will demand that they keep the pledges made as a condition precedent to election, but it is far from us. In many of the years to come we will continue to build up an office- holding class that is now so utterly idle, incompetent, impudent and corrupt that the history of the world can show nothing like it. This will be always so with universal suffrage. A government which permits the ballot of a man who has not a dollar's interest in the good conduct of the government, who can neither read nor write, who cannot speak the English language, who is permitted to vote merely upon the declaration that he intends at some time to become a citizen, will continue to be a rotten government. The wonder is not that the United States has had war internecine and otherwise, but that it has existed at all. It carries within itself the elements of its own damnation. It has within itself the seeds of decay. Unless they are dug out, that which is now one of the worst governments under the sun will be no government at all. * * * THE SAW-MILL CHECK SYSTEM. The ICONOCLAST receives frequent complaints from laboring people in the lumber districts of Texas and Louisiana, that their employers are robbing them by compelling them to accept orders on mill stores, where they are charged exorbitant prices for all they purchase. I have been unable to visit the lumber districts and make personal investigation of these complaints, while letters of inquiry have elicited conflicted evidence. The following statement by a disinterested party, a gentleman of unusual intelligence who has traveled extensively in the lumber districts of the two states, is doubtless a fairly correct account: