Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/ploughsharepruni00hous PLOUGHSHARE AND PRUNING-HOOK Ten Lectures on Social Subjects by LAURENCE HOUSMAN The Swarthmore Press Ltd. (formerly trading as Headley Bros. Publishers Ltd.) 72 Oxford Street, London, W1 First Printed September, 1919 PREFACE These papers, originally given as lectures, make no pretence to the solution of the social or political problems with which they are concerned. They indicate rather a certain standpoint or attitude of mind from which these and like questions may be viewed, one which may find acceptance with only a few of my readers. Even those who are friendly may consider it too idealistic; those who are adverse will employ other and harder terms. With regard to that standpoint, while not wishing to avert criticism, I would like to secure understanding; and if a few words of general application can make that more possible it may be well to offer them here. Whether these lectures were primarily intended for the pulpit or the platform it would be hard to say. Most of them have been given in both places: and their drawback to some who heard them in the former was (I have been told) their occasional tendency to make the congregation laugh. That in itself is no special recommendation; it takes so much less to make a congregation laugh than an audience. Between the pulpit and the platform there is bound to be a difference; even the fact that the preacher is normally immune from interjection or debate tends to give to his statements a complacency which is not always intellectually justified. And I remember well that two of these lectures, after having been accepted in a church with only momentary breaches of decorum, aroused elsewhere a storm of criticism and rebuke which taught me, if I did not know it before, that a preacher occupies a very privileged position, and can turn a church, if he chooses, into a place of licence which elsewhere will not be accorded him.