Page:The stuff of manhood (1917).djvu/44

 And not only by taking up crosses, of which the world is full, can we roughen our lives. Many of us can do it by simply cutting off some of our waste and extravagance. There are many of us who never ask before we spend money, "How can I get the greatest return from this money?" We waste it like water, while Belgium, Serbia, Poland and Armenia call. It is said that there are thirty million people in India who have only one meal a day, and who never know what it is to have enough to eat. Some of them say that if they could have enough to eat for just two days, they would be willing to lie down and die content. Again and again, hundreds of thousands of people in China have been the victims of famine, while we were throwing wealth away. We can roughen life a bit by denying ourselves, by abridging expenditure and devoting the money to human need and to some of the services the world is dying for.

Students often reject the ethical and economic arguments against gambling. These arguments are valid but it is very hard to get a clutch for them on many minds. You can point out how dishonourable and essentially immoral it is for a man to have money which he did not earn, for which he gave no equivalent, which came to him as no expression of friendship or by no legitimate inheritance. All this is clear to the healthy and manly moral sense. But the gambler