Your selfish man to-day only asks for a yacht and some race horses, mild forms of dissipation. A thousand years ago the vicious man demanded and exercised the power of life and death over those who surrounded him, and his mildest fit of irritation cost the life of some helpless human being. Men are ill-paid to-day, but their condition is Paradise compared to the slavery of their predecessors. ---- You should daily criticise yourself and others, and do what you can in your little sphere as preacher, politician, editor or private individual to help along humanity's progress. But remember always for your encouragement that the world is improving steadily. It never stands still; it never goes backward. And there are no limits to our future improvement, thanks to our inborn love of what is right and to the steady influence of EDUCATION. A WHISKEY BOTTLE How should a whiskey drinker talk to his son? If he talked as he feels he would hold up the flat, brown bottle and say: "My boy, you know that I am a poor man and have nothing to leave to you or your mother. "The difference between myself and the successful men who have passed me is this: "I have gone through life with this bottle in my hand or in my pocket. They have not." A man comes into the world prepared to do his share of the world's work, well or ill, as his brain and his physical strength may decide. Of all his qualities the most important practically is BALANCE. The whiskey in that bottle destroys balance, mental and physical. It substitutes dreaming and foolish self-confidence for real effort. It presents all of life's problems and duties in a false light. It makes those things seem unimportant which are most important. IT DULLS THE CONSCIENCE, WHICH ALONE CAN MAKE MEN DO THEIR DUTY IN SPITE OF TEMPTATION, AND STRUGGLE ON TO SUCCESS IN SPITE OF EXHAUSTION. Keep away from this bottle, and keep away from those who praise it. He who hands it to his fellow man is a criminal, and he who hands it to a young man is a worse criminal and a villain. ---- It is a well-established fact that in the usual order of events drunkenness would be handed down from father to son, and hundreds of thousands of families would be ultimately wiped out by whiskey. It is not true, fortunately, that the son of a drunkard actually inherits drunkenness fully developed. But a drunkard gives to his son weakened nerves and a diminished will power, which tend to make him a drunkard more easily than his father was made a drunkard before him. The great safeguard of a drunkard's children undoubtedly lies in the warning which they see every day in their home and in the earnest advice which the man who drinks will give to all young people if he have any conscience left.