ercise of that watchfulness which strains attention to the utmost. This cannot be expected of half-fed or overworked men. It is essential, too, that engineers, conductors, and leading operatives on trains feel alike a pride and interest in their roads, their trains and engines, if the highest efficiency be secured.

Now this loyalty to their vocation and high fidelity to the interests entrusted to them are never secure so long as they are under superior obligations to any other organization so shaped as to be liable to antagonism with their employers. On the other hand, these may well be secure if they are detached from their fealty to these outside and hostile bodies, and if their interests come to be bound up inseparably with the prosperity of the companies which employ them.

In order to this, it is desirable that the employés of the great companies should have, in connection with the company employing them, an accumulating provident fund, furnished partly by contributions from the company, and partly by a small percentage on the wages of the employés, which shall combine some of the essential features of savings-bank and life insurance, and from which, in case of disablement or death, they or their families will receive a certain proportionate allowance or pension. Let vacancies as far as possible be filled by the promotion of the most meritorious from the lower to the higher positions, and as far as possible let new recruits for the service be from the families of existing employés, so that they will look to it with considerable confidence as affording a field for their children after them; these privileges, of course, all to be forfeited by those who leave the service for any cause but disablement or death. Let this, or some substantially equivalent arrangement, be the basis of the relation between railroad employers and employés, and with this identity of interest, antagonism between the railroads and their employés would cease, and the fell spirit of trades-unionism and strikes would be exorcised. The special hazards of running railroad trains also call for some such provision. The Reading Railroad has already initiated something of this system, and, although in the very centre of strikes and riots, has kept up an unprecedented activity of production and transportation, with low wages for labor. This method has long been practised

with marked success on the Eastern Railroad of France. We are glad that the attention of railroads in this country has been directed to the system employed on this French road, in general and in detail, in a lecture delivered in Paris in 1867, by M. F. Jacqmin, manager of the road, a translation of which has recently been pubished in the Railroad Gazette of the City of New York. See also New York Times of Sept. 18, 1877.

It is quite common to speak of these, and other collisions arising from the unrest of laborers, as outworkings of the conflict between labor and capital. They are not such at all. There is no conflict between these as such. They are mutually auxiliary; capital supports labor, and labor utilizes capital. Either is useless and helpless without the other. The more there is of each, the higher is the bid or reward it will offer for the help of the other. The real conflict is between employer and employé, either of whom may or may not be a capitalist. The carpenter's tools are capital-his own capital. He can do nothing without them. Yet he may be employed by one who has less capital than he. The employer may even borrow capital of his employé, and such loan may have been the consideration inducing such employment of him at certain wages. As between employer and employed, of course, each wishes to make the best terms he can the one to get the best service he can for his money, the other the most money he can for his service. But what can be more insane than to destroy capital, to burn up property, for the purpose of increasing wages or bettering the laborer? It were as wise to kindle a fire around a powder-house in order to protect it.

There is but one solution of the labor question, and that is, for all to go to work forthwith at the best rates and in the most agreeable occupations open to them which employers can afford to offer them. This will bring production to its maximum in forms and at rates that are marketable-it may be at low rates-so that working at low prices, numerically, they can exchange their labor for commodities likewise as low as the labor which produces them. While men remain idle and produce nothing, they can of course have nothing. The effort to prevent the wages of labor from falling to what employers can pay for it without loss, has done more than all else

to aggravate and protract the financial distress, the depressed condition of labor and capital, for the past four years.

To this may be added as next in baleful influence our fluctuating currency, which, now that it has so nearly reached the standard of the honest money of the world through causes beyond the control of politicians or speculators, is certain, if not interfered with by Congressional tinkers, to be soon once more convertible with coin. But a large, and we fear preponderant body are striving to debase our money again to its former depreciated and fluctuating condition. What does it mean? Was ever such madness? Has God delivered us over to judicial blindness that we should be unable to see that a promise to pay a dollar binds us to pay it; or that we should be left to believe that an enactment of our rulers can make permanently irredeemable paper, silver worth ninety per cent. of gold, and gold itself equally valuable, and capable of floating side by side as currency? Quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.

Art. XI. THE TYPICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ELIJAH AND ELISHA.-2 Kings ii.

By REV. W. G. KEADY, Savannah, Mo.

THAT the career of these two prophets has a more important significance than has usually been accorded to it is a conviction that many have felt. Our commentators pass over as a problem not to be touched any consideration of the peculiar place which both Elijah and Elisha fill in the development of God's designs of mercy to lost mankind. Elisha is considered as taking up the unfinished work of Elijah, and the work of both as having importance only as concerns Israel. The place of Elijah is considered as adequately established when it is said that he was the restorer to Israel of God's covenant, and that he is to be placed side by side with Moses as one of the ruling and representative characters of the old dispensation. This position is assigned him because he was with Moses at the transfiguration; and the significance of both these men appearing on that occasion is felt to be met when we regard them as representatives of the law and the prophets testifying of the Christ. But admitting the correctness of these views, which is by no means certain, they certainly do not exhaust the hermeneutical demands of the position either prophet holds in Scripture. The two questions, "What is there in the new dispensation of which they were the type?" and, "Was the type fulfilled adequately in John the Baptist?" have not been satisfactorily answered. This article is an attempt to find at least materials for an answer.

We will take up the case of Elijah first. The passages of Scripture in which he is mentioned are few, and we will confine our view to Scripture, without levying upon Jewish tradition for light. Once only is his name mentioned by the prophets that succeed him, and that is in Mal. iv: 5, 6, the very last utterance of the Old Testament: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet," etc. It is the prophet who is to be sent, not the Tishbite; so that whether he is to come in person or not, it is his official, not his personal character, that is to be manifested. In this sense John the Baptist was an Elijah in spirit. Before John's birth it was announced that " many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God.

And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah" (Luke i: 16, 17). When John was asked, “Art thou Elijah?" he answered, "I am not." "Art thou that prophet?" "No." Now John knew, from the angel's announcement to his father, that he was referred to by Malachi, and no doubt assumed the dress of Elijah as symbolic of his mission; yet he evidently knew, by inspiration, that he did not exhaustively fulfill all that was included in that prophecy, and that there was to be a future and a fuller fulfillment.

Just after the transfiguration the following conversation took place between Jesus and his three disciples: "Tell the vision to no man until the Son of man be risen again from the dead." They asked, “Why, then, say the scribes that Elijah must first come?" He replied, " Elijah truly shall come first and restore all things; but I say unto you that Elijah is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed; likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them." They understood that he spoke of John the Baptist. The plain sense of this, taken in connection with John's denial, which was honest and true, is that Elijah's coming was still future, in one sense, but that he had already come in another sense-in the person and mission of John. As there is to be another consummating coming of the Messiah himself, so there is to be one of his forerunner, Elijah; perhaps in person, as at the transfiguration, and as intimated in Rev. xi: 3-12; or, more likely in spirit and in power, as in John the Baptist. The words "Before the great and dreadful day of the Lord," show that John cannot be exclusively meant; for he came just before the day of Christ's coming in grace, though he did indeed appear previous to "his coming in terror, of which the last destruction of Jerusalem was but the type and the earnest." Elijah's coming was to "turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to the fathers." The angelic announcement of John's coming explains this by changing the latter clause to "and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord;" implying that "the reconciliation was to be effected between the unbelieving, disobedient children and the believing ancestry." The threat in Malachi is that if this reconciliation is not effected, Messiah's coming would prove a curse to the earth, and not a bless