Then there is the drink business. Volumes have been written and thousands of sermons preached to prove how drunken and dissolute the workers are. Yet brewers and distillers through their agents and managers seek out poor districts where housing conditions are bad, and where industrial conditions keep the people poor, and in these districts erect their gaudy gin palaces, with garish light and colour, tempting the weary and weak to enter and forget their misery, their sorrow and their poverty. Is it a wonder that those who are denied the pleasure and joy of real home life fall easy victims to these allurements? It is indeed no marvel they do so; the marvel is that any resist. Yet few of the bishops or clergy of any denomination dare attack these business men and declare their trade to be an immoral one; and this is because the law has not merely allowed the trade to grow up but has also by legislation made of it a most powerful monopoly. Because of this monopoly good people have invested many, many millions of pounds in a business which sends more people to perdition than almost any other evil of our day. Whenever it is proposed to tackle this evil it is Christians who at once raise the question as to the moral right of the nation to destroy so profitable a business, once it has been established by law--even if such a business ruins the health and character of multitudes of people! There are many working people who believe that this evil is not properly tackled because those whose business it is to teach the nation its duty in a social and spiritual sense derive their incomes from this traffic, as many good people in former days opposed the abolition of slavery because of their money investments in slaves. We shall never settle this drink question till we abolish all private monopoly or private gain in the liquor trade. If there is to be a monopoly of the kind it should be a State monopoly, from which every vestige of profit-making should be taken away. There is little chance of this happening until our whole conception of the right of property is changed. There was a chance at the beginning of the war when an effort was made, but money interests were too strong, and we can all see how in Parliament a small group of determined men can keep back, and do keep back, true reform on this and many other social questions.