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ld, when the teaching of race-limitation came their way, added this also to their monopoly. Having assimilated it, they kept it to themselves. This was the last fine fruit of their selfishness! But, now, the opposition has weakened in a world of greater enlightenment, and the Malthusian League is determined to resist that selfishness which would keep the good things of this world as the preserve of certain classes. Therefore it starts its new campaign in South London. 'We know that the want of restriction among the poorest grade is enormously due to ignorance,' says its secretary. 'It is clear, therefore, that if such knowledge is available to them it will conduce to more restriction in those quarters than at present.' Having achieved what it did not intend--having silenced the voices of children in Park Lane and Belgravia--the Malthusian League is now determined to achieve what it intended--silence the voices of children in Lambeth and Poplar!

When the arguments on which the Malthusian League base their propaganda are considered, they are at once revealed to be the fruit of false reasoning and of ignorance. Neo-Malthusianism is based on the principle that poverty, disease, and premature death can only be eliminated by restricting the increase of the population. As disease and premature death are largely due to poverty, the problem is how to eliminate poverty. It is, however, manifest to any one who considers the sources of the world's food supply that these sources could provide food for a population many times greater than that at present inhabiting this planet. The vast territories of the British Empire are at present only occupied along their fringes. The most fertile regions--the vast spaces of Africa watered by noble rivers--cry out for the spade and the plough. Canada is doubling its wheat supply every few years. Counties at home, lying derelict, are waiting for intensive cultivation. The remedy for poverty is a right distribution of the world's food, and a right direction of the energies of men towards the production of food. When life is directed to its primary object, the production of food, then the greater the wealth of life the greater will be the food supply. The true wealth of a nation is therefore its life.

But the Neo-Malthusians are incapable of regarding life with anything but a jaundiced eye. If anywhere life should be desired it should surely be in Australia, where a population only equal to that of Scotland inhabit a continent. But even there the Neo-Malthusians will have nothing but restriction. The birthrate in Australia has descended to 10 per thousand, but the Neo-Malthusians regard that with satisfaction. 'What I am absolutely certain of is that no country can, from year to year, increase the amount which it produces by enough to hold all the people that can be born, and Australia apparently has just got to the point; its birthrate has just descended to 10 per thousand, but there has been a correlation between the birthrate and deathrate.... I do admit that, at the present moment, it has just got to the point of balance.' The hollowness of an argument such as that is apparent when it is remembered that the wheat crop of Canada in 1915 was more than 50 per cent. higher than that of 1911. Canada in five years increased its food supply by half; it is impossible in five years for the birthrate to increase the population by half. Canada has done even more, for since 1901 it has increased its wheat supply by 125 per cent., and its population is only two per square mile. Yet in the vast empty territories of Australia and Canada the Neo-Malthusian would spread his propaganda!

What is manifest is that if teaching such as that of the Neo-Malthusians be the ideal adopted by the people of this Empire and the Dominions beyond the sea, then the Empire is doomed. Australia has laid it down as an unalterable policy that the continent shall be a white-man country. How can that policy hold in Australia with a birthrate of 10 and in New Zealand with a birthrate of 9 per thousand? The abounding birthrate of Japan and China demands an outlet. If the men of British race succumb to race-weariness and adhere to the policy of racial suicide, they must give place to those that are not yet weary of life. It will be impossible for any race in the future to hold territories which they cannot occupy, and lands which they cannot replenish or cultivate. And, yet, in the region of empty spaces, the Neo-Malthusian regards racial limitation with satisfaction. 'When the birthrate stood at that level in Ontario, was that a desirable level for Ontario ... being a young country with plenty of room for expansion?' was one of the questions addressed to the secretary of the Malthusian League. 'I am quite decided Ontario should at present have only that birthrate,' was the answer. Surely human folly has seldom transcended this.

But the Neo-Malthusian has another argument to support his delusions. It is that the lowering of the birthrate leads to the lowering of the deathrate, and thus that there is no decrease in the population. It was on this ground that the secretary of the Malthusian League justified the restriction of births even in Ontario. 'When Ontario did increase its birthrate, its deathrate increased; it gained no increase of population thereby, so I am absolutely definite in that case.' But the Superintendent of Statistics, Dr. Stevenson, promptly pricked that bubble. The alleged increase of the deathrate in Ontario was due to a miscalculation. The increase in 1911 of the population was underestimated. The population in Ontario increased in 1911 to 2,523,000; the birthrate went up from 21.10 to 24.7, and the deathrate came down 14.0 to 12.6. So far from the increased birthrate in Ontario producing an increased deathrate, it brought with it a diminished deathrate. At the touch of reality the edifice of the Neo-Malthusian crumbles into sand. He is not deficient in patriotism; for he says so. 'We probably should get more colonising and more efficient colonisers if we had a smaller birthrate,' declared the secretary of the Malthusian League. Empty cradles are going to populate the Empire! There is surely no limit to the faculty of human self-deception.

Though the arguments of the Neo-Malthusians be fallacious, and the basis of their teaching illusionary, yet they have gained the allegiance of a vast portion of the population of the Empire. A birthrate lowered by half in some cities, and by a third over the whole of the nation, testifies to the withering blight which has passed over the race. In a little while Britain will be as France--its population stationary. We have yet a little way to go ere we have reduced the birthrate to the level of Australia, 10 per thousand; but we are on the way to it. When that day draws near there will be no more emigrants available for the territories that we hold; and the door of Australia must open to the yellow races. A race that chooses death can no longer shape or mould the issues of life.

Births per 1000 married males aged under 55 years, Social Class including retired.

The race is now being carried on mainly by the poorest classes of the population. But, when the Neo-Malthusians have carried out to the full that campaign on which they have now entered; when the faith in life which the poor have not yet lost, shall at last be undermined; when it will be true of Poplar as of Belgravia, and of the Canongate as of the West End, that having a family is no longer a British ideal--what then is to become of the race and the Empire? What we must realise is that this process of racial destruction will steadily go on working down the social scale until the race is doomed--unless the conscience of the race be roused and the forces of degeneration routed. Nobody has studied the whole problem with more thoroughness than Dr. J. W. Ballantyne of Edinburgh. 'If this voluntary restriction has begun in one group of society,' says Dr. Ballantyne, 'it has not expended itself yet upon the other groups ... it is working its way, one might almost say, as a leaven, it has not yet reached the larger groups of people, and therefore I expect the fall in the birthrate to go on.' In the present miasma which has fallen on the race, when women have become 'less scrupulous,' and doctors advise with greater and greater frequency the restriction of birth, Dr. Ballantyne can only summon us to 'bring up the reserves and strengthen the recruits.' Life has ceased to be desired; its continuance is no longer 'convenient.' It is inevitable that, unless a change comes in the spirit of our day, the process of decay will go steadily on.

It is a repulsive picture this which grows before our eyes; but there are blacker shades still--so black that one can only indicate them and pass on. So far we have only considered the restricted birthrate as the result of the teaching of Neo-Malthusianism; but there is a further restriction which even the Neo-Malthusian condemns--the destruction of the unborn life.

The best way to indicate this, the blackest of all the signs of moral decay, is to quote here and there from the Report.

The Lord Bishop of Southwark did not hesitate to declare that the destruction of unborn life in South London 'betrays instincts which are worse than the savage.'

Of the mass of evidence regarding this terrible aspect of the national life, these quotations must suffice. The public conscience has, in this last generation, become so deadened on the part of masses of the people that life is no longer sacred. 'It is always a great comfort to me,' says Dr. Amand Routh, 'that it is criminal as well as wrong--that one can show that the law considers it to be murder.' To escape from inconvenience, to secure freedom from responsibility, to attain untrammelled devotion to pleasure--the weapon of murder is freely used. One of the witnesses, Mrs. Burgwin, told the Commission an experience. 'When I went to Moscow,' says Mrs. Burgwin, 'I went to see the great Foundling Hospital ... and I felt very ashamed when I came away, because I said to a Russian doctor there, "You know this is very serious; you have got a couple of thousand illegitimate children, and by bringing them into a place like this you are only encouraging illegitimacy!" And he said to me, "Well, Mrs. Burgwin, is not that better than what you do in England? There, even your married people murder the children."'

There is another cause of the falling birthrate which I will only indicate. However necessary it may be to look facts in the face, there are facts so ugly that they do not bear even contemplation. One great cause of the fall in the birthrate is the social disease. One or two quotations must suffice.

'I hold,' says Dr. Ballantyne, 'that in a given family, if syphilis enters it, it is the most deadly thing for the future of that family.'

'Have you any idea about the proportion of antenatal deaths which are due to syphilis?' 'Of course, one's idea is,' answered Dr. Amand Routh, 'that it is an enormous proportion--perhaps one-fourth....'

'Dr. Willey was of opinion that probably 32.8 per cent. of the total still-births were due to syphilis.'

'I would hold the view that it is a considerable proportion,' says Dr. Ballantyne, 'founding upon Fournier's evidence in France, where he speaks broadly of families being swept out of existence before birth by syphilis.'

'We have been recently told that there are 500,000 fresh cases of syphilis yearly in this country and three times that number of cases of gonorrhea.'

It is the opinion of Sir William Osler that of all the killing diseases syphilis comes third or fourth. 'While we have been unable,' says the Commission on the subject, 'to arrive at any positive figures, the evidence we have received leads us to the conclusion that the number of persons who have been infected with syphilis, acquired or congenital, cannot fall below 10 per cent. of the whole population in the large cities, and the percentage affected with gonorrhea must greatly exceed this proportion.' Regarding all that, one can only re-echo the words of Sir Thomas Barlow: 'I think it is terrible.'

It is only when the after-effects of these diseases are considered that the full measure of the peril which they create is realised. They not only lead to an enormous loss of child life, but they also undermine the health of those on whom they have fastened their fangs, transmitting the misery even to the third generation. The evidence shows that more than half the cases of blindness among children are the result of these diseases in the parents. Out of 1100 children in the London County Council Blind Schools at least 55.6 per cent. were clearly attributable to this cause. In adult life this evil is responsible for diseases which often manifest themselves after many years, such as general paralysis, affections of the brain and spinal cord, and epilepsy. It is because the people have been left in ignorance as to the terrible consequences not only to themselves but to their children, that the welfare and happiness of life are thus sacrificed to sin.

'It is one of the few diseases which are hereditary,' writes Sir Malcolm Morris, 'and in the hereditary form its effects are even more disastrous than in the acquired variety.... Many of its innocent victims die in the first few months of life from meningitis, hydrocephalus, convulsions, and other affections; if they survive they are liable to recrudescences of the disease up to the twentieth year or even later. Growth is checked, vitality depressed, intelligence stunted; hideous deformities may be produced, sight and hearing may be destroyed, and the central nervous system may be involved, with results similar to those which supervene in adults. What a story of mutilation and massacre of the innocents!'

When these results are considered, there comes a feeling of amazement that a nation should suffer such plagues to afflict its vitality without putting forth every effort to stamp them out. The nation which has become thus afflicted by its own vices must have sunk to a depth which may well fill the observer with consternation. And the remedies which are proposed will only deliver the people from the consequences of their acts--they will not cure the disease itself. The only salvation lies in the ideal of the pure heart once more shining forth before the eyes of man. The law of God decrees that sin be punished; and deliverance for humanity from punishment can only come by conformity to the law of God. But this is not how we now regard it. We have set ourselves to combat the social disease not because vice is hateful but that in the future vice may become safe. When we shall have attained our end the shadows shall have gathered in deeper blackness. The few remaining stars shall be blotted out.

Such, in bold outline, are the forces which threaten the continuance and the well-being of the race. On the altar of degeneration England and Wales offered up in the year 1914 over 600,000 children. Who can compute the laughter and joyousness, the happiness and the riches thus consumed at the shrine of our self-indulgence? And every sign points to this vast sacrifice of life increasing with the years. For we are emancipated; and we smile at any restraint emanating from--God! Science has delivered us from that. We know it now--the voice of law is only the echo of outworn superstitions. And science, which has broken the chain of restraint, and which has provided the means for gratifying desire without incurring responsibility, has blessed us also with the high-explosive shell. This great deliverer--science--has put into our hands the power of pruning life at both ends. If the world is to find salvation through the absence of life--then, salvation is at the gate. In other days it gave our fathers a shudder to read of the moral depravity of Home ere the scourge of God fell on it. The old Romans can, alas! cause us to shudder no longer. We have improved upon them. Science has helped us greatly, and with its aid we can sound depths of depravity the Roman never reached. The triumphs of science have in our hands become instruments of an immorality which would have made even heathen Rome shudder. And as yet we are only at the top of the declivity. The momentum of our descent is gathering force with the years.

It may be asserted that this view is alarmist, and that, however bad our state, we are better than Germany. No thought of an enemy from without need, therefore, mar our satisfaction in our swift declension into the morass of vice. That comparison may be granted: we are better than Germany, though Germany has not yet sacrificed her children in such hecatombs as we have done. But what we have to consider is not the birthrate in relation to that of Germany but in relation to the extent of the earth surface which owns our sway. The end of the war will find Germany confined within narrow borders with all her colonies gone. The Germany of to-morrow will have no room for racial expansion. But we own the fourth of the world's surface. That vast territory calls to us for men. And if we individually choose our own selfish ease, and sacrifice the generations to come, we shall have failed in our imperial calling. We may win an empire on the battlefield; we will inevitably lose it in the silent nursery.

Not in relation to this or that earthly factor has this question to be considered. It is in relation to the Moral Order of the universe that we must face it. The unseen Power that reigns is a Moral Power. Somewhere in this universe, Righteousness is throned. Whatever race in the past surrendered to evil and made degeneracy its god--upon that race the judgment of the consuming sword fell. Though the judgment often tarried, it always fell. As one considers the moral condition to which we have come, the worse condition to which we are hastening, the destruction which befell those of old in whose footsteps we are now treading, the dust accumulated on buried cities and vanished races who made their pleasure their god, and the flaming of the sword wherewith God removed in all ages the cankerous growth from the body of humanity,--the question leaps forth: How can we escape the righteous judgment of God? Will there be found a place of repentance for us who have sacrificed the child of flesh and blood to the calf of gold and have surrendered ourselves to the sensuous delights of worshipping at our chosen idol's shrine? Unless the nation finds the place of repentance, it needs no prophet to foretell the end. For we have been living for more than a generation a life 'such as God has never suffered man to lead on earth long, which He has always crushed out by calamity or revolution.' And the startling fact is this--that when the judgment of God befell, it was on men unconscious that they were being judged. They came to the Great White Throne and never discerned it; they reached the end and never knew it to be the end. Thus they perished--Babylon and Rome alike. And we are as they. The judgment-seat is visible in the heavens, but our eyes never turn to it; amid the crash of the world's civilisation we hear no voice calling to repentance.

P. 125.

See pp. 85-88.

THE EMPTY COUNTRYSIDE

In the past the decay of civilisation has been heralded by the decay of the country-side. When the cities had sucked the life of the plains and valleys dry, then came the end. It was thus with Israel. Out of the villages and farms nestling in valleys the people were driven into cities by the rapacity of men eager to be rich. This was the burden that weighed on the prophets, 'Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field till there be no room.' When in the country places there was no room for the common folk, then national decay ensued in Israel. It was so also in Rome. The day came when one magnate owned the 'territories of whole tribes' and left them 'to be trampled under foot by herds or ravaged by wild beasts,' or garrisoned them 'with slave prisons or citizens held in bondage,' and Rome sucked dry the rural life of Italy and of the lands washed by the Mediterranean. Therewith paralysis seized the greatest of the world-empires. In every age overgrown cities have proved themselves the graveyards of civilisation. And the primary cause of the evils which now threaten us is that we have made the countryside waste. Counties and parishes have been depleted of life that cities might grow more and more. It has been calculated that nine out of ten families in England have migrated to the city in the last three generations. In and around Glasgow half of the population of Scotland is concentrated. Three-fourths of the whole population of Scotland has been massed in the industrial belt of country that lies between the Forth and Clyde estuaries, and which includes Edinburgh and Glasgow and the towns round which are centred the iron and coal industries. We have driven our manhood and womanhood out of the sunshine and the clean air and the silent spaces into the foetid, sunless closes of monstrous cities. There the clanging of machinery leaves no place where the soul can be still. And upon us has fallen the woe declared against those who devastate the quiet places, adding field to field, until there is no room for the poor.

It is to the Moloch of an industrial civilisation that this sacrifice of life has been made. The desolation was wrought because men, in their haste to become rich, were blind to the true values of labour. They forgot that the primary work of man is to produce food, and that upon the production of food the whole structure of the commonwealth depends. Cities endure because, far beyond their ken, the land yields wheat and fruit and supports wandering herds. All other work is parasitic; that work alone is essential. But a perverted civilisation sacrificed the primary to the parasitic, and poured its rewards into the lap of the workers who added nothing to the world's true riches. The road to success and honour lay only through the city. Formerly the gentleman was he who tilled the ground; in our day the man who ploughs and reaps is deemed a boor. Clean hands and clean linen are now the badges of a gentleman. The sense of the dignity of making the soil yield its riches has vanished from among us. Everything is ordered that the stream of life from the fields and the open sky into the barracks of sooty, squalid cities may swell into an ever-increasing river. We had only one ideal and that was cheap food. Other nations carefully conserved the workers of the soil and protected them from a competition that might deprive them of the reward of their labour. During the last fifty years, while our population has rapidly increased, our agricultural population has been diminished by a million workers. A hundred years ago we had 9,000,000 acres producing wheat, to-day we have only 1,800,000 wheat-growing acres. We have indeed sacrificed our true life. In the whole of the British Empire, covering a quarter of the globe, the total white population living on the land is only 13,000,000, whilst that of Germany alone, working the land and living by it, has risen to 20,000,000. We had one watchword which stirred our blood--the cheap loaf! The meaning of the watchword was hid from us. For the cheap loaf meant cheap labour, and cheap labour meant ever-increasing riches to the exploiters of toiling masses in the lamp-lit cities. But the 'cheap loaf' meant for the country places which yielded it, that the husbandman could not live by his labour. Floods of oratory were poured forth; under the guise of philanthropy the ideal of cheap food was held up in palpitating periods by capitalists who reaped their sure reward in labour correspondingly cheap, and the fields of England were steadily laid down to 'twitch and thistle.' A generation wrought this desolation, unconscious of the desolation that it wrought. The agricultural labourer became at last obsessed by the watchword which wrought his ruin. Even Mr. Masterman records with sympathy, if not with satisfaction, the attitude of the farm labourer to the new 'fiscal reform.' 'Oh dear!' is his comment, 'we want no taxes on food.' We destroyed him, but we did it so skilfully, and with so splendidly assumed an air of philanthropy, that the worker on the land did not even recognise the instrument wherewith we destroyed him. He has been the victim of political factions--of politicians who have sacrificed the State to party. The Conservatives not unnaturally made the monopoly in land a tenet of their faith, and resisted every claim on the part of the poor to call any portion of England, however small, their own; the Liberals made the policy of Free Trade an inviolable doctrine, and though that policy mainly enriched the capitalist, they assumed in its support the semblance of enthusiasm for humanity, if not of the passion of religion. But between the two, as between the upper and nether millstone, the rural population of England has been ground to powder. Not for the first time in history the desolation of a kingdom has been wrought by time-serving politicians.

And with the devastation which our national policy thus wrought in the countryside there passed away, slowly but steadily, the ancient landowners. These men had in their veins the life-blood of England; they built up the Empire and sent forth their sons to be the 'frontiersmen of all the world.' Innumerable ties bound them to the people. Squire and peasant were at one in love of the land, and each knew that his welfare was bound up with that of the other. But the lands had to be sold, and the new-rich came from the cities and replaced the aristocracy of the countryside. They had no ties binding them to the sons of the soil. They knew not the traditions to which the landlord and tenant were loyal. They only sought to transplant a bit of the city into the heart of the country. It was then that the country folk awoke to the insecurity of their lives. At a word they were sent forth homeless wanderers. The hint of a right to be vindicated brought down unemployment and eviction on the head of England's freedmen. The cottager in the country could no longer call his soul his own. In the city he could at least call his thoughts his own, and he could give them utterance in stumbling words without incurring the risk of being made homeless. No wonder the rural labourer escaped for his life. The nation, as usual, awoke too late to the realisation of its ebbing life. It began to make provision for the people of England acquiring a moiety of the land of England. But it is easy to turn a smiling land into a wilderness; to convert the wilderness back into a garden is the baffling problem. 'To-day,' writes Mr. Masterman, 'land is being slowly and laboriously offered to the people, a generation after the people who once hungered for that offer have flung themselves into the cities or beyond the sea.' Any parvenu can sweep the population of a parish forth into Poplar and Lambeth; it may well pass the wit of man to bring their children back from Poplar and Lambeth to the land.

To-day four-fifths of the population of England is crowded in cities, and there they are left 'to soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime.' In Scotland the same forces have been at work with the same result. Parishes of soil as fertile as is in the world are to be found in the occupation of half a dozen farmers, some of whom hold two or more farms. Land which might hold hundreds of families, if the land were available for the people as in France, is empty save for a handful of farmers and their servants. Though great markets are at the door waiting the produce of intensive cultivation, the small holder is crowded out. Denmark pours into our cities the produce which the monopoly in land prevents being supplied at home. Holland feeds us in time of peace and our enemies in time of war. That the Danes and the Dutch may have stores wherewith to feed our foes, the fields of England are laid waste. The only life now left in the country is the ebb and flow of the overflow from the cities. Germany and Austria have withstood a two years' blockade, because the land is there kept under cultivation and yields the necessaries of life. Our enemies have not been blind to a nation's true riches. Did we lose the command of the sea for a few weeks, there would be no escape from destruction. For we have sacrificed our bread supply to the production of Brummagem wares.

But there has been in Scotland an additional element of tragedy in the rural situation which has not been manifested in England, at least on so large a scale. Whole parishes have in the Highlands during the last century been laid waste by wholesale ruthless evictions. Behind the processes which have made the glens and mountain slopes desolate of men, and which have massed a million of human beings into a city of restricted area such as Glasgow, piling them, family on the top of family, in noisome tenements, there lies perhaps the greatest tragedy of the nineteenth century. And that tragedy is all the more poignant in that it has been wrought in silence, none paying it any heed. Glens filled with men have been transformed into desert places filled with sheep or deer, and that at the will of one man, while statesmen paid no heed and the world took no cognisance. For were not these things done beyond the Grampians? And what happened there was of no consequence.

It is almost incredible that, during the last century, glens and countrysides in Scotland were stripped bare of human beings by wholesale eviction. The thought of these poor thatched houses burning and the people driven away to find refuge where they could--in the slums of Glasgow or across the seas--is to our minds so intolerable that many will deny such crimes were ever perpetrated. Yet they were perpetrated. The hearthstones on which the peat fires unceasingly burned, which for generations had never grown cold, were left to the rain and the snow. Some parishes were laid wholly waste. In one such parish which I know, out of which sixty-one officers bearing their King's commission went forth to fight in the Napoleonic wars, there has gone forth hardly one officer to-day. Where hundreds were found of old in the day of need, a mere handful of ghillies or shepherds is found to-day who can take up arms. For that parish which gave Scotland the greatest family of preachers and leaders in religious and social movements was laid ruthlessly waste, and the parish minister, who held all the honours which his Church and country could bestow on him, was left in his manse solitary amid the wilderness which greed created, to die of a broken heart. That most beautiful of islands--the Isle of Skye--sent forth 21 generals, 48 colonels, 600 commissioned officers, 10,000 soldiers to fight in the great wars for human freedom against the Corsican; to-day the Isle of Skye can scarcely muster 1000 in the greatest crisis of human history. One parish in the western sea-board which sent 200 men to fight for freedom in the Napoleonic wars to-day could only muster six; for the parish fell into the hands of a man who wanted a deer forest for the passing of his leisure hours. These figures are but representative of what has happened all over the British Isles. An old man, who was carried as a child in the corner of a plaid out of his native glen when the cataclysm of eviction burst on the unbelieving crofters and cottars, while cottage after cottage was given to the flames, when asked what he remembered about it, answered: 'I can see yet the smoke rising to heaven; and I can hear the sound of weeping down the glen.' In my boyhood's days I heard an old man speaking of the townships of his youth being laid waste, and he said: 'I remember it as one remembers things seen in a dream.' There are many books in which those who may desire can inform themselves of the depths to which it is possible for greed and tyrannous power to bring men who have no ideal but the gratification of their desires. The cruelties and the wrongs perpetrated in the Scottish Highlands on a loyal and law-abiding people can only be paralleled by the atrocities of the slave traders in Africa. They would be unbelievable were it not that the State suffered the same processes in a gradual and less dramatic form to accomplish the same ends in England. The only difference was that the Scottish evictor concentrated in one day of sword and fire the desolating work which in England and in Lowland Scotland was diffused over many years. Whether the result be that of a day or of a hundred years, the folly and the guilt are the same. The same fate as overtook rural England and Scotland has in even more fateful degree overtaken Ireland. The vast majority of the Irish are now outwith their native isle. In the Ireland of to-day only the derelicts are left. Throughout the length and breadth of the three kingdoms, the country places in which strong men were reared have been made desolate that cities in which men decay might extend and enlarge their slums.

In this devastation of the country places the abnormal process of eviction played but a small part compared with the normal processes which worked steadily for the emptying of the country and for the growth of the city. A blinded legislature sacrificed everything to the growth of an industrial civilisation. What the ruling classes wanted was the increased prosperity of Glasgow and Birmingham; it mattered nothing though the country-folk perished. They had, however, some consideration for the countrysides. They caused schools to be built everywhere at the expense of landlords and tenants. But in these schools they caused nothing to be taught but the dates of battles and the names of rivers. In them there was nothing taught of the wonder of growing life, of the miracle of earth pouring food into the lap of men, of the glory and beauty of the greening earth, or of the dignity of breaking up the fallow ground. I say, nothing of worth was taught in these schools--nothing, except what roused an unhealthy craving for the life that could be lived with unsoiled hands! And for the support of these schools one lady who owned a large estate in the west had to sell her jewels that she might pay the school rate, and tenants parted with their stock for the same end. For the State had decreed that the country places should pay for the support of those processes which were to work their own desolation. Landlords were made bankrupt and tenants ruined that bloated cities might grow more and more.

Every development of the great national machinery designed for the intellectual illumination of the people has wrought more and more desolation in the country places. The last of these has been the worst. In Scotland the parish school since the days of Knox was the centre of intellectual activity, and the parish schoolmasters were able to send their scholars straight to the University. But the pundits at last decreed that this must cease. Secondary education was banished from the parish schools. The teachers who formerly had scope for, and joy in, the higher spheres of teaching were consigned one and all to the withered fields of elementary education. All the secondary teaching was concentrated in the towns where central schools were established, to which promising children who desired such training were collected.

The result has been disastrous. The light of higher education in each rural parish has been quenched. The secondary education has been concentrated in towns, and only a few parents could face the additional burden of providing lodgings for their children. The pundits made no provision for the proper accommodation for boys and girls at the most critical period of their lives. No hostels were built for them. In insanitary villages they were left to whatever provision decayed houses could provide for them. In these schools religious and moral training was banned. After school hours boys and girls, removed from the salutary influences of their homes, were left to the social joys of the street corners. The main industry of many of these towns was that of the hotel and public-house. The result has been that a large proportion of boys and girls who in the shelter of their homes would have grown into a worthy and useful citizenship have been utterly ruined. The system was devised that the few might be pushed up the ladder into the region of the higher knowledge, leaving all record of God and moral duty behind with their elementary textbooks; and no provision whatever was made to safeguard them, in the course of the giddy ascent, from toppling over and falling into the mud. And the great system, instead of elevating, crashed them into the mire. And this devastating process still goes on. The rising generation in the country places in Scotland are made unfit for country life by a false education, and, through its neglect of their higher needs, many of them are ruined. A nation that spends five millions a day on war would not in its education system provide for the social and moral needs of its sons and daughters. It sacrificed everything to the brain. And the result has been desolation in many a family in Scotland in lonely glens and by the sea. Our education machinery has, in truth, been Prussianised, and in the process the soul has been grievously wounded. The class that provided the ministers of religion in wide stretches of Scotland, provides them no more. A generation of boys left to the moral influences of the street corners, undisciplined and disregarded, can provide the nation with clerks and not with leaders in the sphere of the soul.

There is no sign that the nation is waking to the misery wrought by the bureaucrats. All the cry is for a further march along the same road. The Government have in these last days appointed two Commissions on Education, the one to 'inquire into the position occupied by natural science,' and the other 'into the position occupied by the study of modern languages,' in the educational system, and they are to consider the matter, the one in relation to the 'interests of the trades, industries, and professions' dependent on science, and the other in relation to the 'interests of commerce and public service.' In this there is no hint that what the nation mostly needs is the development of character, the re-enforcement of soul. We are to investigate with our eye on commerce; the material gain is still our goal. The Germanised minds have won their first victory. The future path of our development is to be the path of the Teuton, and we are to tread it like him, sacrificing our souls to Mammon. For the sake of commerce we must go on pushing our boys faster up the ladder, heedless of debris of moral wreckage at its foot!

A still more depressing symptom is the policy already adumbrated by the Government to mitigate the devastation wrought in the country places. Our armies now number millions, but the Government introduces a bill to settle a few hundred soldiers on the land! Millions of acres lie waste, but the Government proposes to deal with a few thousand acres here and there. The needs of the future require an exodus from the Egypt of the slums and from the slavery of that industrialism which adds nothing to the world's true riches, and the re-establishment of the people in their true heritage, the land. But the Government proposes to reinstate a handful. There is no sign that the politician has as yet realised that agriculture is the noblest of industries, a nation's true wealth. And there is no realisation of the only method by which this can be done. It is the magic of ownership that alone will restore to the people the joy in the land. The rent system is doomed to failure. In the words 'my own' there is a glamour which turns even sand into gold. When to the masses that have been despoiled there is again restored the privilege of designating a little portion of the land of their fathers, their own, then, and only then, will the country places once more waken to life, and the desolation of generations be at last removed. A nation for which millions have been found ready to die must surely provide for the living such social conditions as will enable them to live joyous and clean lives. In kingdoms teeming with riches, no heart must be starved of beauty, no life starved of bread, and no soul starved of God.

A hundred years ago there were 5 deer forests in Scotland, now there are 200. Since 1891 the acreage in Scotland under deer and devoted to sport increased from over 2 1/2 millions of acres to over 3 1/2 millions of acres. This process of increasing the area devoted to sport has gone on even since the war began. This land, to the extent of two millions of acres, can be reclaimed for human use. Scotland has talked of afforestation for a generation--and done nothing! During the last twenty-five years, while the politicians pursued their game, the people of Scotland lost an additional million of acres so far as food production is concerned!

THE MAN IN THE SLUM

The countrysides have been laid waste, but what of the men and women who were thus driven from the wide, wind-swept spaces to stony streets and airless barracks? What did it mean of happiness and well-being to them? Let us try to present the contrast to ourselves.

In no sphere is there such an opportunity of happiness as that of work in the open air, when men have learned to love the sights and the sounds of the wide sky. The pleasantest sight in the world is to watch a ploughman driving straight his long furrow, or resting at the furrow end crooning to his well-groomed team, while the fresh air fans his face and the westering sun casts a mantle of loveliness around him. He may be a lover of nature, this man. He may watch the coming of the birds and the first white flashing of the swallows' wings. If he does not own the land there is no reason why he should not 'own the landscape.' At the close of the day he goes home and is met by the welcoming shout of his children, who, strong and sturdy, clamber on his knees.

But it was decreed that he be driven into a slum; and see what has been made of him! Walk through the East End of Glasgow on a Saturday night and mark the product of the 'highest civilisation' the world has ever known. Out of reeking public-houses men and women reel into the streets. Degradation and brutality have marked them for their own. Their diseased bodies witness to their lives of sensuality. They were children of the fresh air, now 133,000 of them in Glasgow live in one-room houses with the very decencies of life denied them; and 486,000 live in one-room and kitchen houses--a total population of 619,000, in the one city, doomed to live under conditions which render all privacy impossible. Often a father and mother and three or four children live in a single apartment. When that single apartment is at the top of the rookery, the pitiful spectacle is seen of little children with bowed or bent legs climbing painfully up the squalid stairs. The mothers of the race can be seen toiling up weary flights of stairs carrying a heavy basket on one arm and a child in the other. Once streams of purest water from the hillsides flowed day and night, singing to them, cleansing for them; now it is impossible to keep clean, for in these rookeries the washhouse is only available once every three weeks! Out of a million of a population, 60 per cent. live under conditions such as these. The Medical Officer of Health has declared that there are 10,000 houses in Glasgow absolutely unfit for human habitation, and which it is impossible to make fit. But a doomed population must go on living in them because there is no other accommodation to be found for them. In these places the children perish in the first year of life at a rate of 200 per thousand; but in the West End only 50 children die per thousand. Out of every thousand babies born in those parts of the city in which the poor are massed, 150 at least are destroyed by the social conditions which the highest modern civilisation has created. After a day of nerve-racking toil the freeborn Scotsman comes home to his lair, the one-roomed house which can command the use of a wash-house once in three weeks, to the foulness and the squalor, and what is he to do? The State has provided. The whisky-shop is there, at the corner, with its brightness and its allurements and its forgetfulness of woe. The State says to him, you can escape out of your intolerable surroundings through the door of alcohol. And he escapes. There is no other course left for him, and only the Pharisee can blame him. Thus it comes that the State-regulated alcoholic manufactories of paupers and criminals pass the slum-dwellers through the mill, and they come forth moral refuse. Children with the faces of old men and women cry to each other the undertones of a babel of profanity. For weeks they never see the sun, moving under a pall of black smoke. They rise to toil in the dark, and all day they watch and feed clanking machinery, and they return home in the dark. The State has provided for them the narcotic of drunkenness. Vigour dies low in them. Out of every three one is rejected as physically unfit to bear arms. When stringency is exercised one out of two is rejected. In the process of transplantation and disinheritance the people have lost not only the land but their bodies. For them there has been yielded no profit. They have lost the world, but they have not gained their souls.

For the greatest of all their losses is this, that they have lost the sense of God. In the country they could not fall to those depths. There they were face to face with the Unseen.

'Who plants a seed beneath the sod And waits to see it push away the clod-- He trusts in God.'

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