Stand Up, Ye Dead. Norman Maclean

one can see how impoverished the race would have been, and how different the history of the world, if the door by which mighty souls become incarnate had been shut by the generations of the past. One has but to think of the world with Luther, Knox, Carlyle, and the prophets shut out. In France to-day Napoleon would never have been born! We can already trace the tracks of the withering blight that has seared humanity. In Germany idealism is dead, and there is no prophet either of Christian love or of self-sacrifice. France trampled upon the Church because the Church fought resolutely against the policy of racial suicide and used all its power to save the womanhood of France from submitting to degeneration. Because the Church persisted, France 'extinguished the light of heaven,' and no man was found who could rouse the nation to realise its sin and to repent. The prophet who could have done so was doubtless shut out. And among ourselves we can mark the slow ebbing of vision, of genius, and of prophetic might. Two generations ago one voice could rouse the whole nation and kindle the fire of fierce indignation against the tale of Balkan atrocities. In our day we beheld the Armenians massacred again and again; but there was no voice to rouse the nation to indignation or to action. We could not send the fleet to the mountains of Ararat, declared our statesmen, and we acquiesced. One by one the great leaders, the poets, the writers passed into the silence, and the day of the politician and the time-server had come. Did a prophet arise, we no longer stoned him; we only meted out to him contumely and neglect. In vain did Lord Roberts summon a nation sinking on its lees to arise and quit themselves like men. When the judgment throne of God blazed forth in the heavens, and our startled eyes beheld the sword emerge from the mists that hid heaven from our eyes, we were engaged in preparations for civil war, and listening to the low murmur of the toiling masses who threatened social chaos. And there was no man found equal to the task of saving us from ourselves. The men who could have saved us were, doubtless, shut out. It is manifest that the richest elements must be lost to any race that limits its own growth. If the sixth and seventh children in a family be the healthiest, as has been established by investigation,[4] then there is no place for the strongest in a family limited to two! Thus it comes that we are left to-day without a Wesley who could kindle the passion of righteousness in the nation's soul; without a Scott who could glorify our patriotism; and without a Tennyson who could set the hearts athrob. We have as yet produced neither a Pitt nor a Wellington. They have been shut out. That is our impoverishment. For great souls will no longer come aboard a world such as this.

      VI

      And yet there were those who would have given all they had if to them there were given what these others spurned. They knew that the only abiding joy of life is the joy of little children. But that was denied them. They had boundless capacities of love and of sacrifice, but the opportunity of development came not to them. Few cries can pull at the heartstrings like the cry of the old maid:

      'All day long I sit by the window and wait,

       While the spring winds fling their roses everywhere,

       And I hear the voice of my husband cry at the gate,

       And the feet of my children tremulous on the stair.

      'Hour by hour I dream at the window here,

       While footsteps trip and falter adown the street,

       And I hear my children murmuring, "Mother, dear!"

       And the voice of my husband crying, "Sweet, oh sweet!"'

      But they who had the opportunity went out pursuing the mirage of pleasure, and they wanted no voices crying 'Mother, mother.' And these others were left with their hunger—left to 'clasp air and kiss the wind for ever.' For the modest never attained in the days when the vulgar and the blatant received the incense and the crown. It was because the pure were disregarded that the cult of the empty cradle cast the glamour of its degeneration over the land.

      VII

      In the so-called dark ages the mother and the child were an object of veneration if not of worship. Men thrilled with the sense of the sacredness of life because they feared God—the source of life. What the race needs is to go on pilgrimage back to the Manger—back to the Child. But, alas! the spiritually dead cannot go on pilgrimage. First the dead must be quickened. What we need most of all is to cleanse these self-filled, soiled hearts in the fountain of self-sacrifice. The soul of the race, if the race is to be saved, must go on pilgrimage back to the Manger—back to the Mother and the Child.

      'And he who gives a child a home

       Builds palaces in kingdom come.

       And she who gives a baby birth

       Brings Saviour Christ again to earth.'

      When, last winter, the enemy poured into a trench, and almost all the defenders were killed, a French sergeant, grievously wounded, grasped a rifle and began to shoot, crying out to his semi-conscious comrades, 'Stand up, ye dead.' At the wild cry the wounded arose, and the half-dead began to shoot with unsteady hands. By a resurrection from the dead the trench was saved. To a race that has set its face towards decay, there ringeth from heaven the cry, 'Stand up, ye dead.' It is not yet too late to save the race, the empire, and the world.

[1] The Declining Birthrate, p. 247.

[2] The Declining Birthrate, p. 343.

[3] The Declining Birthrate, p. 93.

[4] The Declining Birthrate, p. 126.

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      THE ROOTS OF THE EVIL

      If a disease is to be combated the first thing to be done is to diagnose it. It is only when the destructive powers of an enemy are realised that the full power of a nation is mobilised; and the moral forces of a nation will only be mobilised for its own salvation when it realises the full sweep of the forces of degeneration which are united for its ethical destruction. Hitherto the attitude of society towards the evils which threaten its very existence has been one of assumed ignorance. Ostrich-like it buried its head in conventions and was determined not to see. The result has been that the evils grew in an atmosphere of artificial darkness and ignorance, until to-day the fountains of the national life are at one and the same time going through a process of desiccation and of pollution. The elements in society which have in them a promise of strength are limiting their own existence; the elements which have in them the least promise of vitality are passing on the stream of life diseased alike by inheritance and by infection. It is a disagreeable and distasteful duty to contemplate the foul diseases which prey on the body-politic, but we must face the duty. We must remove the blinkers which have too long hid from us the sweep of those forces which will inevitably work destruction unless the nation be roused to its peril.

      I

      It is a startling fact that in the very days when the flower of the manhood of the race is perishing by the hundred thousand on land and sea, a campaign is being conducted in London with the express purpose of preventing the wastage of life being replaced by the advent of life. It is almost incredible that such a thing could be, but those who carry on the propaganda are not even conscious that they are doing wrong. In this very unconsciousness of evil we see the depths to which the nation is falling. In his evidence submitted to the National Birthrate Commission, the secretary of the Malthusian League, with a frankness which showed that he was thoroughly convinced of the righteousness of