is the most insidious destroyer of moral
character which the world has ever known. The man who once accepts it,
even in extremes, imbibes a poison from which his system can never be
thoroughly cleansed. You let him loose upon society, and the evil which
you have sown in him spreads. He is like a man with an infectious
disease. He is a source of evil to the community. You have relieved a
physical want, and you have destroyed a moral quality. I do not need to
point out to you that the balance is on the wrong side."

Sybil glanced across at Brooks, and he smiled back at her.

"Lord Arranmore has not finished yet," he said. "Let us hear the
worst."

Their host smiled.

"After all," he said, "why do I waste my breath? From the teens to the
thirties sentiment smiles. It is only later on in life that reason has
any show at all. Yet you should ask yourselves, you eager self-denying
young people, who go about with a healthy moral glow inside because you
have fed the poor, or given an hour or so of your time to the
distribution of reckless charity-you should ask yourselves: What is the
actual good of ministering to the outward signs of an internal disease?
You are simply trying to renovate the outside when the inside is filthy.
Don't you see, my dear young people, that to give a meal to one starving
man may be to do him indeed good, but it does nothing towards
preventing another starving man from taking his place to-morrow. You
stimulate the disease, you help it to spread. Don't you see where
instead you should turn--to the social laws, the outcome of which is
that starving man? You let them remain unharmed, untouched, while you
fall over one another in frantic efforts to brush away to-day's effect
of an eternal cause. Let your starving man die, let the bones break
through his skin and carry him up--him and his wife and their children,
and their fellows--to your House of Commons. Tell them that there are
more to-morrow, more the next day, let the millions of the lower classes
look this thing in the face. I tell you that either by a revolution,
which no doubt some of us would find worse than inconvenient, or by less
drastic means, the thing would right itself. You, who work to relieve
the individual, only postpone and delay the millennium. People will
keep their eyes closed as long as they can. It is you who help them to
do so."

"Dinner is served, my lord," the butler announced.

Lord Arranmore extended his arm to Lady Ca