Though we know the idea is now out of fashion,
there are still some of us who hold with that great social and religious philosopher Chalmers, that at bottom destitution is a moral evil and can only be reached by moral remedies, and that no streams of public assistance, however deep and wide and fed from however huge a Government reservoir, will ever take the place of those five fountains of true human benevolence of which the Glasgow Professor wrote so nobly—fountains which dry up as if under some curse when once the Govern- ment tap is set flowing. It is quite true that, as the manifesto says, we must be on our guard against "maxims and standard, which are really due to selfishness and ignorance." Yet if the framers of the manifesto had been a little more humble- minded and a little less intoxicated with their own zeal and righteousness they might have remembered that we must also be on our guard against maxims and standards which are really due to sentimentality and want of imagination.
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