It is only right to emphasize these good signs when
we are told that the nation is charging downwards to demoralization. Evidently old and ingrained habits are tenacious in spite of all the excuses—of which we fully admit the existence—for abandoning them. Gloomy generalizations, however, are fashionable. We remember the almost universal belief that there was " physical deterioration " in all the great industrial centres. It caused the appointment of an Inter-Departmental Committee in 1903, but that Committee found that though certain potential causes of deterioration existed there was in fact no evidence of deterioration, but rather evidence of improvement. To-day it is justifiable to watch very anxiously the well-known temptations to economic demoralization, but it is demonstrably wrong to say that the age of thrift has passed.
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