Selfishness a Curse

Digging for human beings alive or dead in the ruins after the explosion. The cause seems to have been the ignition of Pintsch illuminating gas mixed with air by an electric spark. The explosion followed the breaking of a gas-main under the power-house.

The ruins of the power-house at the Grand Central Terminal in New York, December 20, said by the "Scientific American" to be the worst at railway terminals; 10 were killed and 200 injured. The ruins show the tremendous power exerted.

ITS votaries are to be found everywhere, in every walk of life. See it in our cities, where men strive and struggle to push their way to the front, caring not on whom they trample, and where skill and cunning concentrate their forces to build up out of the failure of the many the fortunes of the few.

The car which was lifted bodily off the track and turned over. Five pupils of the normal college were killed and twenty injured in this car. The "Scientific American" well says that "electricity and gas are dangerous agents to be used side by side."

See it in our parliaments, where the foremost interests of truth and justice and the loftiest claims of enlightened patriotism are sacrificed to the contemptible triumphs of party, and where it is assumed that a nation's glory is in its material prosperity, its mines and resources and munitions of war, rather than in the harmonious development of its manhood, the peace and happiness and comfort of its toilers.

See it in the law courts, where laws are so administered that a starving man who takes a loaf of bread, or a miserably paid clerk who, in some dire extremity, filches a sovereign, is committed to jail with all its consequent degradation and ruin to their homes, while the daring and unprincipled speculator who fails in his schemes is still allowed to live in ease and luxury after he has paid his creditors a small sum to the pound, and while men who are in powerful positions are allowed to continue through their vile trade to wreck and blight and blast the lives of their fellow men, and ruin their families, and bring them to the lowest of depths of shame, while they live in luxury on their ill-gotten gains.

See it in the churches, where prayer-books bound in silver and ivory are held in jeweled hands which have never performed one deed of holy ministry to want and suffering; and where the sacramental wine, symbol of the blood shed for the world's uplifting, is sipped by lips from which no mercy speaks, and which have never quivered for the woes of those for whom the Saviour died.

O, the glaring and terrible selfishness in our midst! How fitly it may cause us to bow our heads in shame and sorrow! O, the unattended sick-beds, the unregarded miseries, the cry of trampled weakness, and the shout of merciless strength, the tears which find no pity, the wailing to which no one harkens, the multitudes pinching, pining, perishing, while others bask and batten in luxurious ease, and boast of a human nature devoid of each human attribute! How distressing and appalling is all this to every noble mind!

And this infernal selfishness is as blind as it is cruel. It sets men to tasks which they hate, and to which they are impelled by physical force, until they are filled with discontent and hate. It makes laws about land and taxes and property which burden the toiler with a sense of injustice which is full of peril and danger to the nation.

Is it any wonder that the downtrodden and oppressed seek some solution to this awful problem?

It is urged by some of our greedy and strenuous money seekers that they are willing to distribute a portion of their surplus wealth

in charities. To this we reply that men have no right to put charity in the place of justice, and to make almsgiving, as one has said, "a ransom" for the rich. Nothing is really helpful which saps the foundation of self-respect in men and women. It is an insult to the toiler to offer in alms that which should have been distributed in wages. Charity finds its finest exercise, not in the dole which fills the empty stomach, but in justice to the toiler, of whatever sex, and in the lovely offices which minister moral sympathy and spiritual uplifting and strength.—The Christian Herald.