and out of
the straths and valleys of Scotland into sunless, airless cities. A
population that formerly lived in cottages was now piled into barracks.
In mills above ground and in mines beneath little children were set to
labour. Social conditions were created that destroyed two hundred
babies out of a thousand in the first year of life. These conditions
still continue. The pages of the Press in these last days show how
horrifying they still are. There are streets in our cities which are
sacrificial altars on which the little children are offered to the
social Moloch.... These things came after Waterloo. The cannon-fodder
of war became the cannon-fodder of industry. The small minority that
got rich quick were balanced by the vast multitude who got poor quick.
And for four generations the ugly streets have presented the spectacle
of files of men begging for work--begging for permission to exist!
To-day the files wait for the dole. The folly and the greed have
worked out the inevitable consequences. History goes on monotonously
repeating itself.

II

And just as a hundred years ago men thought they were going to make a
new and better world by reorganisation, so also is it to-day. On all
hands the cry is reorganise. In Paris and in Glasgow it is the same.
In Paris they are to save the world from all future bloodshed by a
treaty. That childlike faith in treaties!--they have forgotten that
treaties were unable to save even one fragment of Europe eight years
ago. But this time the treaty is to be so very big that it will save.
But, alas! no treaty is of value beyond the truth in the soul of its
signatories--and of that there is never a word. No treaty can exorcise
greed, ambition, and lust out of the heart--and it is from these wars
spring. If the hearts of the nations be not changed, one more mirage
will be added to the many humanity has pursued across the burning
sands, strewing the barren desert with bleached bones.

In London or Glasgow or Hamilton or Fife it is the same. There also
the new earth is to come through redistribution. Society will be
differently organised. The voice that to-day cries, 'What is yours is
mine,' will to-morrow shout victory. The day of material good will
come through the maximum of pay for the minimum of work. The new order
will banish all our ills. But the question emerges--How is the new
order to be worked? If the new order is to bless humanity it must be
guided an