The daily morning journal and courier., 1895-01-08

 | ideas?
 The reform movement is the most
 evident, and perhaps needs no com
 ment. Starting in Brooklyn, it is
 spreading all over the country. It is
 said every city and town has it's Park hurst or committee, a sudden, fierce
 determination to brand vice as vice, to
 at least hold no traffic with 1t. Men have been expecting a religious revival,
 which has generally accompanied a
 period of depression, but it has not come yet. Apparently it has in the | present taken the form of a moral re- vivaL This revival has been connect ed with some striking personalities: McKane and Hill, Parkhurst and Golf, but the movement has been pre-emi-
 nently of God and the people. How
 thoroughly it is the offspring of ripe,
 popular sentiment is made evident by
 considering the scores of men just as
 brilliant and earnest who have broken
 their hearts trying to do this same
 thing. The people were not ready
 and you have got to wait for the peo- pie. Were we a monarchy, and had strong monarch thirst, that reform on
 New York, it would not have done any
 good; it would have been the untamed,
 unchanged, unslain lion caged. Prog
 ress to be really progress must not alone
 be approved by but developed out of
 The people. It is not the end of course.
 There will be reaction toward sluggish
 ness again, but never so far. Munich
 palities will never again be so poorly
 governed as in '94. It seems sometimes
 as though reform hit upon the very
 least ill in the peoples way. With a
 nation pouring ruin and crime down its
 throat quart day per man, and pay
 ing $100,00O0 900 year for the privilege
 of doing it, a few millions scraped up
 dishonestly from dishonest people by
 dishonest people doesn't strike us as of much consequence. With the national
 legislature absolutely owned by a su- gar trust and whiskey trust a poor
 little alliance between a policeman and
 a brothel doesn't seem of much conse-
 quence. Yet 1t is in these smaller cor ruptions that the larger find their roots
 A more hopeful thing by far to my mind is the breaking up of the solid south. Sectionalism is the hydra-head- ed, fire-spitting dragon of human pro gress; never a tyrant, never an incarna- ton of supreme selfishness, never giant liar has arisen on this earth but has been taught by the devil, his mas ter, that the way to conquer liberty and
 truth was by dividing is. S1viding not its ideas; truth grows strong by division of ideas; but by divid- ing its sympathles by persuading the people that the good fortune of their neighbors was their i'll fortune, that truth could gain anywhere and not all men be gathers, that they ought to be by themselves and for themselves. The day when a man or principle must go before that immense section, which in so many respects is the home of our truest and trustiest Americanism, and be tried, as they must be here, by their merits alone, that moment the lash held held over the faithless statesman's back gains a resistless weight. One-half of the craftsmanship, so-called, in this country during the last thirty years has founded itself on the fact that man could appeal powerfully to nomi nal prejudices. If both great parties have not discovered that there are hun dreds of thousands of voters in this country, and are going to be hundreds of thousands more, who care nothing for names, but will have deeds of value and truth from their representatives, then they are blown. We care less mt +5, know more what he has done since he was born, and what he will do if we let him live.
 Abroad there has been some big his 1 tory-making. There the most evident thing seems the most significant also the war between China and Japan. The little ball on China's flag, which l her dragon has always been about to | devour for so many years, has itself become a devourer. It is hard for us | to put ourselves in the place of peoples l who speak and act and look so differ | entity from ourselves, We were slow to | recognize the significance of the strug gle. To the great majority it was sim | ply a heather scrap. We had been l hearing wonderful things about Japan 1 TOT IHlEIy yedlS-llSl lllll SI lOI lHulO- pean knowledge, her popular develop l ment, her new constitution so largely | modelled on our own, her disgust with | the obsolete. We knew China was ex elusive with contempt for everything | that was not Chinese, but we did not | know the immeasurable difference ia | the spirit of the two nations. We know | now that the war means that the in evitable light has burst in on the big | gest cave of darkness on the globe, that a ripple of oncoming breeze of liberty 1 has struck the oppression of the mosI populous nation on earth, that vast den of corruption has had it's side sto- ven in, that a monumental coneeit has lost it's underpinning To us who know so we'll what toryism is, what the wor ship of ancestors is, what the gospel of custom is, what the worship of the old | simply because it is the old is, and can | do nothing but feebly protest how per fectly delicious it is to read of these Japanese believers in Jesus great law | of growth humping the life out of ob stinacy, marching over these rag dolls | of national boobyism, laughing at man made scarecrows of holiness. To Japan | it is true evolution of popular con
 +r I,ak