A

cereal farming are still in their infancy in this country, we can form an approximate idea of the future importance of the cattle industry in the United States. There is hardly a field in the whole cereal belt between the Allegheney and the Rocky Mountains that will not produce as good grass as it will grain; and there is scarcely a farmer that might not increase his products of cereals, on a fraction of his land, by raising and grazing cattle on the remainder in the summer and feeding and fattening them from his corn and hay and fodder in the winter. The value of turning farm products into meat on the spot where raised is not yet even dimly understood in the Western States. It is practised, however, extensively and with profit in some of the older States. The most important element entering into the problem of the future of this industry is the improvement of the stock; the weight must be increased, and the quality of the meat made better. This can be done by a judicious crossing of full-blooded shorthorns, or other heavy thoroughbeds, with the better class of natives. full-blood shorthorn steer at three years will average from 400lb. to 600lb. more than the native, and the half-blood will outweigh the native by 2001b. to 400lb. At the same time, the full-bloods and the grades will command higher prices per pound. The following actual cases afford striking illustrations:-In February, 1877, Mr. Saume, of Kellogg, Iowa, sold in Chicago a drove of sixty-four cattle. All were two years old, and stall-fed; a part were common native stock, and the remainder were half-blood shorthorns. The natives averaged 1,236lb., and sold at 4.65dol. per cwt., 57.40dol. per head; the half-bloods averaged 1.6661b., and sold for 6.50dol., or 108.29dol. per head. This was a difference in favour of the grades of 430lb., or 50.82dol. per head. A more general test was made by Mr. Pliny Nichols, a well known breeder of Iowa. He found, on averaging the prices at the Union Stock-yard Market in Chicago for 1877, the following results, viz.:-Common cattle, with good handling, at three and a half years, averaged 1400lb., at 4 cents, or 63dol.; grades, half-blood shorthorns, three years, average 1800lb., at 6 cents, or 108dol. Here was a difference of a half year's feeding and 21dol. between the native and the halfblood, and a half-year's food and 45dol. between the native and the full-blood. Another drove of 112 half-bloods were sold, 12 of which at three years averaged 20631b., and the remaining 100 averaged 1720lbs.; such examples could be easily multiplied. It is a generalisation from the great market of the Union Stock-yards of

or

Chicago, that graded cattle will weigh a fourth more, and command a third more per pound than the natives. The difference in dollars and cents is, therefore, a very tangible and palpable one. Raisers, dealers, and shippers are becoming thoroughly awakened to the fact. Breeders' associations are now formed in nearly all the States. Attention is being directed to the raising of the general stock. Hitherto too much attention has been given to raising fancy breeds for mere speculation or fancy prices. There are already a large number of thoroughbred shorthorns, Devons, and Herefords, in this country. The shorthorn is the favourite. The Kentucky herds of pure bloods are world famous. The pure stock is also largely cultivated in Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. It is only a question of time when the number will become sufficiently great to fall within the reach of the middle-class and small farmer. Then the grade and weight of the entire stock will be rapidly raised. The western farmers have taken hold of the matter in earnest; that which they see clearly and believe in thoroughly they are likely to accomplish.

improvement of the flock is Better stock is itself an ad

Another advance to come with the better and more economical feeding. vance in this respect. Shorthorns not only weigh more, but will fatten on less food than natives. As yet, however, little attention has been given to careful and economical feeding. In the Western States, cattle are almost entirely grass fed. In many of them all that has been needed was a drove of breeders and a herder. The free ranges of the wide prairies and time did the rest. These advantages will continue for a good while, but not indefinitely. As the cereal belt is advanced the ranges of grazing will be cut down. In the older and Eastern States stall-feeding is practised to a considerable extent. In the fall of the year stock cattle are brought east by the drovers, and sold to the farmers of Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, and New Jersey, who put them in their comfortable barns, and feed with corn and hay during the winter. At the end of February or March they turn them into the New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston markets at a high price. The gain in weight gives a good margin of profit for the winter's work and grain; besides, the winter's stabling gives him a coating of manure for his next crop of grain. This is generally clear gain.

The transportation problem is a very important one. It is the great drawback to the almost unlimited supply of the Western States. Railroads, however, are springing up like magic. The cost

of construction and operations is being constantly cheapened. Competition can scarcely be avoided, although the whole network of roads has fallen into the control of three or four great corporations. Water navigation is being extended. The great Ohio and the Mississippi systems give through lines of water communication that cannot be blocked. So with ocean carriage and the devices for preserving the meat. These are steps lying between the producer and consumer. They all fall within the region of inventive skill, and the successful division and organisation of labour. They come under the head of appliances or adaptation of means to ends. For improvement in this line the Yankee mind seems to possess a peculiar genius. It is safe to say that improved facilities will come with the demand for them. Upon the whole, therefore, the outlook for the future of the cattle industry in the United States is a very hopeful one. So far as capacity to supply is concerned, the business admits of indefinite extension. Of the dairy interest and the improved stocks of milk producers-a very large and important trade-I may have something to say in a future paper.

New York.

R. PORTER,

VOL. IV.-No. 24.

4 Ꭲ

THE WESTMINSTER CONFESSION.

Now that the smoke of battle has rolled away, and the din of conflict is temporarily hushed in the Presbyterian Assembly, it may not be inopportune to review the causes of the strife and to consider the consequences to which it points. In religion, as in politics, there are two antagonistic forces constantly at work. On the one hand. there is the spirit of inquiry, of criticism, of progress, and of aspiration. On the other, there is that of immobility, of conservatism, and of a blind, if not idolatrous, reverence for the past. This tends to the petrifaction of creeds and systems, while that aims at their reconstruction by the light of science, experience, and advancing knowledge, so as to bring them into harmony with the altered conditions of the human intellect, and with the changing circumstances of modern society. The law of development is unresting in its operation, and theology must submit to its influence as well as every other product of the mind of man. For while the sentiment of religion is as old as the race itself, and seems to arise with the first dawn of reason, it is continually undergoing important modifications, continually divesting itself of the superstitions which gathered round it in the childhood of the world, and continually forming higher conceptions of the Supreme Being, and formulating these in clearer and more expressive language. From fetish worship to the deification of the forces of nature was a great stride; and from the poetical mythology of the Greeks to the monotheism of the Hebrews was a still greater. But the greatest of all was the proclamation of the Divine element in man by the Founder of Christianity, and the sublime declaration, “I and my Father are one." Nevertheless, the new religion of love became more or less tainted in course of time, by admixture with the Manicheism of the East, and with the paganism of the West; and all through the Middle Ages, Christendom was accustomed to regard the Creator of the universe as a capricious, pitiless, and vindictive Being, with human passions and resentments; and the popular notions of Him found their most graphic expression in the "Inferno" and

"Purgatorio" of Dante, in the grim frescoes with which Andrea Orcagna adorned, or disfigured, the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa, and in the grandly gloomy "Last Judgment" of Michael Angelo.

When the Reformation occurred, the saturnine mind of John Calvin found a congenial occupation in engrafting on to the new theology the shocking misrepresentations of God which had originated with and been propagated by the ascetic schoolmen of earlier times. Science having been proscribed by the Church, little or nothing was known of natural laws; and every great physical convulsion was looked upon as a special and extraordinary interposition of Supreme Power, undertaken for the express purpose of punishing those who suffered by it, and of reading a terrible warning to those who did not; a repetition of which, might be prevented by the performance of certain rites and ceremonies. The orderly sequence of events, the immutability of the Divine law, and the unity of the whole creation were not only unknown, but were incapable of being understood at a time when individual accidents were supposed to be supernatural judgments; and even at a much later period, when, as we learn from Wodrow's "Analecta," it was seriously believed in Scotland that three gentlemen had met with violent deaths because they had been guilty of the heinous sin of quitting a place of worship before the sermon was finished.

The first and second Confessions of Faith, adopted by the Kirk of Scotland, reflected the hard and cruel spirit of Calvin's "Institutes." These made God the author of sin (cadet igitur homo, Dei providentia sic ordinante); represented Him as issuing "a horrible decree" involving numbers of people, with their infant children, in eternal death; and went so far as to assert that "the devil and all the legions of the wicked" were "unable to conceive any evil or to accomplish it," excepting "in so far as He has commanded." That such a creed as this should have found almost universal acceptance among the people of Scotland, in the seventeenth century, is only explicable by a variety of circumstances connected with the national temperament, with an austere climate, and with scenery and natural phenomena of an awe-inspiring or depressing character, which I cannot stop to analyse and elucidate. Enough to say that it engendered superstitions, and encouraged practices-witch-burning, heresy-hunting, religious persecution, and physical mortifications among the rest-under the influence of which, as Buckle has pointed