Part 6

Out of the clean countryside they were taken, these men, and the State that summoned them, and whose call they answered, surrounded them with temptations. Away from the influence of mother and sister and sweetheart, wearied and worn with the hard toil of preparation, the State opened the canteen and said, "Take your ease thus," and they did so. The Secretary of War made appeals to them. "Be sober," said he, "avoid alcohol, that the State, through your self-denial, may live." But the State said, "See, I have made ample provision for you, so that you may disregard the noble advice my servant gives you." They came in their thousands across the Atlantic from the far North-West at the call of their mother--clean and sober--and their mother opened the canteen for their benefit on the plain. Such a world as that dwelt in the imagination of Dean Swift--I never imagined that it could exist here and now. And in that world of the cities of the plain, what reward are we preparing for the men who are baring their breasts to the arrows, standing between us and death? When they come back, war-worn, to what will they return? To homes in which the fires are extinguished, the candles burnt down to the socket; the cupboards bare, the children famished and neglected? Is that to be the guerdon of their sacrifice; is it for that that they have gone down into hell? Surely it cannot be for that! A wave has passed over us, raising us to the realisation of the higher values of things. Words live for us now which were dead yesterday. A beam of light has fallen into the chamber of imagery, and the word _Temperance_ has risen from the couch on which it lay dying, and it claims us for its own. Through it we can make the world know that we are worth fighting for--worth that the young, the strong, and the brave should take everything they hold dear--their ideals, their love, their little children unborn--and throw them into the trench, and there give themselves and their dreams to death for 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 encircles the path of its children by legalised temptations at every corner. It is the maddest of worlds. I may be wrong and the General wholly right. But as the ticket-collector said the last time I saw him--"I would like to see the man who could convince me that I am wrong." And I don't know whether to be grateful to the ticket-collector or not. He has deprived me of some of my sleep; he has made my head ache with thinking of problems which I am not fit to cope with; and, most unlooked for of all, he has made a tee-totaler of me till the end of the war. There is a plaintive note in the ticket-collector's voice, which strikes a chord in my heart, when he invariably adds: "I hope the war won't last long." For, if it does, there will be the danger of the ticket-collector and myself becoming teetotalers for altogether. And it is such an ugly word--tee-totaler! If only the ticket-collector would coin a new and beautiful word to connote his new and beneficent state of mind! It is a pity that great causes should be burdened by the weight of ugly words.

GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.