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

But in the East Ends of our cities no work of God is ever visible. And they were told by many wise men that God was superfluous. Everything could be explained without any God! There was nothing but sensations! Ah! who can blame him because he has sunk so low? They took the earth from him; they took the sunlight from him; they took the air from him; they darkened the moon and the stars for him--until at last they took God Himself from him. And it has all been so cunningly wrought that he is all unconscious that he has been driven out of Paradise. That is the essence of the grim tragedy.

In the countryside it was possible for men and women to live clean and decent lives, and those who are left there continue to do so. In proof of that it may be cited that the north-west districts of Scotland can still show a birthrate of 34.8. Were it not for the 'Celtic Fringe' and the country places, the birthrate of Scotland would be far lower than it is. For the country and the hillsides are the land of far vistas and empty spaces, so that the apostle of racial limitation could not there plead that there is no room for more. And life is natural; children, so far from being an endless burden to their parents, are looked upon as life's true riches, the helpers and the supporters of their parents. The crofter's house may be poor, but it rings with the shouting of children at play, and love spreads its endless feast. In these places, so unsophisticated and so 'uncivilised,' children are not a burden, and, however large the family, there is room in the heart for more.

But far different is it when the family is driven from the countryside into the slum. There the new civilisation decrees that men and women must no longer live natural lives. If they have children they must pay the penalty, and the penalty is that landlords refuse to accept them as tenants. Long, long ago a Child was born in a stable 'because there was no room for them in the inn.' There was room for tax-gatherers and soldiers and traders, but there was nobody found to make room for a woman in the hour of her direst need. The Child was shut out. But that was in a rude age and the door was shut by untutored men. The most startling of all the facts which leap to light as we consider the social and moral condition of our generation is the fact that after nineteen centuries of Christianity, in the heart of the most 'perfect' development of civilisation, the same tragedy is perpetrated--the child is shut out. There is room for everything but not for innocence. There is conclusive evidence to prove that the property owner in London has set his face against tenants who happen to be the unhappy parents of little children. Childhood is that which nobody now desires except a few poor people whom the Malthusians have not yet instructed. 'A printer told me the other day,' says Monsignor Brown, '...he had five children; when he went to an agent the other day, the agent bowed him out and would not listen to him, though he wanted five rooms and was prepared to pay the rent.' If a family exceeds four the position becomes acute. 'If a family consist of four or five children,' declared the Assistant Housing Manager of the London County Council, 'they would have a difficulty in obtaining accommodation. All this is quite natural. The property owner wants his rent, and he wants it without his property suffering undue dilapidation. And the rent is more certain when there are not more than two or three children. He is not a philanthropist; he wants his money, the race must look after itself. Profits and not children--that is the rule of his life. In every city it is the same. The owner of house property will not have children in his houses, even as the London County Council will not have married women as teachers--for they might have children! This then is what we have done. We have deprived four-fifths of our population of their birthright in the air and the sunshine and the land, and we have decreed that they must live unnatural lives--otherwise we will allow them no place wherein to live! We have built up a civilisation in the midst of which childhood is anathema.

When we look beneath the surface and ask the reasons why the poor cannot find houses in which they can live with comfort, we discover that it is a matter of finance. The extortionate prices of building sites render it impossible to build on them any dwelling-houses except tenements. Here is an example: 'Unless the land were given you, you could not possibly build cottages,' says the Secretary of the Guinness Trust. 'Our new site, which was supposed to be sold to us on cheap terms, cost ?11,000 an acre, so that you can see the landrent per tenement will work out at about 2s. 6d. a week, and as I say, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners professed to sell to us at a low rate, having regard to our objects. It is really not a stiff price for the position.' In this bare statement we touch bedrock. The Guinness Trust, founded with the philanthropic purpose of providing decent housing for the poor, buys an acre for building purposes from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who, from their very name, must be interested in the poor, and they get it cheap at ?11,000 an acre! What does it mean this fabulous cost of land in great cities? A hundred years ago that acre would be bought and sold at its agricultural value of a few score pounds sterling. Whence, then, this inflated price? The answer is that the people created that value. We deprived them of the land of England and drove them to the cities. In the cities they, by their labour, made the land valuable; and the value which they themselves created we turn against them. We exiled the people from the soil; and in the cities, where we piled them, we turned the values, which they created, into an instrument for their ultimate destruction. They have made the land so valuable that cottages can no longer be built on it, and the man with four children searches in vain for a house. It is a staggering product of a perfect civilisation. And still more staggering when one realises that the birthrate of these poor people, for whom the Guinness Trust provides some measure of comfort, is 36.95 per thousand, as compared to 17.53 in the west. The section of the population still willing to carry on the race must pay ?11,000 an acre for the sites of their teeming tenements. Only after that form can civilisation make room for the child.

What guerdon has the State provided for the massed populations who have the very riches they create thus turned into an instrument for their impoverishment? One looks for that guerdon in vain. The vast majority of them are consigned to a life of privation from birth to death. Factories pour heavenward the smoke which lies over our cities as a pall, and in the gloom men and women toil with bloodless faces producing the goods which, elaborate and costly, or cheap and nasty, crowd the markets of all the world. But ten millions of the toilers go shivering through life ever tottering on the verge of the precipice of want. Over one and a half millions of them were rated as paupers in the years before the war. In the old Roman world half the population were slaves, but three-fourths of our population are virtually slaves. For the man who marries and has children, who is forced into a slum, and is once chained to the chariot of modern machinery, there is no escape. 'Man is born free,' declared Rousseau, 'and is everywhere in chains.' No chains of slavery were ever more degrading than those forged in our day. Systems of indoor sweating found for their antidote the pauper system of outdoor relief. England, that struck the shackles off the African slaves, forged shackles for her own children. The conditions of the modern slaves are in a sense worse than that of the Roman serf. For the Roman slaves often laboured in noble toil, building temples which have defied the corroding power of time and which still inspire the heart with admiration and awe. But these slaves of to-day build nothing that endures. The cities of their labour might perish to-morrow, but in their perishing no beauty would disappear from the earth. The very efforts which the toilers have made to improve their state have been movements of blindness and folly. They have organised far-reaching systems by which they seek through the limitation of output to improve their condition. The gate through which they press towards deliverance is the gate of dishonesty. That is the proof of the servitude not of body only, but of mind and spirit, to which they have been brought. 'I do not hesitate to express the opinion,' wrote Huxley in 1890, that if there is no hope of a large improvement in the condition of the greater part of the human family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion over nature which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows upon that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of want with its concomitant physical and moral degradation amongst the masses of the people, I should hail the advent of some kindly comet which would sweep the whole thing away as a desirable consummation.' Since then, wealth has enormously increased, science has triumphed more and more over nature, but the increase of the one and the triumph of the other have only produced an increase of physical and moral degradation on the part of masses of the people. Whoever ponders the two Reports in which for the first time that degeneration is fearlessly and mercilessly exposed, cannot any longer be blind to that. It is not, however, by means of a 'kindly comet' that the arrest comes. For God's judgments shut not the door against hope.

In the days of old a prophet surveying the decay of Israel used a phrase which grips the heart: 'They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity,' and so has visualised our pitiful state also. It is not, however, quite the same. For Zion was the temple, and stood for the hunger of the soul. We no longer build any temples. We build factories and playhouses and endless miles of grey and colourless streets. To-day the prophet would vary the words, 'They build up theatres and cinemas with blood and London with iniquity.' That is near the truth. London has been built up by that iniquity which has made the home-counties of England waste; and the life-blood of islands and fair valleys and hill-sheltered glens has been drained that Glasgow might grow and its slums be enlarged. The call to repentance which comes to our ears is a call summoning us to right the wrong wrought by blinded politicians, to restore again to the people the decencies of life and the possibilities of happiness. The call to national repentance is not a call to emotion but a call to action. Of old prophets summoned a race fast hurrying to decay to return to God. The way of return was the way of action. They were exhorted to people the waste places, to curb licentiousness, and to walk in the path of righteousness. And to-day the call of national repentance is the same. It is the call to the realisation of an ideal of life in which masses of the people will not be damned from birth by a social organism in whose grip they are powerless. All in vain does a mission, appealing to the soul, feeble of help, wage conflict in a slum with the forces of the State, wielded through a dozen public-houses, that depress and enslave. As things now are there can be no escape and no salvation for the man in the slum.

Infant mortality in one-apartment houses, per thousand, 210 " " two " " " 164 " " three " " " 129 " " four " " " 103

The following quotation from a newspaper of this summer is illuminating:--

'A woman with six children, who sought advice at Acton, said that so as to get a flat she told the landlord that she had only three.

'He accepted her deposit, and allowed her to enter the flat, but on learning of the other three children, ordered her to leave, and would not take her rent. He described her as a trespasser, and threatened to eject her unless she left.

'"If I had told him the truth," said the woman, "he would not have taken me. As soon as I say I have six children, people will not listen any longer."

'The magistrate told applicant that she must make arrangements to leave.'

Micah iii. 10.

THE LORD OF THE SLUM

He stood at the corner of a terrace that opens off the steep street that leads from the heart of the high-perched city right down to the sea. With his right hand he gripped the paling, while he swayed gently from side to side. A big, burly, swarthy man with a close-cropped black beard, he sawed the air with his left hand, while he glanced with bleared eyes down the street. From the bottom of the steep a car came lumbering up, and a gleam of intelligence came into his eyes. He let go his hold on the paling, and made for the tram lines. He plainly wanted to board the car, but his feet moved in contrary directions, and on the pavement he described an arc. And he lurched back on the paling, gripping it this time with both hands, while the car with its freight of passengers went clanking past up the steep. There, with helpless limbs, with his head bowed on his breast, he held on to the paling, while the sunlight flooded the firth with molten silver--the product of an ancient civilisation and a thousand years of Christianity. In that remote era which ended in August 1914 we would have passed him there without so much as a feeling of surprise. But to-day we are as a man awakened from heavy slumber, stung by a sudden dart to a new realisation. And we saw not that one solitary man sunk in his sodden degradation, but the multitude which he represents, that multitude whose drunkenness means destruction to their brothers wrestling in the trenches with an unbeaten and ruthless foe. Two years ago the call went ringing through the Empire, and from the far North-West to the long wash of Australasian seas an indomitable race arose to war for the right. Statesmen and preachers summoned them to a holy war, and they came with transfigured eyes. But, alas! a holy war can only be waged by a holy nation. And as the eyes gaze at that figure swaying on the paling, and on the mind there flashes the realisation of what lies behind him, the heart can but cry in deepest awe: May God have mercy upon us!

There can come no moral resurrection for any except to those who realise the evil of which they are partakers. It is not in the spirit of Pharisaic censoriousness that we must judge that brawny workman swaying on the paling, and all that he represents. For these men are what we made them. It is the nation in its corporate capacity that shaped and moulded these lives after that pattern. If we had set ourselves expressly to produce this result, we could not have taken a surer way of attaining the end. We drove the people into the congested and foul tenements of narrow streets. Let the well-to-do classes try to realise the conditions of life to which men such as this have been doomed. Let them picture to themselves what life can be like in a one-roomed or two-roomed house in a crowded barracks. Imagine a man and wife with an infant and two or more children, and often a lodger, living in such a house. For them there is no change of air either day or night; their bodies cannot be cleaned nor their clothes washed; they are denied cleanliness in their whole environment; it is impossible to cook appetising food or to serve it in a pleasing manner; there is no escape for them from noise and squalor; they have no privacy either living or dying; and there is always the spectre of want hovering near. What recompense has the State provided for them in their misery? What provision has been made that men and women may escape for a little to breathe a purer air and feel that they have part in a life richer than this? The State has not been wholly unmindful of them. It has provided for them the public-house, and, with paternal care, has multiplied these places of recreation and happiness where the mass of human misery is greatest. The State has been lavish in its provision. In the Cowgate of Edinburgh it has provided one public-house for every 200 of the population, though in the leisured and rich districts there is only one licence for every 1300 of the population; in the Cowcaddens of Glasgow it has provided at the rate of thirty public-houses to the half-mile. It surrounds the poor and the miserable with an atmosphere reeking with alcohol. The trade in alcohol enfeebles the will, saps the resisting power, and then trades upon that enfeebled will. This is the door of escape from misery which the State provides. Who can blame the people for availing themselves of this national remedy for their woe pressed upon them by the State at every corner? If the drunkenness of masses of the population be a national weakness and a crying scandal, it is not their fault. It is the State that is responsible, and as citizens of the State we have each to bear our share of the responsibility and of the shame. It is no use decrying publicans and brewers, for these are only what we ourselves made them. Let us take ourselves to task and condemn our own folly and our own sin.

It was not enough that we provided the narcotic of drunkenness for the man, but we set ourselves to alleviate also the lot of the woman. There was a pressure of public opinion which prevented respectable women from frequenting public-houses. Provision had to be made for them. This provision was made in the legislation of Mr. Gladstone in 1860 and 1861 whereby grocers were licensed to sell alcohol. It is only fair to say that the purpose of the legislation was not to encourage the consumption of alcohol. In those days people were obsessed with the idea that by multiplying the opportunities for procuring alcohol, its consumption would decrease! The grocer's licence was to safeguard people from the public-house! The result has been the most disastrous of any legislation passed by sane statesmen. It enabled women to obtain alcohol in a respectable manner, sanctioned both by legislation and society, and to use it under conditions of privacy, unhampered by any restraint. The State enormously increased the facilities for drunkenness and strengthened the forces of temptation by the multiplying of tens of thousands of liquor-selling establishments. To these temptations the women in ever-increasing numbers succumbed. When war broke out, and the men mustered to the defence of their country, the women were left the comfort of alcohol. The result was an increase in the drunkenness of women, and a corresponding increase in child mortality.

Who can blame these women? With their husbands and sons summoned to wrestle with death, what wonder that 'feelings of faintness' overtook them, and that for those feelings they resorted to the only unfailing remedy they knew--alcohol! These women live their lives under conditions which make it impossible for them ever to be well. They climb up and down weary stairs endlessly. There is no escape from hopeless toil. The unhealthy conditions of life render them chronic invalids. In the grocer's shop the State provides for them the panacea. Here is exhilaration amid the worries of their drab existence, and escape from the anxieties which oppressed them. And in a little while they are slaves to the national remedy provided for them. Their husbands often come back on leave to find their homes ruined--the larder empty, the fire dying for lack of fuel, the children unkempt and ill-nourished. In many districts the allowances made by the State to the dependants of its fighting men were but a further State-endowment of the publican. It was for this that our soldiers bared their breasts to the foe and looked death in the face. This was the reward of their sacrifice, the guerdon of their wounds. In their absence the State provided for their wives the solace and stay of alcohol; but the State heeded not the fact that by so doing it ruined the home and destroyed the children. If there be condemnation, let the State be condemned; and from that condemnation for us, as its citizens, there can be no escape.

When we consider the results of the trade in alcohol, the wonder grows how it is that this State-regulated monopoly for the manufacturing of paupers, lunatics, and criminals has been suffered to continue so long. To it most of the evils which afflict the body-politic can be traced. It nullifies all efforts at social improvement. Philanthropic movements have poured out money like water to improve the condition of the people, but faster than slums can be cleared away or emptied, new slums are created and filled by the victims of alcohol. The funds of Guardians and of Parish Councils are mainly used to support those whom alcohol has impoverished. There is the authority of Mr. John Burns, the late President of the Local Government Board, for the statement that out of 100,000 applicants for poor relief at Wandsworth during a period of twenty years, only twelve were abstainers.... It not only fills our workhouses, it also crowds our jails. According to the late Lord Alverstone nine-tenths of the crime of this country was due to drink.... Insanity finds in it a fruitful source. Twenty per cent. of all the men and ten per cent. of all the women in a London County Council asylum--the Claybury Asylum--have become insane through alcohol.... The social evil is mainly due to alcohol. Under its influence women descend to vice. Half the infections of the social disease are traceable to the weakening of the will power by drink.... Evil though it be in itself, its evil goes far beyond itself, for it is the short-cut to all the other vices.... It is one of the great causes of the decline of the race in thus polluting the springs of life, poisoning and sterilising them; but, far more, it is responsible for an enormous share of the appalling infant mortality which destroys in many districts a fifth of the child life in the first year.... It lowers the vitality and makes the tissues more susceptible to attacks by the germs of disease, and thus greatly increases the deathrate.... It multiplies coffins and empties cradles.... Were this one monopoly abolished and the people delivered from the State-licensed temptations which are for ever inviting them to their ruin, almost all workhouses and jails would be closed and the nation delivered from the burden of pauperism and crime which weighs so heavily upon it. Yet the nation in the time of its greatest peril spends ?180,000,000 a year upon the drink-traffic. This is the price which it pays for the lowering of its own vitality and for the weakening of its striking power. A government which connives at that cannot be a government that is waging war really in earnest. Shipping, food, coals, the railways, roads, and a host of men are in great measure sacrificed to a trade which weakens the nation in face of the enemy.

The favourite argument in support of the liquor trade is the argument that upholds the liberty of the subject. In a free country people must be free to destroy themselves if they so wish, that others may be free to use alcohol without abusing it. If we are to aim at freedom, let us have a freedom worth while. At present the nation is not free to control or eliminate the greatest peril in our midst. We are entrusted with the administration of our schools and roads and gas and poor-rates, and we elect men who control these. But we elect nobody who controls alcohol. We have as citizens no say as to whether the grocer in the village will get a licence to corrupt our family life with alcohol, or whether the poor places be crowded with public-houses. That is in the hands of justices, and justices are created by a mysterious power behind politics. In a free country this power of planting down places for the sale of alcohol independently of the will of the people is an anachronism by which the poor are enslaved. When we speak of freedom let us consider this freedom--freedom for the children of the poor to grow up untempted. Let us remember that the race has now to depend mainly upon the poor for its continuation and for its virility. A nation that will doom the rising generation to the atmosphere of gin and whisky round its cradles, seals its own doom. The children brought up in its atmosphere will deem alcohol not only inevitable but also desirable. They will be 'happy in the mire because they are not conscious of the slough.' The true liberty of the subject cannot mean racial destruction.... Recently a woman in a mean street in London went to the public-house with a sick baby in her arms. 'While she was there it died, but she stayed on drinking and holding the dead baby.' That dead baby in the arms of its alcoholic mother in a public-house visualises the grim and terrible situation. It is the personification of all the millions of baby lives throttled to death by alcohol--of a race sinking to decay in its grasp.

We must not, however, forget that the Government of this country, while the manhood of the race was perishing abroad, were not wholly indifferent to the welfare of childhood at home. When they found that ship-repairing and shipbuilding and the production of munitions were hampered and delayed by drunkenness, they adopted restrictions of various kinds. But in most cases these restrictions were worse than useless. The Government surrendered its powers in the matter of the greatest evil afflicting the nation, to a Board of Control. That authority meant well. It sought to limit the consumption of alcohol by limiting the hours of its sale. This Board forgot that a man can in five minutes buy enough whisky to keep him comfortably alcoholic for five months. To shut the public-house for certain hours meant for many the laying in of a store of whisky when formerly a few nips sufficed. But no regulations made by man since the day of the Bourbons equalled in sheer fatuity the decree that a man who wanted a gill of whisky could not get it unless he bought a quart? With a wage that passed his rosiest dreams, to secure the gill he of course bought the quart. No wonder the consumption of alcohol increased to ?181,959,000 in 1915, as compared to ?164,453,000 in 1914. This was the fruit of a policy which aimed at producing sobriety.

But there are some good results claimed by the Board of Control. The number of convictions for drunkenness decreased! But what was the price paid for this improvement in our streets? It was the greater corruption of the home. The drinking was driven out of the public-house into the house; the drunkard no longer offended the public gaze in the street, he carried his vice and degradation into the bosom of his family. Formerly his drunkenness was limited by certain hours; now his drunkenness was continuous while his store lasted. And he took care it lasted. If the streets were partially cleansed, the children were impregnated as never before by the atmosphere of alcohol, and the women were taught to share in the drunken orgy. To-day the claim is made that, at last, the consumption of alcohol is on the decline. When four millions of men are with the colours, fighting across the seas, it would be indeed marvellous if there was not a decline in the sale of alcohol at home!

If some of the steps taken by the Central Control Board cannot commend themselves to temperance reformers, there have been other policies initiated by them which are undoubtedly in the right direction. The prohibition of the sale of ardent spirits within certain areas has inaugurated a new and beneficial national policy. The time may not be yet come for a total prohibition of alcohol throughout the country. Those who know anything of the intolerable conditions under which men and women live in the crowded, noisome tenements of our great cities, realise that these people must have some way of escape from their miserable environment. Total prohibition is the ideal to be kept steadily in view, but before that ideal can be realised the people must be prepared for it. The only way to prepare for the ideal is by a reconstruction of the social order. New and sanitary housing for the poor must precede the policy of total prohibition. But the time is fully ripe for a prohibition of ardent spirits during the war and during the period of demobilisation. And it is on this policy that the Board have launched forth. In the district of Annan and in wide stretches of the north of Scotland the sale of spirits is now prohibited. In a recent visit paid to the Hebrides, I found among the people a spirit of thankfulness that they have at last been delivered from a great evil. Drunkenness has vanished among them. A new era of prosperity has been inaugurated.

This policy, which has been made effective in the places where it has been put in force, ought to be at once applied generally. It is grotesque to endeavour to promote sobriety in patches, shut in by geographical boundaries. It has not been applied in the places which need it most. In the common lodging-houses and farmed-out houses of the Grassmarket and West Port of Edinburgh there were found, by a recent census, a population of 1383 persons of whom 518 were engaged in war-work, It is futile to expect that these workers, living in an atmosphere reeking with alcohol, can render the State the best service they are capable of. And to these places come, every week-end, workers from the naval base and soldiers on leave. And these workers and these soldiers pass their brief holiday in that alcoholic atmosphere. The result can only be deleterious to them and to the State.

There are more sailors and soldiers to be found in the poor places of Edinburgh and Glasgow than in all the villages of the West of Scotland put together. Why should the few be protected from the sale of ardent spirits and the many left to be victims of temptation? There is only one remedy--the general application to the country of that policy which is now restricted to favoured areas. There must be equal treatment for the whole country and an equal chance given to all who are serving the State.

The time to make that policy effective is now. While the nation is in the midst of the great conflict for its existence, the people will gladly welcome any restrictions which will strengthen the State in its hour of need. The heart of the nation is prepared for sacrifice. But when the danger is passed, the mood will change. It will not be so easy then to make drastic changes in the habits of the people. And the time when restrictions will be most necessary will be when the army is demobilised. If restrictions are not imposed now, it will be impossible to impose them then.

There is a growing feeling that the quickest road to the desired end may be found in the nationalisation of the liquor trade. Many would shrink from this policy if they thought that the State would become a permanent species of glorified publican. But the end in view is the transformation of the liquor trade. Only the State can achieve that. The State, with full control, can make the public-houses centres of recreation, with the temptation of spirits removed. And the way will be clear for mending or ending, as experience will prove which is the better policy. The true reformer will care far more for the reform than for the means by which it is to be achieved. If the reform can best be realised through State-ownership, then the sooner it comes the better.

If the remedy for the evils wrought by drunkenness does not, and cannot, lie along the road of supplying more facilities for the sale of alcohol, we must at the same time never forget that the craving for alcohol is a craving for a fuller life--for life lit up by colour and social joy. Those who meet that hunger for a richer life with nothing but a dreary 'don't,' with no remedy save that of the surgical operation, expose themselves to jibes such as that bitter jibe of Lord Macaulay: 'The Puritans objected to bear-baiting not because of cruelty to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.' The aim of the social reformer must be the substitution of true joy and happiness for what is spurious. The State must make provision for the social instincts of the masses. 'What are wanted,' writes Sir Thomas P. Whittaker, a member of the Royal Commission on Licensing, 'are places of the nature of free clubs, where men may sit and smoke and talk and play games or read the papers. They should be open to the public free, with small charges for the use of cards and the billiard-tables.... People should be made to feel as much at their ease in them as they are in our public parks. The cost of maintaining such places would not be great, and the social, material, and moral advantages that would result would render them an excellent investment....' It is along this road deliverance must be sought. There is no use sweeping out the house unless the house is to be occupied by fairer and more wholesome tenants than those expelled.

There is one last serious aspect of this problem wherewith the spiritual forces of the nation are faced, and that is the weakening of the nation's soul which the new policy has entailed. Whosoever considers the manner in which religion has lost its grip on the masses, the passing away of all discipline, the decay of idealism, and the slow but steady emptying of the churches, cannot but feel that the greatest need of to-day is a revival of religion. Unless the soul controls the body, man atrophies and perishes. The Church for many centuries has striven to garrison the nation's soul, and to bring the body under discipline. But the Church no longer can bring its power into play, for the churches are left deserted more or less. The proportion of the industrial population who never enter a church's door is vastly greater than is commonly supposed. Professor Cairns, a careful and judicious observer, who would make no statement that could not be verified, has declared that three out of five soldiers at the front have had no connection with the Church. The toilers of our cities are rapidly relapsing into that paganism out of which Christianity rescued the world at the first. What the world needs is God. It is only when the face of God is unveiled to the awe-filled eyes of men that they can realise the foulness of moral degradation. In the light of that holiness which marshals all the forces in the universe to war against sin, and in that light alone, does the soul realise the awfulness of sin. When that realisation comes, then the history of the world becomes mainly the history of sin--that dread power which saps the vitality of nations, disintegrates empires, ruins civilisations, and which brings upon proud capital cities the flaming judgment of sword and fire. The function of the prophet is to keep clear before the eyes of men the moral issues which are laden with life or death. The mission of the Church is to replace the spurious and fleeting joys of sin by the true and enduring joy of a life in unison with God.

But the State renders the Church impotent and makes the revival of religion in our day impossible. That may seem exaggerated, but it is true. For the State has driven alcohol into the homes, and has consigned not only the husband, but often the wife also, to the degrading influence of alcohol not only on Saturday but on Sunday. In vain does the call to return to God sound in the ears of a population sunk in the torpor of alcohol. No prophet can rouse such a people. 'If a man, walking in a spirit of falsehood, do lie, saying, "I will prophesy unto thee of wine and of strong drink, he shall even be the prophet of this people."' The Church is powerless against thirty public-houses to the half-mile! Alcohol bars the door against every movement for the social and spiritual uplift of the nation. If the nation is to be saved, the nation must act. Arise, O Israel!

We must look at our population in a new light and see them not as makers of munitions but as sons of God. The horribly cynical attitude of our rulers is that which regards men merely as munition-makers. They survey them only from the low ground of self-interest. It is not in relation to the peril of the hour that this problem has to be faced, but in relation to man's high calling as the son of God. These men and women are our brothers and sisters, bearing the image of God, and created to be heirs of an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled. Can we go on working their ruin, damning them body and soul? A race that will not cleanse the fountains of its national life, that will not remove from its midst the forces of degeneration, that shrinks from that moral surgery which will alone save the body-politic--such a race cannot hope to go on swaying the destinies of the world. But this is our confidence, that through the horrors of war the nation will waken to the deep issues of life and death, and that the forces of moral and social renewal will advance a hundred years in one day. We can hear the marshalling of the forces in our midst which will transform and enrich the nation. There is arising the cry of the coming victory:

'The King shall follow Christ, and we the King.'

'Let me give a personal experience of one of the multitude of family tragedies directly due to drink which come under my notice. A family of eight persons--four of them adults--occupied a single room in a slum area.

'The eldest son, aged twenty-one years, was in the last stage of consumption, and occupied the only bed in the room. On visiting the house one morning, I found the lad lying on the floor, in a corner. He had required to vacate the bed for his mother, and during the night there had been born into these surroundings another of those immortal souls who, in the words of Kingsley, "are damned from their birth."

'The following day the mother was sitting at the fireside, and was never back in bed till the son died some days later. It is hardly necessary to add that the mother, the infant, and another girl followed him at short intervals. On the day of the mother's funeral the husband got drunk and had to be locked up--the twentieth-century method of remedying evils of this kind.'

The distribution of licences in our cities is a crying evil. The following are examples of the provision made in the wards of Edinburgh:--

Number of Population to Ward. Population. Licences. each Licence

Morningside 24,320 18 1351 Merchiston 24,436 21 1163 St. Giles' 24,277 118 205 St. Andrew's 11,166 87 128

In proportion to the poverty and misery of the population are the licences increased. In the Cowgate of Edinburgh there are 12 licences, and in the Canongate, 19. The same proportion applies to all our cities.

Micah ii. 11.

THE GREAT REFUSAL

It is only as yet possible to surmise as to the forces which led to the great refusal. The nation, with the almost unanimous voice of its wisest and best citizens, had called for the deliverance of the people from alcohol by its total prohibition. Employers of labour, who had no sympathy originally for the prohibition movement, were converted to it by the spectacle of the nation's marshalling of its forces being steadily hampered by drunkenness. The leaders of all the Churches pressed for it; the Press began to plead for it; Mr. Lloyd-George openly declared that 'drink is doing us more damage than all the German submarines put together'; and there is no doubt but that the King and Lord Kitchener expected that their example would give an impetus which would carry prohibition to victory. But the House of Commons shattered that hope. The forces of reaction immediately began to raise their head, and to the tables of the home and the mess alcohol slowly returned to resume its fell sway. The nation that had braced itself for social surgery was presented with soothing medicine in the form of the Central Control Board.

Though it is impossible to assign causes to these effects with certitude, yet it is safe to say that this failure was the fruit of the party system. We have seen how the play of political parties one against the other devastated the countryside. The party politicians think primarily of votes, and anything that would cost them votes is banned. They knew in what peril the nation stood before the war, but they did not summon the nation to prepare for war and endure hardness. That would have been unpopular--and would have cost votes. They kept the nation in ignorance of its peril, and cowered before the people whom they kept in the dark, terrified to use firmness lest the firm hand on the reins should mean their unseating. They went further: when Lord Roberts warned the State in prophetic terms, they held him up to derision. The greatest calamity that ever befell the human race we owe to the party politicians.

Behind the party politician there is the caucus, and behind the caucus the party funds. The power of money is proverbial, and behind the party politician is the exchequer supplied by his supporters. That exchequer is replenished by the sale of honours. When Oleander, a Phrygian and erstwhile slave, was the minister of the Emperor Commodus, Rome saw the woeful spectacle of the rank of Consul, of Patrician and of Senator exposed to public sale. We hold the decencies of life in too high regard to do that. Secretly and decorously our senatorships and the ancient orders of our knighthood are assigned. At one end of the social scale national degeneracy makes the trader in alcohol a plutocrat; at the other end the same national degeneracy makes him a legislator and a pseudo-aristocrat. The alcoholic trade was too wise to be on terms of friendship with one party alone; it sought relationship with all. Nobody can object to the man who pays the piper calling the tune. In Ireland the publican is even a greater power in politics than he is in England. And the power behind the politicians brought all its forces into play. When, in 1887, Lord Iddesleigh, superseded at last, fell dead in Lord Salisbury's waiting-room, the latter, writing to Lord Randolph Churchill, exclaimed, 'As I looked upon the dead man before me I felt that politics was a cursed profession.' And Lord Salisbury knew.

The party politician, even in the maelstrom of a world's devastation, pursued his familiar course. Before the war he failed to warn the nation and to prepare. In the midst of the war he still strove to keep the nation in the dark. After months of calamities the nation was told that all was going well, and the people were obsessed with the idea that final victory was at hand. If the people only knew their peril they would have made any sacrifice for their country and their homes. But they were not told. And the party politician shrank from demanding or enforcing a sacrifice which the nation did not realise to be necessary because of its ignorance. The policy of pusillanimity pursued before the war was still regnant. The politicians who shrank from demanding sacrifice in peace, shrank from demanding it in war. They did not know the heart of the nation. There was no sacrifice the nation would have shrunk from, if the demand were made. The nation knew that it needed discipline, and it asked for discipline, but asked in vain. And to-day the same pusillanimous policy sacrifices prohibition to the fear that the munition-workers might give trouble. They knew not, and they know not, the heart of this nation. But the fact remains that to-day the nation is spending 180 millions or so a year on alcohol, while the Government calls on the people to exercise the greatest economy that the war may be waged to the end. It is a sad and strange spectacle.

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