Page:The Slippery Slope.djvu/119

 is difficult to have any patience with people who do these things, people who are as often as not "University professors" and the like. They invent phrases and shibboleths in their studies which we recognise afterwards in the workshops, in the working men's clubs and debating societies, and at the street corners at election time. In doing so they are causing irreparable mischief to the character of the poor.

For that character we believe to be of supreme importance to the nation at large. We have been told that we shall always have the poor with us, but we have never been told that one class is to be doomed to eternal poverty. But that is what must happen if the poor resign themselves to poverty, and are satisfied to be "kept" by the State. We want, like Queen Elizabeth, to recover people from poverty and to give free play to those forces which are at work in an upward direction. We want to stimulate their "ambition to rise," as was said many years ago by one of the best friends the poor ever had. Lord Rosebery, speaking at Liverpool the other day, said that for an empire it is necessary to have an imperial people. But we cannot have physical efficiency without moral efficiency; we cannot construct an imperial people out of a spiritless and pauperised population.