In fact, no belief in the whole ideology of “Democracy” is more pernicious and more crassly stupid than the belief that errors and false practices must in the end right themselves. The natural indolence of mankind in the mass very soon makes a supposed principle of this kind a popular and highly appreciated stand-by in the face of difficult problems, but it does not make it true. With the history of previous civilisations and races before us--civilisations and races which we are now convinced pursued error and false practices with the heartiest and most cheerful conviction to their ultimate doom--with the evidence of biology to hand, which shows us myriads of creatures, all the parasites in fact, having steadily descended from superior and more highly organised creatures, merely through having followed the line of least resistance, it is difficult to account for the prevalence of this utterly stupid notion that evils and errors tend to right themselves. For of this we can feel quite certain, that all those peoples and races who do in fact believe, and act on the belief, that their errors will right themselves, will suffer not only extinction in their culture and civilisation, but also ultimate evanescence in themselves. Thus, as we have seen, quite apart from the inferiority of the raw material she has to deal with, the working-class woman no longer knows the simplest rule of sound culinary science, and whatever wisdom might still have survived by pure tradition in the kitchens of the poor, has been satisfactorily suppressed by the innovations of commerce and industry. To deny that the existing food conditions have any bearing upon the spirit and therefore the temper and the outlook of the nation, is to support the doctrine that a man’s physical condition can be independent of his attitude of mind. Nobody would claim that the peculiar virulence of modern Social Unrest is entirely to be accounted for by the debility of the masses, or that this debility is entirely due to faulty nourishment; but, on the other hand, it would be obviously absurd to attempt to put an end to Social Unrest without giving very serious attention to the people’s debility, or without examining one of its chief contributory causes, which is bad food. And any legislative measure, or economic readjustment or reform which [p195] is brought about without some drastic provisions calculated to meet this important factor in the trouble, is bound to end in failure. The temperance movement is nothing more than a helpless and non-statesmanlike solution on Puritan lines of the liquor side of the food question. What is required is obviously not the abolition of fermented liquor, for that would be tantamount to depriving the people of a necessary foodstuff,[39] but such reforms in the liquor trade as will secure pure drinks to the masses of the nation.