greater material development, and everywhere the leaders of thought and the favored sons of genius are busy in formulating plans, or taxing their mechanical skill for devices, by which shorter and easier roads may be opened up to wealth and to imaginary comforts and luxurious animal life; while the nation at large is reaching out with insatiable greed to the ends of the earth and grasping by force one possession after another to be added to her already vast domains. Bloated with power and dead to every appeal of national honor, she recognizes no law but that of might, and goes forth in the name of civilization and humanity to plunder and murder distant and unsuspecting people whose only offense is that their sunbright lands are objects of desire and lie within the compass of national expansion and fall easily into the grasp of a national greed which promises never to be satisfied.

In the name of high Heaven and of all that pertains to the welfare of humanity, is all this the road to true prosperity? If success acquired by such means is prosperity, then the successful gambler is a prosperous man-then the daring buccaneer is a model and a hero.

We do not believe that the picture we have drawn is too highly colored. Of course there is yet a wide substratum of society which rests securely on the old foundations. There are in every community men

who have never worshipped at the shrine of Mammon and who have higher aims and purposes in life than to acquire material wealth. But no thoughtful man will deny that the dominant spirit of this age is that of money-getting and of material ad

vancement.

The question arises, What will the harvest be? Whither, as a people, are we drifting? Where is the goal towards which we are rushing with ever quickening steps? Things cannot always go on as they are now going. The spirit that moves them can never be satisfied. The visions now so alluring can never be realized. The race is searching for an Eldorado which has no existence; it is a foolish child chasing the receding rainbow for a bag of gold.

While no man can predict the outcome in detail, yet every thoughtful man knows, or might know, that the reaction will come. It is an immutable law of ethics as well as of physics that action and reaction are equal. This being true, the reaction will come with terrific force. Society will be upheaved from its foundations, law and order will be trampled under foot, and Anarchy will hold a high carnival among the wrecks of ruined fortunes and the debris of prostrated power; the long pent up passions of men will be unbridled to run riot in scenes of carnage until some Cæsar or Napoleon shall rise out of the chaos and curb the raging multitudes

with a strong hand and call some Vulcan from the lower world to rivet the chains of despotism upon the maddened throng.

Such reactions have come in the past, but never with the same force, because never before perhaps, with one exception, was the action which generated them so long and intense. That exception is to be found in the causes that led to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.

We pen these words for a litttle country newspaper, with no possibility of reaching the ears of a great nation, nor indeed of many outside of a small county. Some of the few who may read them will regard them with indifference; others will consider them as only the riotings of a heated imagination, while possibly to a residue of thoughtful, serious readers, they will bear the solemn impress of truth.

THE PASSING OF THE BRAVE.

Within less than a year three great figures that stood out conspicuously in the darkest days that ever brooded over South Carolina, have vanished. Three strong pillars that upheld her temple of honor when the forces of land and sea seemed to combine for its annihilation, have fallen.

McGowan, Hagood and Bratton have passed over the river. It was meet that they should go when the era that gave them to the world had closed. When the temple had become dilapidated with

age and the advancing times had demanded a new structure fashioned after new models, it was meet that the old pillars should yield and the old temple should topple to its fall.

But the men who erected that temple and stood guard over its sacred shrine while the earth rocked and the heavens thundered through long years of blood and flame, belonged to the kingliest race that ever lived in the tide of times, or gave inspiration to the genius of story and song.

Let the changes come. Bring in the new era with its new men, new impulses and new standards. Raze the old temple to the ground and scatter the dust to the four winds of heaven, but hallowed be forever the ground on which it stood. The past is secure beyond the reach of chance and change. In the rapid evolution of events, in the wide rush of on-coming changes, this generation may forget the heights of glory they have left behind them, but they will shine on beyond the mountains of the past until God will baptize them with the light of His own everlasting approval.

McGowan, Hagood, Bratton! leaders of heroes! Tried in the furnace and proved to be gold. "Fearless and faithful, pure and powerful, tender and true," Pass on ye braves! ye shades of heroes! pass on to your eternal rest! But not yet shall your names he swallowed up in oblivion-not yet shall

the memory of your deeds be erased from the hearts of the true and brave.

From mountain side to ocean wave there are scattered remnants of vanished hosts, that yet linger on the shadowy border land of time and guard with jealous care the sacred treasures of the days that were crowded with glorious life. The steps of these weary sentinels do not fall with the firm, elastic measured tread that once kept time to the strains of Dixie's Land. The limbs may totter under the weight of years, but the hand is steady, and the heart is true, and though wearied by the burdens of time, it will leap again with the old life and send the hot blood bounding again through the shrunken veins, at the mention of the names of our fallen braves. And at the onrushing memories that these names conjure up out of the shadows of the past, the dim eyes kindle again with the light of youth and hope, the soul shakes off the lethargy of age and arouses itself again to strike a supreme blow for home and native land.

Was it but yesterday that we hurled a mighty host out of their intrenchments on the Chickahominy?-that we drove the compact and multitudinous legions pell mell through the woods of Chancellorsville?-that we charged the solid lines at Gettysburg?-that we held the "bloody angle” at Spottssylvania? How the cannons glare and the rifles flash! How the bayonets gleam and the ban