EDITORIAL NOTES.

IN fifteen States of the American Union women now have the right of voting for school committees. In Kansas they have full municipal suffrage. They recently cast in that State 26,000 ballots, greatly to the advantage of good government in cities. In England, Scotland, Ontario, and Nova Scotia, widows and unmarried women have municipal suffrage on the same conditions as men. In Washington and Wyoming Territory, full suffrage for women in both municipal and state elections has existed for some years. Thirty years ago women nowhere had any right of suffrage.

Among the petitioners for suffrage for women in regard to liquor licenses are many who do not yet think full suffrage for women expedient, but prefer to try the experiment of limited municipal suffrage for women before going farther. Two considerations have much weight with those who occupy this conservative and yet progressively tentative position. A vote on temperance laws, or at least on license, is both needed and generally desired by women as a means of home protection, and so would be likely to be used on the right side. If the experiment does not succeed, the state legislature can withdraw the right of limited municipal suffrage. Under that right, women would vote only on questions of education, or temperance, or both, and not for legislators or state officers, and so could not constrain the latter to continue the new law, if it should not be justified by its results.

So confident are we that the results of limited municipal suffrage for women would be excellent, that we are not surprised to find many highly conservative men and women of eminent public and social position petitioning for it. Nearly a quarter of a century of experience in England and Scotland has abundantly approved this measure of natural justice.

We have great sympathy with President Warren's inspiring proposal that enterprises be organized under American governmental aid to complete the exploration of Polar America as a fitting commemoration of the discovery of this continent by Columbus. An international exhibition at Washington, a holiday voyage of a fleet of ships from Spain to the West Indies, a convention of the representatives of Anglo-Saxon and of Latin nations will not be enough to mark the four hundredth anniversary of 1492. As President Warren says ("Independent," March 8): "The sole supremely fitting commemoration of the immortal explorations of Columbus is to finish them.... With permanent telegraphically or semaphorically connected stations, the passage to the North Pole could in all likelihood be made less perilous to human life than was twenty years ago the passage of the Congo."

It is now one year and five months since the American Board, at Des Moines, at its seventy-seventh meeting, passed its memorable resolutions repudiating as divisive and perversive the unscriptural hypothesis of probation after death. It is five months since these resolutions were reaffirmed with increased emphasis at Springfield, in these now historic words:

"The Board adheres to the position taken at the last annual meeting at Des Moines concerning the doctrine of future probation, reaffirms its utterances made at that time, and accepts the interpretation of the prudential committee as the true interpretation of its action.

"We recommend to the prudential committee an unabated carefulness in guarding the Board from any committal to the approval of that doctrine."

How deeply the churches sympathize with these votes is shown by the fact officially reported in the "Missionary Herald" for March, 1888, that for the first five months of the financial year the receipts of the American Board have been $222,134.48, an advance over those of last year at the same date of nearly $60,000, and an advance beyond the annual average for the corresponding months of the preceding five years of over $39,000. These facts are attracting deserved attention among Congregationalists in Great Britain. "The British Weekly," published by Hodder & Stoughton, Paternoster Row, London, and which Mr. Spurgeon calls the best religious journal in England, says: "The doctrine of probation after death has been expressly repudiated by the American Congregational Churches, after desperate efforts to gain a footing for it."

The following petition for electoral reform on the basis of the Australian system of voting is in wide circulation in Massachusetts and has our heartiest sympathy:

To the Massachusetts Senate and House of Representatives in General Court assembled:

We, the undersigned, respectfully represent that the present system of voting in this State, requiring as it does the printing of enormous numbers of ballots by the different parties and the employment of men to distribute them at the polls, is the cause of much expense and gives rise to much corruption; while, by impairing or destroying secrecy, it affords great opportunity for bribery and intimidation. We therefore earnestly petition for the adoption by law of that method of voting known as the Australian system the essential features of which are that ballots are printed at public expense and delivered by a public officer to the voter only when he approaches the polls, the voting being conducted in such manner that there can be no canvassing or solicitation of the voter between the time he receives the ballot and the time he records his vote, and that such absolute secrecy as to how he votes is secured as to make bribery unprofitable and intimidation impossible.

The national superintendent of the work of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union has sent this pathetic and powerful protest to every member of Congress :

To the Members of the Senate and House of Representatives of the Fiftieth Congress : SIRS, - The admission of Utah has something more than a political significance. It involves the withdrawal of federal protection from helpless women and innocent children who have no representative in your honorable body; no advocate in your committees; no representative in the Mormon lobby. Yet the food necessary for their sustenance has, by priestly edict, been converted into gold, to purchase legal misrepresentation at the national capital.

To the present hour there is not the slightest indication, in the Territory, of any movement to place the home on an American basis. The only visible surrender of polygamy has been the rush to the "underground railroad" of the lords of the harem, and the "surrender" to fate of their "beloved" wives. The "noble army of martyrs" daily, at the expense of the national government, go to prison for 66 conscience sake." From these "retreats" the "martyrs" issue official orders to the laity to "live their religion."

As the result of close personal investigation for ten years, I assert that the prostitution of the sacred office of motherhood under Mormon regime has no parallel in any civilized country in the known world. In the month of October last I traveled over a greater portion of the Territory to find these domestic conditions unchanged. Nor is the spirit of resistance to national interference less determined than heretofore.

As the authorized representative of the loyal women of Utah, and in behalf of the unprotected victims of the Mormon faith, allow me to ask your careful perusal of the inclosed testimony. Moreover, we ask you to consider that any vote cast for the admission of Utah is a vote cast for the perpetuity of treason, howsoever disguised at the national capital, and to license a hierarchy to continue to make merchandise of innocence.

ANGIE F. NEWMAN.

The Report of the Utah Commissioners published in this number of OUR DAY is regarded at Salt Lake City by the non-Mormon population as the fairest and ablest public document that has thus far appeared on the present situation of Utah.

Dr. Bartol, in his characteristic discourse on the life and influence of Mr. Alcott, represented the difference between him and Emerson in philosophy, by saying that Emerson contended that the word IT was properly applied to the Supreme Power in the universe, while Alcott preferred always the word HE. The difference between IT and HE in this case is that between a philosophy nearly pantheistic and one thoroughly theistic in tone and principle. Mr. Alcott deserves great credit for bringing a soundly theistic teacher, like William T. Harris, to the Concord school, and so providing an antidote for any pantheistic tendencies in the somewhat vague and mystical NeoPlatonism once known as the Emersonian philosophy. Mr. Alcott's chief service to philosophical thought in New England was that of effecting a change of front in certain circles from IT to HE.

OUR DAY:

A RECORD AND REVIEW OF CURRENT REFORM.

VOL. I. APRIL, 1888.- No. 4.

FIRST PRINCIPLES OF PROTECTION.

I. THE home market, or domestic commerce, is of immeasurable value to a country over and above all foreign commerce. We shall quote in support of this position an authority which all free traders ought to accept, that of Adam Smith, the father of free trade. "The inland home trade, the most important of all, the trade in which an equal capital affords the greatest revenue and creates the greatest employment to the people of the country." ("Wealth of Nations," Vol. ii. 7. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1869.) In vol. i. pp. 372, 373 of the above edition, Adam Smith draws out with the greatest clearness the argument for the home market against the foreign. As no free trader ever asks attention to this passage, we will here give the substance of it in our own language.

In all exchanges two capitals are employed and two profits result, in theory equal. If an Englishman sends a given product to France, he employs his capital at home and enjoys his profit. On the other side the Frenchman employs his capital and has his profit. Each country is equally benefited. Every one, protectionist or free trader, accepts this.

If now the exchange is made at home two capitals are employed instead of one, and two profits are secured instead of one. Home trade, then, is and must be just twice as profitable to the home country as foreign trade is. That country is passing all others in wealth that has the greatest volume of home trade.

The results of commerce depend upon the ease and rapidity with which exchanges are effected. If the merchant or producer can make two exchanges where he formerly made one, he doubles his profits. The other party does the same. Now here are four uses of capital and four profits at home instead of one which would accrue in the slow and distant foreign exchanges. And in the home trade it may sometimes happen, as Adam Smith suggests, that the parties are so near each other and have such facilities for quick exchanges that twelve may be effected at home to one with a distant country. In such case the home country would secure to herself twenty-four uses of capital and twenty-four profits to one in the foreign trade. Thus the ratio of the importance of the home market to foreign would be 24: 1. This is so plain that no one can question it unless it be some economic eccentric.

II. Protection aims at diversified industries as a potent factor in national prosperity.

Every new industry brings an addition to the home market. It supplies a want and it creates a demand upon other producers. If a country is given chiefly to agriculture its produce must seek a distant uncertain market. Such an agricultural people is always miserably poor, and with their poverty are usually associated ignorance stupidity, and degradation. We have a great number of industries that could not exist without a protective tariff. They are of unspeakable value to the whole country. A wise government will always encourage home industries as unseparably connected with the prosperity of the home market. III. Protection calls into action dormant capital, skill, and labor.

Fawcett and other English writers admit that in no country is the whole of skill, capital, and labor, in full employment. This will always be so for many reasons.

When our government imposed a duty of $28 per ton on imported steel rails, our benevolent English friends were charging us $112.50 in gold. We had few establishments that wished to enter into any competition with the English manufac turer, knowing their system of killing foreign industries by underselling. But with protection no less than thirteen estab