save him alive,
body, intellect, and character, at any cost; because men will see that a
man is, after all, the most precious and useful thing on the earth, and
that no cost spent on the development of human beings can possibly be
thrown away.

I appeal, then, to you, the commercial men of Liverpool, if there are any
such in this congregation. If not, I appeal to their wives and
daughters, who are kept in wealth, luxury, refinement, by the honourable
labours of their husbands, fathers, brothers, on behalf of this human
soot. Merchants are (and I believe that they deserve to be) the leaders
of the great caravan, which goes forth to replenish the earth and subdue
it. They are among the generals of the great army which wages war
against the brute powers of nature all over the world, to ward off
poverty and starvation from the ever-teeming millions of mankind. Have
they no time--I take for granted that they have the heart--to pick up the
footsore and weary, who have fallen out of the march, that they may
rejoin the caravan, and be of use once more? Have they no time--I am
sure they have the heart--to tend the wounded and the fever-stricken,
that they may rise and fight once more? If not, then must not the pace
of their march be somewhat too rapid, the plan of their campaign somewhat
precipitate and ill-directed, their ambulance train and their medical
arrangements somewhat defective? We are all ready enough to complain of
waste of human bodies, brought about by such defects in the British army.
Shall we pass over the waste, the hereditary waste of human souls,
brought about by similar defects in every great city in the world?

Waste of human souls, human intellects, human characters--waste, saddest
of all, of the image of God in little children. That cannot be
necessary. There must be a fault somewhere. It cannot be the will of
God that one little one should perish by commerce, or by manufacture, any
more than by slavery, or by war.

As surely as I believe that there is a God, so surely do I believe that
commerce is the ordinance of God; that the great army of producers and
distributors is God's army. But for that very reason I must believe that
the production of human refuse, the waste of human character, is not part
of God's plan; not according to His ideal of what our social state should
be; and therefore what our social state can be. For God asks no
impossibilities of any