But back of the courts there must be educational work. There must be among the people a better sense of essential righteousness. There must be a justice that will not and cannot sentence a poor wretch, who steals a coat or a piece of bacon for a longer term than the rich man who breaks a bank and robs a thousand people; that will not and cannot send a poor man without friends or money to prison for a longer term than a rich man with both money and friends who has committed the same offense; that will not and cannot send a Negro or a Chinaman to prison for a longer term than it will send a white man for the same offense. Among the people there needs to be developed a better conscience as to the sanctity of an oath, and the sacred majesty and divine authority of law that knows no conditions of society and no distinctions of race. With such a conscience paramount, even among the leaders of opinion, prison reform will be easy.
THE SOUTH.
NOTES IN THE SADDLE.
BY FIELD-SUPERINTENDENT C. J. RYDER.
There is no department of work in the great field which is being developed by the A. M. A. more thrillingly interesting than that of the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee. A recent trip, one of several already made through that region, has greatly increased my appreciation of this work, and confidence in the grand success which is even now opening before us. I have just been over the ground covered by our missionary work and have been impressed with the vast opportunities, as well as the imperative needs which exist on every hand in this mountain region. Let us go over that field together. New and strange phases of life meet us at every turn.
We enter the mountain regions of Kentucky in which the A. M. A. has schools and churches, a few miles north of Knoxville. Indeed the first station of the Kentucky missions is in Tennessee. This part of the work is under the direction of Rev. A. A. Myers. This region has only recently been opened to the outside world. Coal fields are abundant, and timber of the very best kinds still stands in vast forests on the hillsides and along the streams. These trees shoulder against each other like an army of giants marshalled to defend the wild freedom of their mountain home against the impertinent intrusion of the “humans,” as the mountaineers call men. These brave defenders, however, are fast falling beneath the axe of the lumberman. In the yard of a single mill, seven million five hundred thousand feet of walnut timber was piled ready for the market. This same mill cuts on an average ten million feet of lumber, of all kinds, in a week.
A rough, but interesting mountaineer, who sat near me in the freight caboose, in which I rode from Knoxville northward into the mountain region, told me that he kept eight yoke of cattle at work all the time in bringing lumber from the “benches” on the sides of the mountains to the “slides.” These benches are small plains, or miniature plateaus upon which the larger forests grow, as the soil is deeper and richer, being formed from the wash of the mountains above. They draw the logs to the edges of these benches and let them over the slides, down which they dart, as the arrow flies from the string of a bow. It is in this country, so rich in mineral and timbered wealth, that a large part of the mountain work of the A. M. A. lies.
The vast army of men crowding into this region to gather its wonderful wealth, makes still more imperative the necessity for Christian work here immediately. A new railroad is pushing its way from Corbin through Barboursville, and pointing toward Cumberland Gap, through which it will probably pass out into Virginia. The whistle of the locomotive is the reveille awakening other thousands to the possibilities of this region, and bringing them together here. You see, therefore, that this field claims our attention and our help, just as every new region of the West does, as it is rapidly filling up through emigration from other parts of our own country and from other lands. There are also the communities of mountaineers, for whom these churches and schools were planted, who have a claim upon us. Within a few years, hundreds of coal mines will pour out their black streams along the railroads, many of which are as yet unbuilt. Furnace fires will light up the darkness of the night along the hillsides. These small towns will be great centers of commercial and industrial importance.