In the course of those ten years young liberals often wondered what daily spur could be applied to imaginations and consciences which are active enough when once the spur has been applied. The work done for the relief of suffering is immense; the sums subscribed to charity are enormous; and yet by any standard they are insufficient. For want of a better postulate the reformers were agreed that it was incumbent on the state for every man and woman to be secured at least the minimum of essentials; in the search for a first principle of private conduct they would not have refused the criterion whether an act would increase or decrease, in any form or any degree, the world's total of unhappiness. To an agnostic, the value of Christian ethics lay less in the protection which they secured to the weak than in the chivalry which they demanded of the strong; and, if the mentally inert began with a test even so rudimentary as this, they might progress to a frame of mind in which a man would be pulled up short by the fear, that, whatever the gain to others, his act would cause pain to a single living creature. Pain of heart, pain of mind and pain of body are within the experience of all; the desire to escape it is older and stronger even than the desire to attain pleasure. And directly or indirectly, by implication, or expression, the most generous and humane men and women are daily adding to the world's suffering or are consenting to leave it unreduced. If the war could not inspire a consecration of life and a crusade for the extirpation of pain, what other spur can avail to rouse this somnolent collective conscience? Certain streets in every great city are thronged at certain hours with the women whom patronage calls "unfortunate" and superiority dubs "fallen"; the benevolent societies which exist to "reclaim" them succeed as well as a gardener who tries to give back its lost bloom to a rose. In misery of soul and suffering of body, every prostitute adds to the world's total of pain; but no woman can become a prostitute without the help of a man. Here is a fate from which every man would save his mother, his sister and his daughter; to a slumbering conscience, other men's sisters and daughters do not matter. III