquors, has the power to create the appetite for more, which causes all the disaster we deplore; and that this is the result of the nature of the drink, not of the weakness of the drinker.

Space forbids our presenting but one instance of this testimony of science.

We have been told that, "If our people would only drink the lighter liquors, wine, and beer, etc., so common in Europe, we should have no drunkenness." Last summer, the "Congress Against the Abuse of Alcohol," that meets biennially on the continent of Europe to consider how the evils of drunkenness, which confessedly blights those countries, may be averted, held its session in Brussels, Belgium. The chairman of the temperance committee of this association, on learning that one of its members was invited to represent there the temperance movement in the United States, suggested that that member should appear also as a representative of the temperance committee of this association, and sent to the Congress letters of credentials to that effect. Therefore, the findings of that body are a legitimate part of this report.

The personnel of the Congress added emphasis to its utterances, for it was made up chiefly of representatives from the universities of Europe, and men connected with the governments of its nations.

Concerning those utterances, we have space to state only that every paper there presented which reported scientific investigation by university men who are trained to look into the face of nature and report, without bias, what they find, showed that, by the most painstaking scientific investigation, no place could be found in the healthy human economy for alcoholic drinks in any quantity. On the contrary, their investigations proved that alcohol injures health, diminishes both mental and physical capacity for work in proportion to the amount taken, and confirmed the testimony of August Forel, M. D., professor of physiology in the University of Zurich, who said:

"Alcohol, which by slow, unperceived poisoning of the brain, first of all benumbs and destroys our higher ethical feelings, thinking, and willing, and renders us more animal and brutal than we should be otherwise, is the very worst enemy to the future of humanity."

Papers on the sociological aspects of "the alcohol problem," read by men from such wine and beer drinking countries as France and Germany, deplored the drunkenness, which they admitted is an existing menace which they would avert from their native lands.

If the use of wine or beer would prevent drunkenness, as the claim referred to asserts, then there should be no drunkenness in France, Germany, Belgium, and other wine and beer drinking countries of Europe, and there should have been no need of the Brussels Congress, made up of representatives of those countries, met to consider how the curse of alcoholism could be removed.

This latest testimony of science against alcoholic drinks is vital to

Massachusetts, as it is to every other people throughout Christendom, for the situation is this: The first cause of the drink evil everywhere is the misconception of the people. From generations of habit, custom, and appetite, the idea has been inherited that moderately used, alcoholic drinks are good, and that misconception leads to the beginning of their use, while the consequences that have followed are the nightmare of the ages. Every testimony of science, like that from the Brussels Congress, furnishes truth with which to correct these popular misconceptions.

Is it not a providential conjunction of events that as these testimonies of science in the old world, confirmed by similar investigations in the new, are brought to our attention, nearly every school-house in the land is not only open to receive it, but the law commands that the warning truth concerning the nature and effects of alcoholic drinks and other narcotics shall be taught all pupils in all schools in connection with other laws of health?

Massachusetts was one of the early States, in 1885, to make this a compulsory study. The law then enacted is weak with no penalty, and lacks important specifications which have been added from time to time to the temperance education laws of other States.

The world to-day is admiring the cool precision, the steady effectiveness of aim, of our sailor soldier boys during the naval battle at Manila in the Orient. How did it happen there that every shot told? God was there, but he works through human means and often sets forces in motion long before we see their bearing.

In 1886, the Congress of the United States enacted a law which requires all students in our national military and naval academies at West Point and Annapolis to be taught, in connection with physiology and hygiene, the nature of alcoholic drinks and other narcotics, and their effects upon nerves, senses, brain, muscles, and every other human tissue and function. Therefore the young men who for the last twelve years have been graduated from those institutions, and who are now manning our navy, have gone to their country's defence knowing that instead of helping in feats of skill and endurance, as men supposed it did when the war of the Rebellion broke out, alcohol blunts sense perception, clouds the brain, and impairs prceision by deadening nerve control of muscles, thereby unfitting the drinker for important tasks requiring skill and prolonged effort.

Congress also ordered in that law that this study should be taught with text-books in the hands of those military and naval cadets, and that the nation should furnish the books, as it has furnished them, and good books too, during twelve years. Who can say that the hand that wrote the truth against alcohol in those books did not help to aim the guns at Manila? But the Massachusetts law does not require its school boards to furnish text-books for this important study as they must for other branches, and what they are not obliged to do they fail often to see the importance of doing. And thus without suitable helps the study often goes by default; because neither teacher nor pupil can make bricks without straw.

The nation had sore need of skilled marksmen two weeks ago at

Manila, and Massachusetts with nearly one man in three in her populatation foreign born, has sore need of educating her future men and women to be intelligent abstainers from all forms of alcoholic drinks humanity's worst foe. The temperance education laws of Illinois and New York have been revised to require, besides text-books, a minimum number of lessons that shall be pursued by all pupils on this subject in the various grades of the public schools, with examinations in the same for promotion from grade to grade, and in these States as in sixteen others, a penalty impends if the law is evaded in 'any of its particulars. We are behind in the provision we have made for the education of our children in this important matter. Our temperance education law should be amended. It was through the influence of the Christian churches of New York, Illinois, and other States co-operating with temperance and other philanthropic organizations, that these laws have been strengthened in those States. Should not the Congregational churches of Massachusetts, the church of the Puritans, also help to secure a better law for the protection of the children of this Commonwealth from the enticements of alcohol?

Every State in the United States but four now has a temperance education law. There are sixteen million children of school age under this legislation. A great school literature, which has been proved accurate, and methods of instruction have been prepared on the subject, and every school day of the year millions of the future men and women of our land are learning why they should not drink alcoholic liquors.

What results can now be seen of this instruction?

The instructor in temperance physiology at our National Military Academy at West Point, says of the years following the introduction of that study into that school:

"There has been a marked diminution in drinking at army posts which are officered by cadets who have had instruction in temperance physiology."

Graduating classes are reported as having no liquors at class suppers. At the time the department of temperance education began its work in 1880 eighteen years ago a man in this country was not considered to be unfit for positions of responsibility requiring acute perception or the best exercise of any other faculty, because he was a moderate user of alcoholic drinks and tobacco. Men who were known to be moderate drinkers were unhesitatingly employed on railroads, steamboats, in watch factories, and other places requiring clear brains and steady nerves.

The fact that the estimate of the business value of such men is very much changed, and the relation of scientific temperance education in the public schools to that change, is well illustrated by the following incident:

In 1896, one of the officers in a large railroad corporation was asked: "What led to the order issued by your company forbidding the employment of men to run trains who are users, when on or off duty, of alcoholic drinks or tobacco?"