dispensations for those able and willing to pay for them, besides the practical coercion by which, under the guise of voluntary beneficence, the slave of superstition is continually mulcted for various alleged needs of the church. FREE-WILL OFFERINGS NOT ALWAYS VOLUNTARY. The Protestant churches adopt a different method, not quite so successful in dragging the hard-earned dimes out of the worn purse of the poor washerwoman or in stealing the coppers off the eyes of the corpse, but reasonably efficacious. They, too, to at least some extent make merchandise out of "the house of the Lord." The pew rent system is as plain a business affair as the buying of seats in a theatre. The collection is the most important item in almost every Protestant religious service. It is nominally voluntary, but there are numerous ways of inflicting acute mental discomfort on those who do not come up liberally "to the help of the Lord." By skillfully playing on the emotions of the congregation, and if possible inducing in them a state of hysteria, an astute moneyseeker like Simpson of the Christian Alliance or Billy Sunday of the "gutter gospel" can induce a scared, madly excited, hypnotized crowd to help the Lord to the extent of thousands of dollars, none of which can be recovered by the victims on the next day, when they have become sobered and ashamed of their fit of spiritual intoxication. And the church has the phenomenal impudence to boast that the money thus tricked out of persons reduced to a frenzy in which they did not know what they were doing was "voluntarily" donated! Large funds are also secured by this "non-commercial institution" through church fairs, grab bags, special entertainments and other devices which are held to be decidedly commercial when carried on by worldly people, but which become mysteriously sanctified when conducted for the benefit of the church. The claim that the church, as a non-commercial institution, is entitled to the kind chaperonage of the state in the shape of exemption from the obligation of paying its honest debts, besides being bad and invalid in itself, has not even the poor merit of resting on a basis of fact. Moreover, since there are plenty of other noncommercial institutions, which pay taxes like any other concern, no reason is given why the church should be the one special pet. Social and recreative institutions are not conducted for profit, nor are Socialistic or Anarchistic groups, the property of which is not exempt from taxation. All of these, like the church, meet the desires or gratify the tastes of individuals, and are of the greatest subjective value to those to whom they appeal, while worthless to everybody else, and in no way connected with the legitimate functions of society in its collective aspect. Hence none of them can justly make the slightest claim to be exempted from the duty of "rendering to Cæsar that which is Cæsar's." TOWARD THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH.