shareholders. There is an opportunity for honest and well-meaning citizens to consult and act for the benefit of the great national corporation. There is also an opportunity for others to plot and plan for their private benefit, to be secured at the cost and to the injury of the corporation. A combination may be formed to elect a corrupt directorate or executive with the expectation that it will be the submissive creature of those who invested it with power. Some will be prepared to imperil the very existence of the nation in order that they may carry certain selfish purposes of their own into effect. Thus every general election and, indeed, every phase of political action affords an opportunity for the practice of political justice or of political injustice; and to say that any particular determination of the electors or of a legislative body is just because it commanded a majority of votes is as absurd as to say that in a physical encounter right must rest with the conqueror.
"What are yon going to do about it," say some, "if the people manifest a complete indifference to these considerations?" We can do nothing about it, we reply, but uphold the true principle, and trust that the apparent "foolishness of preaching "may in the end prove wiser than the wisdom of our practical politicians who wield votes precisely as they might wield clubs. It is all a question of the moral growth of the people; and we can not but hope that the time will come when even the average citizen will understand that right is not made by majorities, but that majorities are happy when they are able to discover what right is, and pay it the homage of their support.
TRAMP COLONIES.
There appears to be an epidemic of schemes for reforming shiftless people by wholesale. The latest reported is a proposal by a Mr. Heller, of Newark, N. J., to establish seven colonies, in as many States, for the benefit of old and unemployed people and tramps. The chief feature of the scheme is to be the reformation of tramps. Work is to be provided for those who will work, and Mr. Heller evidently expects that a large part of them will. He doubtless actually believes what the tramps say of themselves, and accepts the familiar "can't get work" whine for absolute truth. This belief is squarely contradicted by well-known facts. Plenty of work can be had now, without any colony machinery, by those who will work. During the past summer workers have been called for all over the United States, to gather in this year's bountiful harvest. No tramp could extend his travels to twenty miles outside any largo city without coming across farmers who would be glad to give him fifteen or twenty dollars a month and board for faithful work. In a recent book on Crime and its Causes, the author, William Douglas Morrison, who is an English prison official, puts the number of vagrants who are willing to work at not much over two per cent. To confirm his view he quotes the following striking testimony from M. Monod of the Ministry of the Interior in France:
