least are destroyed by the social conditions which the highest
modern civilisation has created.[1] 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 {82} 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 {83} 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.'

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? {84} 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.

II