of the voters in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina are without the ability either to read or write. In either of these States, or in all of them, any election can be carried by sheer weight of ignorance. Seventeen hundred thousand men, according to a statistical report which has been put into my hands, at the last national election cast the ballot which they could neither read nor write. No wonder we were plunged into confusion. Had not a kindly Providence been on our side we should have been plunged into anarchy. And this scene waits to repeat itself in 1880. The next President of these States will be elected to his high position by sheer force of ignorance—ignorance manipulated and controlled by men whose hearts are as black with treason to-day as they were in ’61. No thoughtful man can look upon these facts and not tremble for the safety of his country. So, also, is the ignorant and unchristianized Chinaman making himself felt in our politics. He casts no ballot, he holds no office. He does not come to the polls to drink and smoke and sell himself to the highest bidder on election day; and yet his political influence already is as wide as the continent; his unwelcome ghost stalks through the halls of Congress, and broods over every political or religious convention that is holden between the two oceans. Already have we seen one sovereign State changing the terms of its constitution and revolutionizing its laws out of pure regard for the Chinaman. And, still more significant, we have seen our great National Congress voting to change the very genius of the Government, and to shut the doors that have for a hundred years stood open, and which we mean shall not be closed for a hundred years to come; and we will write over these open doors in letters of fire, so that the most distant islands of the sea may read: “This is the world’s asylum, free to the oppressed of all nations.” Now, I doubt not there are evils connected with the coming of the heathen Chinaman. There is oppression and sorrow brought home to many hearts. I feel that there must be more or less of pollution in his touch. I pity the State into which this old world sewerage empties itself. But the remedy is not in building walls, though they be heaven-high, on our Chinaward side. This evil can be handled and neutralized only by the Christian virtue that is in us. Can we convert this heathen material—permeate it with Christian thought? Can we assimilate it and weave it into the civil fabric we are making? If so, it will do us no harm; otherwise it will rankle like poison in our blood, and possibly work our destruction in the end. This question should not be settled in the political arena. It is a moral, a religious question. The forces that are needed now are those that lie in the hand of the Christian church. We must permeate this festering mass with the leaven of Christ, and we must do it speedily. The evil is growing.