The battle against the demon of darkness became a struggle for existence, in which the powers of Nature at last prevailed, but for millions of our fellow-men the day of deliverance has dawned too late; spring-time and morning returned in vain for many a once fertile land where the soil itself had lost its reproductive power, where the outrages of Antinaturalism had turned gardens into deserts and freemen into callous slaves. The storm that awakened the nations of northern Europe from the dreams of their poison-fever could not break the spell of a deeper slumber, and the moral desert of the Mediterranean coast-lands remains to warn the nations of the future, as the bleaching bones of a perished caravan remain to warn the traveler from the track of the simoom. The religion of Mohammed, with its health-laws and encouragements to martial prowess, has produced no ruinous results of physical degeneration, but the entire neglect of mental culture has not failed to avenge itself in the loss of national prestige. For after the northern nations of Christendom had broken the yoke of their spiritual tyrants, the children of Islam remained faithful to the task-masters of their less grievous bondage, but also to its total indifference to secular science, and from that day the crescent of the prophet became a waning moon. E.—REFORM. The experience of the Middle Ages has made the separation of church and state the watchword of all true Liberals. But the divorce of church and school is a duty of hardly less urgent importance. While many of our best Freethinkers waste their time in hair-splitting metaphysics, Catholic and Protestant Jesuits coöperate for a purpose which they have shrewdly recognized as the main hope of obscurantism: The perversion of primary education by its re-subjection to the control of the clergy. The definite defeat of those intrigues should be considered the only permanent guarantee against the revival of spiritual feudalism. A perhaps less imminent, but hardly less serious, danger to the cause of Science is the stealthy revival of mysticism. Under all sorts of nomenclatural modifications, the specter-creed of the ancient Gnostics is again rearing its head, and menacing reason by an appeal to the hysterical and sensational proclivities of ignorance. In the third place, there is no doubt that under the present circumstances of educational limitations the adoption of female suffrage would prove a death-blow to intellectual progress and re-doom mankind to the tutelage of a clerical Inquisition; but rather than perpetuate a twofold system of oppression, we should complete the work of emancipation by admitting our sisters to all available social and educational advantages, as well as to the privilege of the polls. From the suffrage of educated women we have nothing to fear and much to hope.