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through him were brought into prominence, were named by this historian, but that the great Master himself, whose words and deeds have never ceased to stir the great world, was wholly ignored and unnamed, is a kind of reasoning which does not produce conviction. Taking Josephus's expression in this testimony, in connection with that concerning James "the brother of Jesus, who is called Christ," as the key for interpreting the sentence, "He was the Christ," it is easy to understand that Josephus was conserving his faith as a Jew in the presence of stupendous facts which he proceeds to state. His attitude toward Christianity may be illustrated by Nicodemus, in his relation to the Saviour, or by Gamaliel, in his relation to the apostles. That is, Josephus was not a Christian, but a liberal Jew; not a hater of Jesus or a hypocrite, but a conservative historian who related his facts respecting Jesus as he saw them; not willing, however, to accept the Christian conclusion legitimated by his facts; not accepting "the Christ" as his personal Redeemer, but as the Messiah of Jewish expectation, a temporal ruler of the Jews, and regular successor of King David. Whatever interpretive sense may be accorded to the particular sentence, "He was the Christ," it in no wise affects his testimony to the historical facts, as follows:

And after Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, his first adherents did not forsake him. For he appeared to them alive again during the third day, the divine prophets having foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe called Christians after him is not extinct to this

day.

S. L. Bowman.

EDITORIAL DEPARTMENTS.

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS.

Nor many days before Whittier died his valued friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, reached the age of eighty-three, in recognition of which the venerable Quaker poet sent him, with affectionate greeting, the following lines:

The hour draws near, howe'er delayed and late,

When at the eternal gate

We leave the words and works we call our own,

And lift void hands alone

For love to fill. Our nakedness of soul

Brings to that gate no toll;

Giftless we come to Him who all things gives,

And live because he lives.

Remembering that Whittier well knew who it was that said, "Because I live, ye shall live also," we cannot doubt that his pure soul was fixed upon his divine Lord and Master as he wrote, with feeble and failing fingers, these devout and solemn lines, so full of the spirit of self-renunciation and of utter dependence on the grace and power of the Redeemer of mankind. And we are

confidently sure that to him was fulfilled the prayer which Tennyson offered for himself; when he put out to sea there was no moaning of the bar.

THE Conference held in the Vatican for the purpose of considering the possibility of a reunion of the Roman and Greek Churches was a result of the papal encyclical on Christian unity. The pope is not only desirous of having all Christians under one name; he is anxious, also, to widen his dominions. But neither the old Armenian Church, nor the Greek Church of Russia and Greece have taken any part in the conference. The ecclesiastical bodies represented in the conference, outside of the Roman Church, number but five million souls, while the Churches of Greece and Russia number ninety-eight millions. Even the comparatively small number of non-Romanist people who consented to send representatives to the conference have never acknowledged the superior

authority of the pope. It is not likely that they will concede this now for the sake of the proposed unity, and the pope will not, of course, resign his professed authority. In fact, it is these exclusive claims of a nonspiritual kind which stand in the way of Christian unity everywhere to-day.

SOME FEATURES OF ONE STRIKE.

Two reasons move us to write of this particular strike: we have eyewitness knowledge of it, and it is of general interest, because typical to some extent of many other strikes. On Monday, January 14, 1895, the motormen and conductors on about all the trolley lines of Brooklyn, numbering some five thousand men, quit work and went on strike for better treatment, being overworked and underpaid. Over several hundred miles of road not a car was running, except a few that carried United States mails. A city of about a million, suddenly deprived of its accustomed means of transportation, suffered immense inconvenience and discomfort, and business was largely paralyzed. An extra expense of $20,000 a day was entailed upon the city, or, what is the same thing, on Kings County, for troops and special police necessary for restoring and maintaining order. The loss to business must have aggregated millions. The suffering endured in severe winter weather by the poor families of the strikers must have been great and distressing. It seems worth while to set forth here, in numbered order and in the present tense, the salient features of this deplorable history, as it proceeded from stage to stage.

1. In the beginning the sympathy of the community is almost entirely with the strikers. They are believed to have real grievances and a just cause; they only ask for fair play. The trolley companies have few friends. Their history has not been honorable. By corrupt means, to begin with, they obtained from the city valuable franchises without paying anywhere near what the privileges were worth. They then inflated or watered their stock, to a volume far in excess of actual capital invested and far beyond the value of their property. Then the roads are so run as to pay large dividends on all this fictitious stock over and above excessive dividends on the real investment. The fare being limited by law, the trolley lines cannot get more money out of their passengers; they therefore wring it out of their employees by overwork and underpay, shrewdly and heartlessly arranging their rules so

that most of the losses-as, for example, by delay or accident-shall fall on the men and all the profits go to the company. Thus, the poor workmen are ground between the millstones as grist, to feed fat the stockholders and pay dividends on money that was never invested. It is the same sort of cruelty as miners in Scotland revolted against, when a fifteen per cent dividend was paid to the stockholders and eight dollars a week to the laborer in the mines. Moreover, the law requires that when dividends reach ten per cent fares shall be reduced. It is said that to avoid this necessity the individuals who constitute the companies resort to a legal fiction, organize on paper another company, a sort of side show, and manage to divert part of the revenue of the roads into this fictional treasury, whence it is distributed to the individual trolley stockholders by a subterranean sluiceway which dodges the law. The trolley companies have, also, been reckless of human life. They have killed many people. They delayed as long as possible to equip their cars with fenders, and only did it slowly when compelled. They made such rules about trips that their men, in order to earn even the wages allowed them, were obliged to run the cars at a higher rate of speed than the law permits. This has endangered the public and made lawbreakers of the men. For such reasons the community had small sympathy or patience with the companies in the beginning of the trouble, and have still less as the miserable days go on and most of the trolley officials maintain, in spite of intercessions by the mayor and others, an attitude of hard and arrogant stubbornness toward the men who are claiming their rights.

2. The strikers, starting with a just cause, show their reasonableness further by yielding part of their demands on some of the lines, and resuming work the moment the managers of those lines make a slight concession and consent to a half decent compromise. The men promptly meet these companies halfway. A similar spirit on the part of the other lines would have ended the strike completely in twenty-four hours.

3. The companies whose employees, obtaining no concessions, continue on strike slowly secure other men, a few at a time, from other cities to run their cars. The new men have a right to come and take the places made vacant by the strikers, and must be protected in that right if it requires all the power of the city and the State. One of the new motormen-" scabs," the strikers call them being asked if he is not afraid of the angry mob, answers grimly: "No; I have a wife and five hungry children

looking to me for bread. It is easier to face the mob than to face them." Another "scab," when threatened by the strikers, replied resolutely: "Let me alone. I have a right to earn food for my motherless children up in Connecticut."

4. The labor leaders earnestly caution their men from the first to abstain from violence and lawlessness. Nine tenths of the strikers, perhaps, obey and refrain from molesting the new men and from injuring the property of the companies. But it is a heavy strain on suffering human nature for them to see the trolley magnates triumphing over them and destroying their hopes, by filling their places with other men who do not belong to their labor organizations; and a few of the strikers, unable to bear this strain, begin to intimidate and assault the new men and in various ways try to prevent the running of cars. Wires are cut, tracks are torn up or obstructed, car windows are smashed, motormen and conductors are stoned, pulled off the car platforms, and brutally beaten. The danger is intensified by the fact that liquor saloons, where many of the strikers congregate, put that into their mouths which steals away their brains, inflames their blood, and deprives them of self-control. A crisis is at hand. Some of the strikers are becoming responsible for crime, thus challenging the law. Violence must be suppressed at any cost. And now a battle is in sight which can have but one end—an end in which, sad to say, there is no comfort for the workingmen standing out for their rights. Government and authority dare not parley with violence and destruction; lawbreakers must be restrained by force; order and peace must be restored at all hazards. The initial issue, the disagreement between the labor unions and the trolley companies, is now pushed into the background by a more ugly and desperate conflict. Labor has lost the floor by the folly of some of its sons; its motion, which was seconded by the community, is indefinitely postponed. The authorities responsible for law and order call the previous question on a motion to put down violence. The cause of the poor workingman begins to be in a sorrowful plight.

5. By the time this stage is reached, if not before, the unhappy laborers suffer a new and undeserved calamity. All the vicious classes, the toughs and hoodlums, the motley crew of vagabonds and villains that infest all cities, gangs of young rowdies, anarchists, thieves, thugs, and drunkards, gather on the scene with no desire but to create disorder and make trouble. The foulest scum of Europe boils up from the slums and pours itself in among

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