r us. We must see to
it that we are worthy the sacrifice.

***

It seemed to me hitherto that I was a citizen of the country endowed
with the greatest freedom on earth. But the ticket-collector has
proved to me that that was a dream. Here in our parish I have no power
to control this thing that matters so vitally in the Cities of the
Plain. We have a Parish Council and a County Council, and I don't know
how many other dignified and honourable authorities, whom we elect.
But we elect nobody to control this. A body of unelected Justices, of
whom we know nothing, settle for us that down yonder in the Cities of
the Plain there shall be half a dozen State-regulated places for the
manufacturing of paupers and criminals. (The laws change with such
kaleidoscopic swiftness in those days that I may be wrong.) And here
am I, newly awakened by the ticket-collector to that enormity, and I am
not free to do anything. It is surely a mad world. We needed to be
awakened; and we have been awakened with the shriek of shells and the
crying of the perishing! And the result of the awakening will be
regeneration for the Cities of the Plain.

***

The ticket-collector has deprived me for the time being of my peace of
mind. My conversion is so recent that I am afraid of falling into the
fanaticism of the newly converted. I followed the General the other
day into the railway carriage, and as we were passing over Sodom, lying
there under our feet, I spoke to him about it. He looked at me with
cold eyes.

"Do you want to sacrifice the freedom of the individual?" he asked in
his curt military tones; "do you think that you can make saints of
people by Act of Parliament? They would be mere plaster-saints."

I was reduced to silence. My new-born zeal seemed to ooze out at every
pore. There was a touch of amused scorn in the General's eye as he
glanced at me. The General is a man of experience, and he is quite
right. Acts of Parliament will never make saints of the people. But
the State can see to it that the people are not surrounded by
temptations through the operations of Acts of Parliament; that, if the
State is impotent to make saints, it shall not, on the other hand, set
itself deliberately to make devils. That, it seems to me, is what the
State is now doing in the Cities of the Plain.

In ten thousand schools the State sanctions that its children be taught
to pray--"Lead us not into temptation," and that same State e