_Answer_. I will first state this proposition: The credit system in morals, as in business, breeds extravagance. The cash system in morals, as well as in business, breeds economy. We will suppose a community in which everybody is bound to sell on credit, and in which every creditor can take the benefit of the bankrupt law every Saturday night, and the constable pays the costs. In my judgment that community would be extravagant as long as the merchants lasted. We will take another community in which everybody has to pay cash, and in my judgment that community will be a very economical one. Now, then, let us apply this to morals. Christianity allows everybody to sin on a credit, and allows a man who has lived, we will say sixty-nine years, what Christians are pleased to call a worldly life, an immoral life. They allow him on his death-bed, between the last dose of medicine and the last breath, to be converted, and that man who has done nothing except evil, becomes an angel. Here is another man who has lived the same length of time, doing all the good he possibly could do, but not meeting with what they are pleased to call "a change of heart;" he goes to a world of pain. Now, my doctrine is that everybody must reap exactly what he sows, other things being equal. If he acts badly he will not be very happy; if he acts well he will not be very sad. I believe in the doctrine of consequences, and that every man must stand the consequences of his own acts. It seems to me that that fact will have a greater restraining influence than the idea that you can, just before you leave this world, shift your burden on to somebody else. I am a believer in the restraining influences of liberty, because responsibility goes hand in hand with freedom. I do not believe that the gallows is the last step between earth and heaven. I do not believe in the conversion and salvation of murderers while their innocent victims are in hell. The church has taught so long that he who acts virtuously carries a cross, and that only sinners enjoy themselves, that it may be that for a little while after men leave the church they may go to extremes until they demonstrate for themselves that the path of vice is the path of thorns, and that only along the wayside of virtue grow the flowers of joy. The church has depicted virtue as a sour, wrinkled termagant; an old woman with nothing but skin and bones, and a temper beyond description; and at the same time vice has been painted in all the voluptuous outlines of a Greek statue. The truth is exactly the other way. A thing is right because it pays; a thing is wrong because it does not; and when I use the word "pays," I mean in the highest and noblest sense. --_The Daily News_, Denver, Colorado, January 17, 1884. FREE TRADE AND CHRISTIANITY. _Question_. Who will be the Republican nominee for President?