ignorant, but within twenty years how enormously their manners to each
other have improved! And then consider their Christian thoughtlessness
for the morrow, how superb and spiritual it is! How different from the
things after which the Gentiles of the commercial classes seek! On a
Bank Holiday I have known a mother and a daughter, hanging over the very
abyss of penury, to spend two shillings in having their fortunes told.
Could the lilies of the field or Solomon in all his glory have shown a
finer indifference to worldly cares?

Mankind, as we know, in the lump is bad, but that it is not worse
remains the everlasting wonder. It is not the squalor of such a crowd
that should astonish; it is the marvel that they are not more squalid.
For, after all, what is the root cause of all this dirt and ignorance
and shabbiness and disease? It is not drink, nor thriftlessness, nor
immorality, as the philanthropists do vainly talk; still less is it
crime. It is the "inequality" of which Canon Barnett has often
written--the inequality that Matthew Arnold said made a high
civilisation impossible. But such inequality is only another name for
poverty, and from poverty we have yet to discover the saviour who will
redeem us.




X


THE GREAT UNKNOWN

There are strange regions where the monotony of ignoble streets is