On Picket Duty.

Without unrestricted competition there can be no true cooperation.

The Boston “Investigator” offers itself to trial subscribers for one month for twenty-five cents. The paper has a glorious record, and all Liberals should unite in rewarding its valiant struggle against superstition by stanch support in its honorable and still vigorous old age.

Herbert Spencer, though he knows nothing of Proudhon’s ideas and made a complete fool of himself on the only occasion when he ever undertook to criticise them, is as much of an anarchist, if he only knew it, as was Proudhon himself. For his theory of social evolution from militancy to industrialism means the eventual abolition of the State. Mr. Spencer is a philosopher who busies himself more with the past than the future, but the lesson of his teaching and the applications of his theories, though less emphatic on that account, are just as clear to thinking people.

At the recent celebration of John Bright’s seventieth birthday at Rochdale the hero of the occasion, responding to the tributes of the admiring laboring population, briefly roviewed the progress made in England during his career. In the course of a glorification of free trade he said, jubilantly: “So far as selling to all the world, you are perfectly free with your labor as we are perfectly free with our capital.” What a sorrowful satire upon the present system of industry and commerce that a prominent representative of a class which does next to no labor and therefore produces next to no capital should be able to stand before an audience made up from the class which does nearly all the labor and therefore produces nearly all the capital, and talk to them, unrebuked, of “your labor” and “our capital”!

The “Free Religious Index” has dropped the adjectives from its name, and wishes henceforth to be known, as of old, simply as the “Index.” Whether the discarded title implied too much freedom to suit the old management, or too much religion to suit the new, or whether both old and new have become suddenly impressed by the profundity of a remark said to have been made by a near relative of the original manager, Mr. Abbot,— namely, that she did not like the term, “free religion,” because it reminded her of “free love,” — we are not informed. But, whatever the motives that inspired it, the change is a good one. A combination of circumstances that makes it expedient for a newspaper to abandon its original name is very rarely found. [George Chainey, please notice!] Certainly no such circumstances ever occurred in the history of the “Index.” The old title is unquestionably simpler, stronger, broader, and, in its present lettering, typographically neater than the one recently in use. Its readoption, therefore, is to be commended. Moreover, the paper itself is now much better “made up” than ever before. The new editor, Mr. Underwood, has reconstructed its anatomy to advantage. If, in addition, he will infuse some blood into its colorless veins, it will become a readable and valuable journal.