Because, whatsoever is ordinated under the will of mankind is ordinated by Nature, human will subsisting under laws of Nature; and if human will distorts or misshapes any ordination of government or society, it must of necessity distort or misshape by authority of Nature; and to ordinate evil features in civilized life, it must make Nature a perversion of herself to purposes of evil. Man's will, while subsistent only as Nature empowers it, is yet independent of Nature, and sovereign in itself over her rulings, so far as human objects in life and means toward those objects are concerned. Therefore, in ordinating features of social life or political government that are evil features, man, when he perverts Nature's powers to his will, occasions perversion of life and its uses, under Nature's perverted authority.

In nothing is this truth more deplorably exemplified than in the relations of mankind to those naturally-beneficial elements which Nature comprises, as air, water, fire, and earth. Each of these is promotive of help and comfort to humanity; air, our vital breath, being a medium for light, mental and physical, and for all sensation incident to the enjoyment of sight, sound, and feeling, Water is man's highway, in rivers and seas, his drink, his lavatory, his motive-power in expansion, the help of his agriculture, the beautifier of his gardens in fountains that gush and glitter, the purveyor of his most delicious food in a countless variety of fishes. Fire, the life of mankind and of Nature, in its basic heat is a household blessing to humanity in all conditions of life, in VOL. XV.-2

sable to the impulsion of man's machinery, even when water is relied upon to turn his mill-wheels; because to the instructed student of Nature no movement is made known that is not traceable to heat as its basic motive-power. And earth, in her diversified products to supply man's wants in food, clothing, shelter and means of conserving fire and of opening travel and transportation, is a storehouse of benefits for the human race.

What, then, is the cause or occasion of such deplorable malordinations of Nature's four elements, as are witnessed in their malign effects upon human life? Why should air be disturbed by whirlwinds, tornadoes, siroccos, and pestilential flows of its currents that generate and spread disease and deathly miasmata? Why should water be lashed to raging seas, enervated in desolating hail, congealed in icebergs, or concentrated in whirlpools and water-spouts, to engulf ships and ravage shores? Why should the hills of earth belch fire to consume cities, and the plains of earth become deserts under parching heats? And why is this earth of ours, so beautiful in natural conditionings, made arid, malarious, and rank with her own products of vegetation, that choke up rivers, change lakes to morasses, and inhibit the occupation of humanity, while her mineral and geological overproduction obstructs man's ways and means of possessing the soil which is his support, and which belongs to humanity?

Is it to be believed that a beneficent God ordained such elemental untowardness as we witness, whereby more than half the geographical area of this world of ours is inaccessible to civilization?

Rather, is it not reasonable to suppose that God intended His earth to be a habitation for His children, wherein the highest uses and enjoy

ments of human life should be made possible and practicable through harmony of mankind with harmonious Nature?

Rather, is it not consonant with our religious perceptions of Nature and our adoring conceptions of Deity to believe that God made all things to harmonize with Himself, and that in departing from Him the human race has ignored or neglected His ordained ways and means; by which that Garden of Eden, wherein mankind awoke to life and light, ought to be naturally extended to all limits of earth, so that the confines of an earthly Paradise would be bounded only by the confines of dry land and seas?

To the man who with open eyes peruses such pages of history and turns over such leaves of Nature's books as are under purview of all men, the possibility of this entire domain given to man in earth, being conditioned as a garden, is as clear and certain as the practicability of leveling a tree to make it a bridge over a torrent, or the blasting of rocks by dynamite force, to make passage-way for steam-carriages.

Given to M. de Lesseps a bank account to draw upon for all the money he requires, and he builds us to order a Suez Canal; and, after a glance at other ground, he promises to unite Pacific and Atlantic Oceans by a canal through the Isthmus of Panama.

"Forty centuries," said Napoleon Bonaparte, "look down upon us!" because he stood at the bases of Egyptian pyramids to fight an utterly useless battle. Had that "new Sesostris" commanded each corporal's guard of his French soldiery to march upon a single slab of pyramid masonry and convey it to Suez, he might have constructed a sea-wall and opened a canal from Red Sea to Mediterranean in the time he wasted for a single campaign.

How many millions of wasted human lives are represented by those Egyptian pyramids, that survive dynasties, hierarchies and hecatombs of immolated nations? And each man represented is representative of a human life lost, which, if it had been used to accomplish useful work, instead of abused to ordinate useless and pernicious war, might have done a man's part toward making this earth a Garden of Eden.

When an Assyrian despot sought to please his wife, he ordained the "Hanging Gardens of Babylon," by compelling a myriad of laborers to

pile clay upon clay, in irrigated terraces, until a mountain of verdure towered over sandy plains, to simulate those gardens of Persia a woman pined after.

What if that Assyrian despot had bethought him of employing his myriad of laborers in another work, that of improving those sandy plains into arable ground, by constructing a canal to divert the waters of Euphrates and Tigris, that they might be conducted in sluiceways to enrich with alluvial deposits those unproductive areas that in the days of Abraham were pasture lands, and in the days of Noah, before he built his ark, were vast grainfields to be reaped, that corn might fill the pyramids, and yield subsistence for millions of predi luvial mankind?

Beneath successive eruptions of Vesuvius, villages and cities were consumed by fiery flows before Pompeii and Herculaneum perished under lava and scoriac ashes. And, during all the Christian era since Pliny perished in witnessing the destruction of Herculaneum, successive generations have gazed upon Vesuvius, and marched in armies of Roman Civilization and Gothic Barbarism, under light of Vesuvian flames; yet no engineer like M. de Lesseps-not even M. de Lesseps himself-has suggested the practicability of tunneling Vesuvius to the heart of her fires, and opening a passage for lava flows; that their harmless deposit might ordinate a causeway from Vesuvius to the ocean, with a trifle of direction at man's expense.

Men read in books of travel that trees are felled at the summits of lofty mountains, and conveyed to fields beneath or seashores by inclined planes; so that an elevated plateau may be denuded of forest growth, and its timber exported by merely "letting it slide." But there is no intimation in print that M. de Lesseps proposes to reduce such avalanchine ideas to mechanical practice in opening his viaduct from Atlantic to Pacific, or that he imagines the feasibility of making such simple and natural means as inclined planes perform the work of a hundred steam-engines so long as relays of laboring men can dig and shovel dirt upon those planes, to be precipitated oceanward on either side, as easily as coal-heavers shunt their carbon lumps into holds of a steamship.

Is Greenland, in our time, an inhospitable coast, with a few sparsely-settled areas of productive soil encroached upon yearly by ice floes? Well, then,

whence came its name of Greenland? and why are its records and traditions rife with reminiscences of years, not many centuries ago, when Scandinavians emigrated by shiploads to settle on its goodly hills and plains, and build their towns on its shores, and on pleasant sites inland? Because of icebergs crowding southward, and changing climate conditions, our philosophers tell us. True, O Science! But why did not men encroach upon those Northern lands and seas before icebergs began to move southward? Ay! before icebergs subsisted in Northern seas! For it is an ordination of Nature to make land, not ice; and where man takes possession of land to stir its inner fires with his plowings, and to build his habitations on it, and to light his domestic fires, and to excavate his mines, and ignite the coals of his furnaces for machine-working, there can be no accumulation of ices. Middle Europe, in mediæval centuries, was colder than Northern Europe now is, because productive areas were desolated by warfare. Bears and wolves, under stress of cold and starvation, invaded depopulated plains, and littered in dense woodlands of France and Italy; where, in our day, the inhabitants breathe balmy airs, almost tropical, that flow for gregarious man- | kind, as icy wind and snow once lashed neglected Nature.

New England, two centuries ago, and even within the memory of living man, was conditioned with long and rigorous winters, heavy snows, and icy winds. But Civilization and population, substituting settled areas for wildernesses, have produced such amelioration of climate as invariably follows the march of mankind armed against all obstacles by the ordained weapons of manhood-implements of husbandry and mechanical arts. When mankind in America shall become gregarious as mankind in Lower China, our Appalachian range of mountains will yield as delicate teas as the tea-districts of China and Japan do. Mantchooria, in the same parallels of latitude with tea-growing districts of China, is restricted

OPPOSITION is what we want and must have to be good for anything. Hardship is the native soil of independence and self-reliance.

If a man is not rising upward to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downward to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast.

to the production of cereals, because of its sparse populations drained by constant emigration to the West. This day, on the track of a Pacific railroad to California, the most inclement weather accompanies winter months, while in summer the plains are parched to desert aridity. Settle twenty millions of an industrious laboring people between Omaha and Sacramento, and the plains will become a continuous summer-garden, with rigorous winters unknown. Is this assertion mere speculation? When Science shall master the secrets of Nature, to learn that all heat is normally conditioned in earth, and her central fires, we may comprehend a universal truth, i.e., that volcanic movement is everywhere latent; and when we understand that volcanic fire is the base of all electric action, and that heat, in every particle of matter will beget heat when attrited with other particles (as savage aborigines know when they attrite two splinters of wood to generate fire), we shall not stop at that discernment, but go on with our ways and means to warm the entire earth, as we can warm any spot of Arctic soil where a hundred laborers shall wield their hammers and drag out molten ore from the furnaces of a rollingmill.

There is no natural occasion for any acerbities of Nature, because all her emanations are amenities, so long as human beings subsist in harmony with Nature's unperverted subsistence. But as sweet becomes sour, as decomposition generates acridity, so is every beneficent provision of Deity through Nature, perverted from its use to abuse, from its good to evil, because mankind, substituting acerbities for amenities in human relations, have departed from God and from the harmonies of his Creation. And the harmonies of Creation have become discords, to play their jarring parts in the jangle and clash, the hiss, the roar, and dissonant crash of a warring and discordant world, at odds with God, with Nature, and with itself— in a Civilization which is Barbarism set to organic stops.

A LIE is a hiltless sword, which is sure to cut the hand of him who strikes with it. It is better to find this out at first than afterward.

THE Consecrated life is not a life of perpetual joy; it is an humble, pure, vehement life, all given up to the service of God and our brothers.

No introduction to the readers of the MONTHLY will be necessary for the subject of this sketch, Mr. James G. Clark. As poet and recitationist, song-composer and vocalist, he has made himself heard and known from one end of the land to the

For many years he has recited his own poems and sung his own songs throughout nearly every State in the Union, until, with them, his face and voice have become familiar and homelike. To this acquaintance already made, it is but natural that the public should feel interested in adding some knowledge of the former life of one who has done so much to give them entertainment and enjoyment.

James G. Clark was born in Constantia, Oswego County, New York State; and there, on the shores

of the beautiful Oneida Lake, he spent his early years until he attained his majority. His father was a prominent farmer and surveyor, and the son's boyhood was passed between his studies and assisting about the farm. It is to his mother perhaps that he owes principally his poetical and musical tastes and inclinations, as they are in some degree inherited. She was of a highly sensitive, poetical and musical organization, and was a remarkably sweet and expressive singer. While attending to her household duties she was constantly singing, and her children were born with her gift, and were natural musicians. When he was but three years old she taught James, seated upon her knee, to sing Kirke White's "Star of Bethlehem" to the air of "Bonnie Doon," enun