You have met Sin, the degradation which comes of selfishness. In West London it often hides under fine trappings. Culture covers a multitude of sins. In the exquisitively ordered banquet intemperance and self-indulgence are unnoticed; in the phraseology of the office greed and selfishness pass as political economy; and in the polished talk of books and of society impurity loses its true colour. You, though, are familiar with East London, and here you see sin without its trappings; you know that intemperance--over-eating and over-drinking--means a brutalised nature; you know that greed is cruelty, and that impurity is destructive both of reason and of feeling. You have seen the victims of sin, that drunkard’s home, the gambler’s hell, and the sweater’s shop. You know that the wages of sin is death, and that no culture can give to Mammon any nobility or warm his heart with any spark of unselfish joy. Poverty, Ignorance, Sin--these threaten the city. Your common longing is to avert its doom. Our fathers nourished a like longing. They hoped in Free Trade, the Suffrage, the National Education, and they have been disappointed. Free Trade has, indeed, greatly increased wealth; the number of the comfortable has been multiplied, but it is a question whether, in the same proportion, the number of the uncomfortable has not also been multiplied. Our England is larger than the England of fifty years ago, but a larger body--like a giraffe’s throat--may only provide a larger space for pain! At any rate, Free Trade, which has given us cheap bread, has _not_ solved the problem of the unemployed. The extension of the Suffrage, again, for which our fathers strove, has had good results; but the example of later parliaments and the growing tendency to legislate by demonstration hardly justifies their hopes. Our fathers held that the possession of the Suffrage would be effective to destroy Ignorance; they thought that responsibility would develop the seriousness which is necessary to knowledge. They--like other good men who need God’s forgiveness--fed Ignorance with abuse of opponents; with exaggerations, with party cries, they bribed Ignorance to establish its own executioner; and now Ignorance is too much puffed up by flattery, too much enriched by bribes, to yield to the voice which from the register and polling booth says, ‘England expects every man’ to vote according to his conscience, and then to submit to the common will.