this respect. I mourn, I grieve, that we should have to think of such actions as those for which England, as I said, has in some degree directly or indirectly made herself conspicuous and set herself alone in this matter. But while I mourn for it, and reluctantly speak of it, we must put even before our beloved country the sacred cause of righteousness, without which England would not be England. [Cheers.] We must think of China. I must think of China. I have for now forty-seven years been linked with China by dear lives close to my own. I have two brothers laboring at this moment, so far as I know, with the energy and hope of the youngest missionary in China. Their residence upon the soil of China, putting aside their furloughs in England, amounts, collectively-the two together-to fully seventy-six years, and with their wives, and with their sons, and with their daughters, there is a group of fourteen or fifteen altogether, near to me in blood and kinship. They have literally given themselves up for China, and therefore I have the strongest reasons of the heart for feeling drawn to the contemplation of that wonderful country. And who that has once been so drawn but feels how grand, how impressive, how magnificent are its claims upon our good will, upon our expectation, and upon our hope?

The

China, of course, has its faults. It has been guilty of a grotesque arrogance. way in which it can speak of the most cultivated races of another type of civilization as if they were barbarous, is hard to listen to with patience. China has again and again acted with an insensate contempt toward the outer world, but, nevertheless, I dare to say that under a higher and better influence than the great agnostic morality of Confucius could ever teach her, China is capable, as a race, of coming out into the front rank of all that is great and good in humanity. And think what it would be if it did so that one homogeneous quarter of the human race!

"FOR THE SAKE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS."

But it is, after all, for the sake of righteousness and of the Lord Jesus Christ as the Lord of Righteousness that we are most moved about this matter. It seems to me that this great question, while complicated in a thousand details, is singularly simple in its main issue-more simply arguable than the great problem of slavery of seventy years ago. It seems to me that it is reduced, so far as I can study the facts of the matter, to the question whether righteousness must be sacrificed to revenue, or revenue must be sacrificed to righteousness. And can anything be more awfully solemn than the question, which side of that dilemma will our beloved, our glorious, and our God used and blessed England take.

If deliberately and finally, after the fullest appeal of loving filial warnings that can be made, the answer is for materialism and not for the spiritual law, what can the future be? God is a retributor still. Some of us think that in the great conflict in the East which is going on now we see something of the retribution which even Gibbon said he felt his study of history inclined him to believe held good through history. It has been pointed out—and is it superstition to think it?—that the disaster in the Khyber followed our first China opium war and that the Indian mutiny synchronized with our second opium war. If we persist, if we forget, if we repent not, the retribution will come. It may come with the slow step of national decay-the decay of ideals, the decay of the home, the decay of reverence, an awful decay of faith within the church; or it may come by sharper and sterner means. Not very many years ago it was as if the imperial fabric in the crisis of the African war were trembling in the balance. The Lord, the arbiter of nations, has not abdicated. "The Prince of the Kings of the sity to strike where he has blessed so long. [Cheers.]

BILLS, ACTS AND DOCUMENTS

ON

SUICIDES

GAMBLING

PRIZE FIGHTS

IMMIGRATION

SECTARIAN APPROPRIATIONS

INDIAN EDUCATION

POPULAR ELECTION OF SENATORS

RAY BILL TO REGULATE PUBLICATION OF SUICIDES.

Introduced Mar. 19, 1897, 55th Congress, Ist Session.

No newspaper or so-called Police Gazette shall be transmitted through the mails of the United States which contains any picture of a suicide or any of the details relating thereto beyond the simple statement of death by suicide, giving name, date, and place: Provided, That further particulars may be given by medical journals in the interest of science, or any judicial officer of the town or county in which the matter is being investigated may order such particulars relating thereto to be published as shall serve the ends of justice.

SEC. 2. That any person violating the provisions of this Act shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor and be punished by a fine of not less than twenty-five dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding ninety days.

SEC. 3. That it shall be the duty of the Postmaster-General to see that this Act is strictly enforced.

GILLETT ANTI-GAMBLING BILL.

Introduced by Hon. F. H. Gillett, M. C., Feb. 12, 1896, reported from Judiciary Committee amended by inserting after "gambling bet" the words "on horse races."

A bill to protect State anti-gambling laws from nullification through interstate gambling by telegraph, telephone, or otherwise, by extending to such gambling the penalties provided for interstate gambling by mail or express.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any person who shall be a party to the transmission by telegraph or telephone or mail or express or otherwise, from one State or Territory, or from or into the District of Columbia, of any gambling bet, or report of such bet on any race or prize fight or other event, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and shall be punishable in the first offense by imprisonment for not more than two years or by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars, or both, and in the second and after offenses by such imprisonment only.

BILLS ON GAMBLING DEFEATED, ENACTED AND PENDING

IN CONGRESS.

Hearing U. S. Senate D. C. Committee, April 7, 1896,

on Bill to Establish a Racing Commission.

REV. WILBUR F. CRAFTS, Superintendent of The Reform Bureau: What we represent is distinctly this. We request that this bill shall have stricken from it every reference to bets, stakes, bookmaking, and to laws relating to these subjects, in order that we may preserve the present satisfactory status of the laws against gambling. We do not believe in these New York sporting men who claim to come here to give us stricter laws than the ministers are willing to receive. This proposed bill is opposed by the churches, the W. C. T. U., and the Y. M. C. A. If the statements of these racing men when they claim that they desire to make this law more strict than the present laws are believed by statesmen when they are rejected by the reformers, then I shall have to exclaim, "I have not found so great faith; no, not in Israel."

I hope this committee will consider carefully whether this bill -which is a copy of the New York Gray-Percy law and which allows the English-New York perambulating bookmaking, which is bookmaking to all intents and purposes-whether this law should be adopted in place of the existing law under which bookmaking in all forms, with or without record of any kind, is prohibited. I wish to read you now an extract from the Washington Star of about the 1st of March, from the sporting column, where the sporting editor is talking inter nos, not at all from the standpoint of a moralist, but simply stating facts, with no prejudice against racing. He is discussing the race gambling actually carried on in New York by bookmakers under the Gray-Percy law, of which the proposed bill is confessedly a close copy:

Some racing men have advanced the proposition that racing at the Island and St. Asaph's could be continued and the Maupin law evaded by adopting the system of betting followed in New York, where no money is put up and no blackboards or pool sellers' stands are permitted and no evidences of gambling are in sight. * * All sporting men know that the system in New York is as much gambling as the open booking of bets, only it is not as safe for the men who are taking the bets.

Now, I desire the committee to turn to the last section of the proposed law while I read from that sporting column a description of the New York method of bookmaking, in which there is no table and in which there is no exchanging or subscribing of pledges, but which is remunerative and distinctive bookmaking all the same. You will see that there is nothing in the last section of the proposed bill prohibiting the New York system of bookmaking, borrowed by those anglomaniacs, with other vices, from England:

The modus operandi is very simple, and can be easily described. Both the bettor and the bookmaker have a small notebook. The bettor approaches the bookmaker and says he will bet, for instance, $50 on Kingston. If the odds are two to one, the bookmaker enters in his notebook, under the printed head of "Amount," $150, under the head "Odds" he enters "2 to 1;" under the head "Horse" he writes "Kingston," and under the head "Name" he enters the name of the bettor. The latter, in his notebook, enters the amount of the bet and the name of the horse and the name of the bookmaker with whom he has placed the bet. While this colloquy and writing is going on, a young man standing behind the bookmaker jots down, in a book like the schoolboy's copy book in shape, "Kingston, $100 to $50." This man is really the agent of the bookmaker, and the page he writes on is as much a bookmaker's sheet as if it was in the box of a regular bookmaking outfit. Sup

pose the bookmaker is dubious about the credit of the bettor after the bet is booked. Then this occurs: The bettor and bookmaker separate, and in a few moments a man walks up to the former and says, quietly, "If you don't put up that $50 on Kingston the bet don't go." If the bettor is really in earnest, he hands over the $50; if he is a prospective welcher, he declines, and the bookmaker, of whom the man who carried the information about putting up the $50 is an agent, scratches the entry out of his book. This is the system followed in New York, and it shows, in the eyes of the law guardians, what a difference there is in bookmaking between tweedledum and tweedledee.

Now, with this before you, I challenge any one to claim that this New York system of betting does not relax existing law. We object to any phrase whatever being included in the proposed law that refers to bets, stakes, bookmaking, or laws on that subject, and none such will be insisted on if it is a bill for legitimate racing.

Ministers by the score and Christian people by the carload went up to the legislature of Maryland to secure the passage of a law that they were assured would allow racing only thirty days in the year, thinking that better than illegal racing permitted through many months. Now that the measure is passed, it is found that the law permits racing thirty days and nights every month in the year. With such instances of race-track legislation in mind, we are bound to look upon every race bill with suspicion. I was in New York when the Ives pool bill was passed. I know that good and respectable men favored the passage of that bill, and that the claim was made that the Ives pool bill would allow only legitimate racing and that it would reduce gambling. It is now admitted by racing men themselves that it increased it greatly.

In the light of such historic facts, the only safe course is to strike out every reference to gambling from this bill.

Now let me turn to the bill, beginning at the tail, which, like that of the rattlesnake, gives the loudest warning. That last clause, while purporting to prohibit bookmaking, really leaves holes big enough for the perambulating New York-English bookmaker to walk through and ply his trade. Let me read the final paragraph:

That the occupation of any room, shed, booth, or place for the purpose of making registry or records of bets; the exchanging, delivering, or transferring therein of a record, registry, memorandum, token, paper, or document of any kind whatever, as evidence of any such bet or wager; or the subscribing by name, initials, or otherwise of any record, registry, or memorandum in the possession of any person of a bet or wager, intended to be retained by such other person, or any other person, as evidence of such bet or wager, shall be deemed to be bookmaking or the use of gambling devices, and punishable as bookmaking as the use of gambling devices is now punished.

Anything not included in that is not condemned by the words of this act—that is, a man may wear a bookmaker's badge, and he may go around the grounds as a perambulating bookmaker, yet if he does not have a "place" and if he does not "transfer" papers or documents of any kind, and if he does not require the better to "subscribe" to his bet, he is not a bookmaker.

If a

There are three distinct repeals proposed-repeals of three distinct gambling laws-repeals in effect, though not in form. man is not a bookmaker under this law, under the loose definition of the closing section, then he can not be punished, if this bill becomes law.