world honours;) from whom I have absorbed all that I can possibly claim of any good?

These addresses may be published. Suppose they were to sell well. Have I any right to the proceeds which the publishers turn over to me? Why is not recompense made my teachers? (always, on any conception of society, miserably underpaid ;)—the nurse of my infancy? How much ought to go to those the knowledge of whose wrongs directly inspired me to choose this line for these Lenten sermons ?-to the maimed pencil peddler the other day driven off Tremont Street here back into the region where his kind is permitted to exist; to that poor child in the night at Venice, whose hand with pathetic gesture crept so pitiably a moment from under her shawl, whose face was so timid and pinched, marked half with hope for a few centimes, half with dread of a curse, in the night filled with music and moonbeams and laughter- and sorrow? How much ought to go to the obscure tobacconist in Smithfield who sold me the copy of Merrie England from which I am borrowing this train of illustration ?

And if I deny or evade these debts, and assert that my industry, my learning, my eloquence, my talent, have produced this book, I may still be reminded that I can't get a second copy of it out without borrowing the aid of thousands of the living and dead; dead men who invented letters and types and presses; living compositors, proofreaders, editors, business managers; and then can't sell it without the help of another army of men who make the newspapers I advertise it in, ragged boys on the street to cry the papers, postmen and expressmen to carry the book, shopmen to handle it. Have I the impudence to say, "I did this"? Still it is nothing unless men buy it. Suppose they could not read it? Suppose there had been no teachers of reading? To those teachers I owe a debt. What justice is there that can release me from the duty of acknowledging that the world has lent me its industry, its talent, in making this book?

Whatever you are, whatever you do, whatever you possess, you are, you do, you possess, because of others. You have not

made yourself; therefore you have no right to yourself. You do nothing of yourself; therefore you have no right to appropriate for yourself the gain from anything you do. For all you are, and all you gain, you are indebted to other men. The New Obedience-nay: the religion of Jesus Christ, with its calm and terrible justice-tells you that you must pay the debt.

I have no desire to represent the Way as more difficult than it really is; neither would I qualify the least particular for the purpose of making it less stern a thing. How to pay the debt is no easy matter to determine. I have expressed the opinion that the justice of the Christian ethic does not demand the surrender of property by those who control it, but that it does require the administration of property in the interest of those whose jointure it is. Were one disposed to release its possession, there is no tribunal constituted for its receipt. There is open to a proprietor none but a cowardly course, except in continuing in control of property to which no other can show better administra

tive right, taking care that what personal advantages it bestows upon him be not withheld from flowing out to his fellows in deeds of ministry, and that no niggardly part be directed to specific tasks of public beneficence in intelligent exercise of the responsibility which has been providentially laid upon him.

It will, however, be found that the disposition of large parts of all increments and incomes will be determined by the plainest considerations of common justice. The rapid rises in values and the vast incomes which our social institutions enable individuals to appropriate, are usually traceable directly to movements or labours of others. To these others, then, they belong. There can no longer continue regarding these things the evasion which a less serious apprehension of human kinship hitherto has permitted. The time has come in which it must be plainly declared, with all the authority the priests of God can give the declaration, that unearned gains are immoral gains. The proprietors of business enterprises who would be Christians will carefully consider

who are actually the makers of their profits, and will distribute them equitably among those who earned them, reserving only their own just share. Most serious will be the conclusions which landowners and proprietors of money or invested funds must face.

There is in particular one kind of property to which no moral right can be pretended. Where land has been made, as we say, in the sea, or saved from wasting tides, some shadow of right to possession of it can be conceived, but to that which, in the nature of the case, no man could have had any part in producing, no man can acquire an honest title. The invalidity of land tenures is so clear that the conclusion seems inevitable that Christians should as speeedily as possible free themselves from complicity in the grave wrong by which the common birthplace andTM inheritance of all is parcelled out among a few selected according to no principle of justice. An immediate requisition is that owners should with the greatest care setaside for the public benefit all land rents. Improvements are not involved in the collapse of title to the land on which they stand,