In the course of the summing up Recorder Levy said:  “To make an artificial regulation is not to regard the excellence of the work or quality of the material, but to fix a positive and arbitrary price, governed by no standard, but dependent on the will of the few who are interested....  What, then, is the operation of this kind of conduct upon the commerce of the city?  It exposes it to inconveniences, if not to ruin:  therefore it is against the public welfare.  How does it operate upon the defendants?  We see that those who are in indigent circumstances, and who have families to maintain, have declared here on oath that it was impossible for them to hold out.  They were interdicted from all employment in future if they did not continue to persevere in the measures taken by the journeymen shoemakers.  Does not such a regulation tend to involve necessitous men in the commission of crimes?  If they are prevented working for six weeks, it might lead them to procure support for their wives and children by burglary, larceny or highway robbery.”

The jury found the defendants “guilty of a combination to raise their wages,” and the court sentenced them to pay a fine of eight dollars each, with costs of suit, and to stand committed till paid.

MORAL TRAINING IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

One of our popular clergymen, in a late Sunday discourse upon the Bible in the public schools, labored to show that the question was a very unimportant one. because none were much interested in it except infidels and politicians—­a sufficiently absurd position for a professed teacher of the people to assume.  Doubtless it is a folly to fan into flame the slumbering embers of a quarrel, but it is a greater folly to pretend, in the face of the common sense of the people, that all signs of fire are extinguished or never existed where there is so much inflammable material about and the “wind of doctrine” running high.

This question of secular education for our public schools is in fact one of the most difficult of solution.  Chicago has met it in a summary manner by excluding the Bible from all her free schools, but this does not settle the question, because both believers and unbelievers in the various creeds of the churches admit that there should be provision made for the training of the moral faculties of the children in our public schools.  Many of them, especially in cities and large manufacturing centres, come out of the dark alleys where intemperance, poverty and ignorance tend to arrest the development of their higher sentiments.  For the unfortunate children of such homes the sessions of the public school afford the only glimpse of a better life, the only chance for moral and aesthetic culture.  Protestants, as a rule, honestly believe that the reading of the Bible at the opening of school tends to waken and develop the moral aspirations of the child.  Just as honestly and conscientiously