But it is not only in political circles that humor has been made to serve the cause of good government, good morals and the highest degree of righteousness in the United States. The members of the Supreme Court of the United States are all practical jokers; that is, they all are fond of avoiding a long-winded argument by telling a story illustrative of the question at issue. Ministers do the same. A meeting of clergymen of any denomination is likely to result in some very sharp discussion which closely approaches to ill temper, but in such cases some one may always be depended upon to get up and tell a humorous story which gives point to the proceedings, and also gives them a new direction and acts like oil upon the troubled waters. Humor is tolerated even in the pulpit. The late Henry Ward Beecher frequently made his congregation laugh on Sunday, and some of the newspapers criticised him severely for it, but he seldom lost a parishioner on that account, and thousands of people--who never otherwise would have heard him--were brought under his spiritual influence by appreciation of a faculty that drew them into closer sympathy with him as a man. A preacher of a very different stamp, the Rev. Sam Jones, of Georgia, never hesitates to tell funny stories, always illustrative of his subject, while delivering his talks, and Sam addresses larger congregations than any other American preacher of the present time. Humor makes its way everywhere in the United States. Newspapers are full of it, and the most high-toned and serious of them find it necessary to supply their readers with jokes. A New Yorker recently held a neighbor to account for reading habitually a very serious and almost bilious daily newspaper. “I don’t read it much,” said he, “but I buy it because its funny column contains a better assortment of jokes than any other paper in the city.” The principal editorial writer of a large New York daily paper, a paper of wide circulation and great influence, once complained to the managing editor that all the point of a leading article to which he had devoted two days of thought had been expressed in the paragraph column by a joke one line long.