248 THE MURDER OF AGRICULTURE 



amounts to a scandal, and respectable, clean-minded 

 citizens have taken to avoiding certain localities. 



Let us carefully note this fact: nowhere else in the 

 civilised world will such sights be met with as may be 

 seen on any Sunday evening or holiday evening in any of 

 our pubhc resorts. In France, Italy, or Germany, the 

 people enjoy themselves in a gay, bright fashion, and on 

 the occasion of their Fetes or Festas hundreds and 

 thousands of young couples may be met promenading 

 in the woods or other quiet places, but never do you see 

 the slightest approach to indecency. 



The British people, or at all events a certain section of 

 them, stand alone in this respect, and the question 

 naturally has to be asked : — why? 



The answer is simple enough, yet deadly in its sim- 

 plicity, because, in breaking down the physical body you 

 have, at the same time, seriously impaired the moral 

 being. Lower a man's physique, breed him in the stifling 

 atmosphere of an overcrowded city; environ him with 

 poverty and its companions — misery and despair ; poison 

 him with the foul miasma arising from life's degrada- 

 tions, and you will produce just the type we see about us 

 to-day in every part of this fair country of ours. 



Shame on us as a people that we have permitted this 

 to go on for so long! 



Shame, fourfold shame, on all those who are respon- 

 sible for this cruel, unredressed wrong. 



Who among us can blame these poor wrongdoers, 

 when, through our own wrong done to them, they know 

 not they are offending? 



What man among us wiU dare to cast the stone, when. 



