deliverance to the swarthy dwellers on the banks of the Ganges, could not see as far as the banks of the Mississippi. Only one Christian organization in the broad land--this Association, dared to say, Slavery is an accursed thing. Riddance from it was only a dim hope, the remotest of possibilities. And all that less than forty years ago. To-day no foot of a slave presses the soil of the continent; to-day ancient irresponsible ownership of the souls and bodies of men is a nightmare of the past, and the haughtiness of unquestioned authority is changing to conciliation and growing respect for human rights; to-day an emancipated race has not only cast off the fetters from its limbs but is seeking and finding the larger liberty of completed manhood and womanhood. Wonderful and blessed change; you search history in vain to find its parallel. In our review of these forty years it is natural that we should inquire as to what forces have been efficient in producing such large results, and quite as natural also that we should credit overweight to influences that have been dramatic and measurable, and overlook or depreciate subtler agencies that make little stir, and work below the surface. We say in a large way, that civil war was the procuring cause of the change that has been wrought, but as the war was not carried on for that purpose, it is more exact to say that incidentally and unintentionally it made the change possible. We assert more specifically that the Emancipation Proclamation was the one supreme factor in inaugurating the new order of things, and no smallest leaf should be plucked from the wreath of honor which crowns the heroic Lincoln. The scratch of the President's pen in that quiet room, writing the new and greater Magna Charta, will be heard for ever. History, like a vast whispering gallery, will reduplicate the sound and pass it on to the ages to come. It was heard at once the breadth of the continent and across the sea. It outran the tramp of armies, and distanced the roar of cannon. It went down through the valleys of Virginia, through the pine barrens and rice swamps of the Carolinas. It rang along the everglades of Florida; it reached to the cane brakes and cotton fields of Louisiana; the Alleghanies echoed it to the Sierras; the Father of Waters caught up the sound, and rolled it like sweetest music to the Gulf, and in the hearing of it, millions woke to freedom. And yet the calm judicial estimate must take into account that the Proclamation was primarily, if not solely, a war expedient, not righteousness for righteousness' sake; and must take into account also that it effected nothing beyond a change in legal relations, voiding of power certain State statutes that legitimatized slavery. The mere shift of status under the law from bondage to freedom, provided the opportunity, but it did not and could not supply the force adequate to effect those industrial and intellectual and moral transformations which are the most conspicuous