yielded an
average of 1s. 9d. per week spent on drink.

So, too, in the cases brought to the notice of the Lords' Committee,
drink and personal vices do not play the most important part. The Rev.
S. A. Barnett, who knows East London so well, does not find the origin
of poverty in the vices of the poor. Terrible as are the results of
drunkenness, impurity, unthrift, idleness, disregard of sanitary rules,
it is not possible, looking fairly at the facts, to regard these as the
main sources of poverty. If we are not carried away by the spirit of
some special fanaticism, we shall look upon these evils as the natural
and necessary accessories of the struggle for a livelihood, carried on
under the industrial conditions of our age and country. Even supposing
it were demonstrable that a much larger proportion of the cases of
poverty and misery were the direct consequence of these moral and
sanitary vices of the poor, we should not be justified in concluding
that moral influence and education were the most effectual cures,
capable of direct application. It is indeed highly probable that the
"unemployed" worker is on the average morally and industrially inferior
to the "employed," and from the individual point of view this
inferiority is often responsible for his non-employment. But this only
means that differences of moral and industrial character determine what
particular individuals shall succeed or fail in the fight for work and
wages. It by no means follows that if by education we could improve all
these moral and industrial weaklings they could obtain steady employment
without displacing others. Where an over-supply of labour exists, no
remedy which does not operate either by restricting the supply or
increasing the demand for labour can be effectual.

Sec. 3. Civilization ascends from Material to Moral.--The life of the
poorest and most degraded classes is impenetrable to the highest
influences of civilization. So long as the bare struggle for continuance
of physical existence absorbs all their energies, they cannot be
civilized. The consideration of the greater intrinsic worth of the moral
life than the merely physical life, must not be allowed to mislead us.
That which has the precedence in value has not the precedence in time.
We must begin with the lower life before we can ascend to the higher. As
in the individual the _corpus sanum_ is rightly an object of earlier
solicitude in education than the _mens sana_, though t