Connecticut western news., 1891-03-11
measure which is already filled with Michigan wheat.

Michigan wheat.
 RUINED BY TENACIOUS READING.
 Why are 50 per cent. of the criminals in the jails and penitentiaries of the United States today under twenty-one years of age2 Many of them under seventeen, under sixteen, under fifteen, under fourteen, under thirteen. Walk along one of the corridors of the Tombs prison in New York and look for your selves. Bad books, bad newspapers bewitched them as soon as they got out of the cradle. Beware of all those stories which end wrong Beware of all those books which make the road that ends in perdition seem to end in Paradise. Do not glorify the dirk and the pistol. Do not call the desperado brave or the ibertine gallant. Teach our young people that if they go down into the swaInps and marshes to watch the jack-o'- lanterns dance on the decay and rottenness, they will catch the ma laria and death.
 ''Oh!" says some one, Il am busi- ness man, and I have no time to exam inc what my children read. I have no time to inspect the books that come into my household" If your children were threatened with typhoid fever, would you have time to go for the doc tor2 Would you have time to watch the progress of the disease2 Would you have time for the funeral9 In the pres ence of my God warn yon of the fact that your children are threatened with moral and spiritual typhoid, and that unless the thing be stopped it will be to them funeral of body, funeral of mind, funeral of soul Three funerals in one day. My word is to this vast multitude of young people: Do not touch, do not borrow, do not buy a corrupt book or corrupt picture. A book will decide mans destiny for good or for evil The book you read yesterday may have decided you for time and for eternity, or it may be a book that may come into your possession tomorrow.
 THE POWER OF GOOD BOOK. A good book-who can exaggerate it's power2 Benjamin Franklin said that his reading of Cotton Mather's Essays to Do Good" in childhood gave him holy aspirations for all the rest of his life. Geo~ge Law declared that biography he read in childhood gave him all his subsequent prosperi- ties. A clergyman, many years ago, passing to the far west, stopped at a hotel. He saw a woman copying some thing from Doddridge's Rise and Progress" It seemed that she had borrowed the book, and there were some things she wanted especially to remember.
 The clergyman had in his sachel a | copy of Doddrige's 'Rise and Prog ress,' and so he made her present of it. Thirty years passed on. The clergyman came that way. and he asked seen long ago. They said, ''She lives wonder in that beautiful house." He went tliere and said to her. Do you remember mel" She said, No, dc not" He said, Do you remember a man gave you Doddridge's Rise and Progress thirty years ago?" "Oh, yes; remember. That book saved my soul. loaned the book to all my neighbors, and they read it and were converted to God, and we had a re vival of religion that tswept through the whole community. We built a church and called q pastor. You see that spire yonder, don't you? That church was built as the result of that book you gave me thirty years ago." Oh, the power of a good book. But, alasl for the influence of bad book.
 John Angel James, than whom Eng. land never had holier minister, stood in his pulpit at Birmingham and said Twenty years ago a lad loaned to me an infamous book. He would loan it only fifteen minutes and then had to give it back; but that book has haunted me like a specter ever since. 1 have in agony of soul, on my knees before God, prayed that he would ob- literate from my soul the memory of it but shall carry the damage of it to the day of my death" The assassin ot Sir William Russell declared that he got the inspiration for his crime by reading what was then new and pop ular novel, Jack Sheppard" Homer's ''Iliad" made Alexander the warrior. Alexander said so. The story of Alex ander made Julius Caesar and Charles XII both men of blood. Have you in your pocket, or in your trunk, or in your desk at business bad book, a bad picture, a bad pamphlet2 In Gods name warn you to destroy it.
 ANOTHER WAY.
 Anothes way in which we shall fight back this corrupt literature and kill the frogs of Egypt is by rolling over them the Christian printing press, which shall give plenty of healthful reading to all adults. All these men and women are reading men and women. What are you reading2 Abstain from all those books which, while they had some good things about them have also an ad mixture of evil. You have read books that had two elements in them-the good and the bad Which stuck to you9 The bad! The heart of most people is like a sieve, which lets the small particles of gold fall through but keeps the great cinders. Once in a while there is a mind like a loadstone, which, plunged amid steel and brass filings, gathers up the steel and repels the brass But it is generally just the opposite. If you attempt to plunge through fence of burrs to get one blackberry you will get more burrs than blackberries. You cannot afford to read bad book, however good you are. You say, "Tho influence is insig-