202.

[4] Micah iii. 10.

{97}

CHAPTER V

THE LORD OF THE SLUM

He stood at the corner of a terrace that opens off the steep street
that leads from the heart of the high-perched city right down to the
sea. With his right hand he gripped the paling, while he swayed gently
from side to side. A big, burly, swarthy man with a close-cropped
black beard, he sawed the air with his left hand, while he glanced with
bleared eyes down the street. From the bottom of the steep a car came
lumbering up, and a gleam of intelligence came into his eyes. He let
go his hold on the paling, and made for the tram lines. He plainly
wanted to board the car, but his feet moved in contrary directions, and
on the pavement he described an arc. And he {98} lurched back on the
paling, gripping it this time with both hands, while the car with its
freight of passengers went clanking past up the steep. There, with
helpless limbs, with his head bowed on his breast, he held on to the
paling, while the sunlight flooded the firth with molten silver--the
product of an ancient civilisation and a thousand years of
Christianity. In that remote era which ended in August 1914 we would
have passed him there without so much as a feeling of surprise. But
to-day we are as a man awakened from heavy slumber, stung by a sudden
dart to a new realisation. And we saw not that one solitary man sunk
in his sodden degradation, but the multitude which he represents, that
multitude whose drunkenness means destruction to their brothers
wrestling in the trenches with an unbeaten and ruthless foe. Two years
ago the call went ringing through the Empire, and from the far
North-West to the long wash of Australasian seas {99} an indomitable
race arose to war for the right. Statesmen and preachers summoned them
to a holy war, and they came with transfigured eyes. But, alas! a holy
war can only be waged by a holy nation. And as the eyes gaze at that
figure swaying on the paling, and on the mind there flashes the
realisation of what lies behind him, the heart can but cry in deepest
awe: May God have mercy upon us!

I

There can come no moral resurrection for any except to those who
realise the evil of which they are partakers. It is not in the spirit
of Pharisaic censoriousness that we must judge that brawny workman
swaying on the paling, and all that he represents. For these men are
what we made them. It is the nation in its corporate capacity that