Page:The Slippery Slope.djvu/224

, I should be justified in a gentle grumble against my rates. Quite lately there has appeared a manifesto, signed by one hundred clergy and ministers whom I may perhaps without disrespect call "whole hoggers," who write as Christian Socialists, and assert that Christian Socialism accepts in its entirety the Socialist programme. It remains to be seen whether they represent the main body of Christian Socialism. It is satisfactory that the issues are gradually clearing themselves.

But, of course, there is much more which might be said as to the distinction between State relief and private charity. Charity means much more than money-giving. It is often more charitable to give no money at all. Charity implies personal endeavour and self-sacrifice, thought and watchfulness, and a thousand conditions which can never be satisfied by monetary payments. Freewill was the basis of the charity of the early Church, the charity of freemen, not the charity of slaves. Under which banner will the Christian Churches of the twentieth century take their stand?

Another feature of unrestricted State relief remains to be noticed. First, the demands upon it increase by a sort of arithmetical progression; the State purse is supposed to be bottomless, and the number of those who wish to dip into it are without limit—and then there comes a breakdown. It was so in Rome: it was so again and again in France during the Revolutionary period and after: it was so in England in 1834. It has been so of late in some parts of London and elsewhere. Either the municipal worm is sucked dry and remains an anaemic and unprofitable corpse, or he turns and rends his persecutors. Then comes a cry for transferring the charges to the Imperial Exchequer: believe me, the Imperial Exchequer is no more bottomless than the municipal purse, and even now the position of our national finances is a grave one. All past experience shows that sooner or later the reaction comes, usually just in time to save irretrievable disaster, and that then the