dim. That night I was seen in many places, searching the blackness

of railway arches, furtively peering down the staircases of tubes, hoping to discover the worst; I appeared in the deserted City; the back streets of Theobald’s Road, the confidences of a hall porter in Gerrard Street (expensive and uneventful), a long inspection of the first floor fronts of Vauxhall Bridge Road, seen from the top of a tram, all these grew familiar to me; and still nothing. As time went on, my legs grew more and more woolly; my mind so obsessed and incoherent, that I realised time would soon fit me for membership of the National Vigilance Society. I even entered the Leicester Lounge, where there was hardly anybody, as it was not Boat Race night; then I wondered whether a visit to North Bank, St John’s Wood ... and awoke from my trance, remembering that this would be thirty years late. There is no vice in London; at least, there is nothing deliberate and artistic, just as there is very little in Paris or Vienna that would justify a Welsh elder in taking so long a journey. It is a pity that so fair a bubble should be pricked.

This does not mean that London is a magnified Exeter Hall. There are, in this town, about half a million bachelors, and that is enough to lower the moral status of any city. There are also rather more married men, which does not mend matters. Observe the bias of my mind: I have forgotten to tell you the number, frequently quoted by indignant letter writers to the Press, of women who hold forth temptation. For it may be true that supply assists demand, but it is much more certain that demand makes supply. During the war, for instance, there was great agitation in the Upper House of Convocation, where the Bishop of London revealed that in Cayeux and Havre undesirable houses were frequented by British troops. Canon Burroughs went on to ask for purity patrols, while the Bishop of Oxford presented a resolution designed to protect our troops from molestation in London. This is all very well, and deserves all sympathy, but the Bishop of London unfortunately read out a protest addressed to the Mayor of the French town by its inhabitants, and this protest referred to ‘crowds of English soldiers waiting outside the houses.’ Does one, then, wait for temptation? Does not temptation steal upon one as a thief in the night, or as a raging lion, seeking whom it may devour? It is a picturesque idea this, of crowds of innocent victims impatiently waiting for an opportunity to degrade their eternal spirit.

Temptation is nonsense. I have spoken to many men about temptation; they are seldom tempted, and this for very good reasons: men do not fall, they dive. The women who ‘prey on them,’ fulfil a function which will be necessary so long as society is as vilely constituted as it is, so long as life is hard and insecure, so long as social relations are false, so long as marriage is expensive and difficult of dissolution, and, especially, so long as the hearts of men are brutish and the hearts of women soft. The class which for centuries has been hunted, has for centuries been maintained by the hunter, just as the fox is bred and protected for the pleasure of the chase. Those women do not seem to me to lead as easy lives as the men who profit by their weakness; they look rather less well-fed, less well-clad; they wear gold of a lesser carat; when they die their names do not appear in the newspapers under the final advertisement: ‘To-day’s wills.’ Truly, the wages of sin are low. Should we not conclude that if bread is so dear, and flesh and blood cheap, there is no great inducement for the sale of flesh and blood, except the cost of bread? Perhaps it is the easiest way, but only for those to whom all ways would be easy.

There is no remedy for what the social campaigners call the condition of our streets, except an alteration in the mind of the men who walk in them; Christianity cannot help, for Christianity attempts to solve this problem by purging sin, instead of realising misfortune. Thus too many Christians justify Tacitus: ‘After the burning of Rome, suspicion fell on the Emperor. In order to allay them, the Emperor embarked on a series of persecutions; among those he persecuted was a sect that called themselves Christians, who had incurred the animosity of the populace owing to their sullen hatred of mankind.’

Tacitus was wrong, but then he was judging the Christians of his day as agitators. The streets will alter when the houses along the streets alter, when mankind has found love in the mind, when it is no longer content with the love of the body. The majority of men seem to approach life as pigs do the trough. Visit a West End restaurant, and you will be sure. In that trough are not only curds and whey, and truffles, and other suitable dainties; but excessive clothes and jewellery, honours, false social values, irrelevant powers; so long as the Gadarene crowd nuzzle and fight about that trough, so long will many of those, who are not Gadarene in the spirit, be infected with envy and desire, so long will they be driven to shrillness and self-advertisement, so long drawn by popularity and repelled by fame. Meanwhile, it naturally follows that what many call vice should endure, for vice is the satisfaction that dulls the flesh when the spirit aches. Happy men have no vices; it is only the unhappy, the hungry, fly to them. For my part, if I had to make laws for a new society, I would make few. I should say rather that we will build our new society so that all may be assured security and justice, but no more. If we were to establish justice, we should automatically do away with the curse of the world, which is wealth. It might be a pity. It may be that Anatole France is right when he says: ‘The devil dead, good-bye sin. Maybe beauty, this ally of the devil, will vanish with him. Maybe that we shall not again see the flowers that intoxicate, and the eyes that slay.’ Still, one would like to see it tried.

VII THE POOR