until the world wakes up to the necessity of enabling work-people
to fill their leisure hours with those amusements and pleasures, of the
intellect as well as of the body, which are the reward of wealth, there
will always be a growing spirit or revolution in the world. I could
endure almost any drudgery for eight hours provided during the rest of
the day I could enjoy those things for which my spirit craved. But to do
that same drudgery, day in, day out, with nothing but a Mean Street to
come home to, nothing but a "pub" to give me social joy, while people who
appear to live entirely for enjoying themselves bespatter me with mud
from their magnificent motor-cars as they drive past me with,
metaphorically speaking, their noses in the air, I think I, too, should
turn Bolshevik, not because I would approve of Bolshevism, or even
understand what it meant, but because it would seem to give me something
to live for. Except for the appalling suffering, the death, the disease,
the sad "Good-byes" of those who loved one another, I am beginning to
realise that the world was a finer place in war time. It mingled the
classes as they have never been mingled before, for the untold benefit of
every class, it brought out that spirit of kindness and self-sacrifice
which was the most really Christian thing that the world has seen on such
a large scale since the beginning of Christianity; it seemed to give a
meaning to life, and to make even the meanest drudgery done for the Great
Cause a drudgery which lost all its soul-numbing attributes--that
horrible sense of the drudgery of drudgery which is sometimes more
terrible to contemplate than death. Religion ought to give to life some,
if not all this noble meaning. But, alas! it doesn't. I sometimes think
that only those who are persecuted for their beliefs know what real
religion is. The Established Church doesn't, anyway. The world of
workers is _demanding_ a faith, but the Church only gives it admonition,
or a charming address by a bishop on the absolute necessity of going to
church. The clergy never seem to ask themselves what the people are
going to receive in the way of rendering their daily toil more worth
while when they do go to church. But the people have answered it with
tragic definiteness. They _stay away_! Or perhaps they go to see a
football match. Well, who shall blame them, after the kind of work which
they have been forced to do during the week? I always think