and when the soul was stimulated to it, then the aspiring youth
must save money, put himself to college, live on nothing, think much,
and in the course of this starvation and effort become a learned man,
with somehow a peculiar moral fibre in him not easily reproduced to-day.
For to-day the candle is free and the college is free and the student
has a "Union" like the profiteer's club and a swimming-bath and a Drama
League and a coeducational society at his elbow for which he buys Beauty
Roses at five dollars a bunch.

Or turn if one will to the moral side. The older way of being good was
by much prayer and much effort of one's own soul. Now it is done by
a Board of Censors. There is no need to fight sin by the power of the
spirit: let the Board of Censors do it. They together with three or four
kinds of Commissioners are supposed to keep sin at arm's length and to
supply a first class legislative guarantee of righteousness. As a
short cut to morality and as a way of saving individual effort our
legislatures are turning out morality legislation by the bucketful. The
legislature regulates our drink, it begins already to guard us against
the deadly cigarette, it regulates here and there the length of our
skirts, it safeguards our amusements and in two states of the American
Union it even proposes to save us from the teaching of the Darwinian
Theory of evolution. The ancient prayer "Lead us not into temptation" is
passing out of date. The way to temptation is declared closed by Act of
Parliament and by amendment to the constitution of the United States.
Yet oddly enough the moral tone of the world fails to respond. The
world is apparently more full of thugs, hold-up men, yeg-men, bandits,
motor-thieves, porch-climbers, spotters, spies and crooked policemen than
it ever was; till it almost seems that the slow, old-fashioned method of
an effort of the individual soul may be needed still before the world is
made good.

This vast new system, the system of leaning on the government, is
spreading like a blight over England and America, and everywhere we
suffer from it. Government, that in theory represents a union of effort
and a saving of force, sprawls like an octopus over the land. It has
become like a dead weight upon us. Wherever it touches industry it
cripples it. It runs railways and makes a heavy deficit: it builds ships
and loses money on them: it operates the ships and loses more money:
it piles up taxes to fill the v