a' sae a muckle to say aboot the injustice of
conditions pay few taxes. They ha' no property, as a rule, and no
great stake in the land. But they're aye ready to mak' rules and
regulations for those who've worked till they've a place in the world.
If they were busier themselves, maybe they'd not have so much time to
see how much is wrong. Have you not thought, whiles, it was strange
you'd not noticed all these terrible things they talk to you aboot?
And has it not been just that you've had too many affairs of your ain
to handle?

There are things for us all to think about, dear knows. We've come, of
late years, we were doing it too much before the war, to give too
great weight to things that were not of the spirit. Men have grown
used to more luxury than it is good for man to have. Look at our
clubs. Palaces, no less, some of them. What need has a man of a temple
or a palace for a club. What should a club be? A comfortable place, is
it no, whaur a man can go to meet his friends, and smoke a pipe,
maybe--find a bit and a sup if the wife is not at hame, and he maun be
eating dinner by his lane. Is there need of marble columns and rare
woods?

And a man's own hoose. We've been thinking lately, it seems to me, too
much of luxury, and too little of use and solid comfort. We wasted
much strength and siller before the war. Aweel, we've to pay, and to
go on paying, noo, for a lang time. We've paid the price in blood, and
for a lang time the price in siller will be kept in our minds. We'll
ha' nae choice aboot luxury, maist of us. And that'll be a rare gude
thing.

Things! Things! It's sae easy for them to rule us. We live up to them.
We act as if they owned us, and a' the time it's we who own them, and
that we maun not forget. And we grow to think that a'thing we've
become used to is something we can no do wi'oot. Oh, I'm as great a
sinner that way as any. I was forgetting, before the war came to
remind me, the days when I'd been puir and had had tae think longer
over the spending of a saxpence than I had need to in 1914, in you
days before the Kaiser turned his Huns loose, over using a hundred
poonds.

I'm not blaming a puir body for being bitter when things gae wrong.
All I'm saying is he'll be happier, and his troubles will be sooner
mended if he'll only be thinking that maybe he's got a part in them
himsel'. It's hard to get things richt when you're thinking they're a'
the fault o' some one else, some one you can't co