rom Florida to
Sitka, from Eastport to San Diego, is vastly greater than the foreign
commerce of Great Britain.

The age has been one of marvelous inventions in steam, in electricity, in
the machinery which has made nearly every mechanic and operative an
engineer, which is driving the horse from the streets and the farms, and
which enables one factory hand to produce as much as three produced a
generation ago.

Submarine cables keep America in close touch with Europe, and even the
gossip of Paris and London is known the same day in our cities. Everybody
reads, and whereas the American of a generation ago took one newspaper,
his son to-day probably takes two or three, besides weekly and monthly
publications. Notwithstanding all that is said about ignorant foreign
immigration it is certain that the growth of newspaper circulation in the
past two decades has exceeded the growth of population. Americans are a
reading people, and it is for every head of a family to see that his
children have the right kind of reading.

* * *

The clergy are not now the political monitors of the community, as when,
at the time of the Revolution, the election sermon preached in Boston,
and printed in pamphlet form, was spelled by the light of the pine-knot
in the cabin on the Berkshire plantation, inspiring the rustic breast
with holy zeal to deliver the Israel of the New World from the yoke of
the English Sennacherib. The newspaper has taken the place of the pulpit
as a political beacon and guide, and, as every denomination and
congregation includes members of both the prominent national parties, it
would be impossible for a clergyman to indulge in even a distant partisan
allusion without offending some one of his hearers. The clergyman is
free, like any other citizen, to indicate his preferences and express his
opinions in regard to public affairs, but the judicious pastor is not
prone to use that freedom indiscreetly.

Although the preachers are no longer political leaders, there is, in the
opinion of the writer, based upon what he has heard and read of the past,
and observed of the present, a larger proportion of learned, talented,
and eloquent men among the pastors who minister in the churches to-day,
than in any generation gone by. The clergy are still pre-eminently the
molders of education. The presidents and professors of leading
universities are usually prominent in some evangelical sect,