Let me conclude with a personal experience. On a car in one of our great cities in this last summer, a man sitting beside me began a conversation. Though he was a stranger to me, he began to speak out of a heart sore distressed. His son had been home on leave. 'Every night he was at home he was under the influence of drink. Before he enlisted he did not know the taste of alcohol.... When he went away back, he was drunk leaving the station.... A few days later word came that he was killed.... The last we saw of him was his going away drunk.... His mother is in sore distress.... She is old-fashioned in her faith and she cannot get out of her mind the words that drunkards cannot enter the kingdom of God. What do you say?' Thus he spoke in disjointed sentences, palpitating with emotion. All I could say was that hell was not for such as his son, in my {148} opinion; but that hell was essential for the due disciplining of those who maintained the conditions which made his son a drunkard. But how many are there to-day in this country like that poor father and mother? They gave their all: this is their reward. [1] Lieut.-Colonel Woodhead, M.D., LL.D, _The Drink Problem_, p. 79. [2] Lieut.-Colonel Woodhead, M.D., LL.D., _The Drink Problem_, p. 81. [3] A correspondent in _The Times_, April 22, 1916. [4] _Ibid._ {149} CHAPTER VII THE SLUM IN THE MAN The misery which the slow evolution of urban and industrial civilisation has wrought in the crowded areas of our cities is manifest to the least observant eye. The pitiful condition of the man in the slum makes its clamorous appeal to the conscience of the race. But there is a condition even more pitiful. It is that of many of the dwellers in the spacious squares and terraces where the rich and the leisured are segregated. They are far removed from the slum where the miserable are massed; but they have created a slum in their own souls. And of the two, the condition of him whose soul is a slum is truly the more grievous. {150} I They have everything that life can desire of material good. These houses stretching for miles in their regular uniformity are replete with appliances of luxury and comfort such as a Roman emperor might have sighed for in vain; every desire of their heart they have the power and the will to gratify;--and yet life is dreary. The people that ought to be supremely happy are on the whole miserable. They have reduced life to a series of sensations. But the dread spectre of satiety dogs the footsteps of the devotees of sense. If they were mere animals they would be perfectly happy. Their misery is that they are endowed with souls. And the starved soul will not let them rest.