Teetotal advocates will preach in vain that drunkenness is the root of all evil, and that a nation of abstainers will be either a healthy, a happy, or a thoughtful nation. Thrift will be seen to be powerless to do more than to create a smug and transient respectability, and even those who are ‘converted’ will not claim to be raised by their faith out of the reach of early death and poverty into a life which belongs to their nature as members in the human family. Theories of reform which do not touch the conditions in which the people live, which do not make possible for them fuller lives in happier circumstances, are not satisfactory. The conversion of sinners--at any rate while the sinners are sought chiefly among the poor--the emigration of children, the spread of thrift and temperance among the workpeople, will still leave families occupying single rooms and the sons of men the joyless slaves of work; a state of society for which no defence can be made. It is only a larger share of wealth which can increase comfort and relieve men from the pressure brought on them by the close atmosphere of great towns; which can, in a word, give to all the results of thought and open to all the life which is possible. If it be that the return for fair land laid waste by mines and engines is wider knowledge of men and things, it is only the rich who now enjoy this return and it is only wealth which can make it common. And since any distribution of wealth in the shape of money relief would be fatal to the independence of the people, the one satisfactory method of social reform is that which tends to make more common the good things which wealth has gained for the few. The nationalisation of luxury must be the object of social reformers.