Produced by Al Haines, prepared from scans obtained from
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STAND UP, YE DEAD
BY
NORMAN MACLEAN
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON -- NEW YORK -- TORONTO
MCMXVI
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
DWELLERS IN THE MIST
HILLS OF HOME
CAN THE WORLD BE WON FOR CHRIST?
THE BURNT-OFFERING
AFRICA IN TRANSFORMATION
THE GREAT DISCOVERY
{v}
PREFACE
Two years ago the writer published a book called _The Great Discovery_.
It seemed to him in those days, when the nation chose the ordeal of
battle rather than dishonour, that the people, as if waking from sleep,
discovered God once more. But, now, after an agony unparalleled in the
history of the world, the vision of God has faded, and men are left
groping in the darkness of a great bewilderment. The cause may not be
far to seek. For every vision of God summons men to the girding of
themselves that they may bring their lives more into conformity with
His holy will. And when men decline the venture to which the vision
beckons, then the vision fades.
It is there that we have failed. We were called to put an end to
social evils {vi} which are sapping our strength and enfeebling our arm
in battle, but we refused. We wanted victory over the enemy, but we
deemed the price of moral surgery too great even for victory. In the
rush and crowding of world-shaking cataclysms, memory is short. We
have already almost forgotten the moral tragedy of April 1915. It was
then that the White Paper was issued by the Government, and the nation
was informed of startling facts which our statesmen knew all the time.
At last the nation was told that our armies were wellnigh paralysed for
lack of munitions, while thousands of men were daily away from their
work because of drunkenness; that the repairing of ships was delayed
and transports unable to put to sea because of drunkenness; that goods,
vital to the State, could not be delivered because of drunkenness; that
Admiral Jellicoe had warned the Government that the efficiency of the
Fleet was threatened because of drunkenness; and that shipbuilders and
munition manufacturers had made a strong {vii} appeal to our rulers to
put an end to drunkenness. It was then that the King, by his example,
called upon the people to renounce alcohol, and the nation waited for
its deliverance. But the Government refused to follow the King. There
is but one law for nations, as for individuals, if they would save
their souls: 'If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.' But our
statesmen could not brace themselves to an act of surgery; they devised
a scheme for putting the offending member into splints. And, since
then, it looks as if the wheels of the chariot of victory were stuck in
the bog of the national drunkenness. The vision of God has faded
before the eyes of a nation that refused its beckoning.
This book deals, therefore, with those evils which now hide the face of
God from us. If drunkenness be the greatest of these evils, there are
others closely allied to it. Two Commissions have recently issued
Reports, the one on 'The Declining Birthrate,' and the other on 'The
Social Evil,' {viii} which reveal the perilous condition of
degeneration into which the nation is falling. It is difficult for
people, engrossed in the labours and anxieties of these days, to grasp
the meaning of the facts as presented in these Reports. In these pages
an effort is made to look the facts in the face and to make the danger
clear, so that he who runs may read. And the writer has had but one
purpose: to show that there is but one remedy for all our grievous
ills, even a return to God.
As we think of the millions who have taken all that makes life dear and
laid it down that we might live; who have gone down to an earthly hell
that we might not lose our heaven; who have wrestled with the powers of
destruction on sea and land that these isles might continue to be the
sanctuary of freedom and the home of righteousness; who in the midst of
their torment never flinched; and of the fathers, mothers, and wives
who have laid on the altar the sacrifice of all their love and
hope--the question arises, how can {ix} we show our love and our
gratitude to those who have redeemed us? We can only prove our
gratitude by making a new world for those who have saved us--a world in
which men and women shall no longer be doomed to live lives of
sordidness and misery. When we shall set ourselves to that task,
seeking to meet the sacrifice of heroism by the sacrifice of our
service, deeming no labour too great and no effort too arduous, then
the vision of God will again arise upon us and will abide.
N. M.
_October_ 7, 1916.
{xi}
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE EMPTY CRADLE
CHAPTER II
THE ROOTS OF THE EVIL
CHAPTER III
THE EMPTY COUNTRYSIDE
CHAPTER IV
THE MAN IN THE SLUM
CHAPTER V
THE LORD OF THE SLUM
CHAPTER VI
THE GREAT REFUSAL
{xii}
CHAPTER VII
THE SLUM IN THE MAN
CHAPTER VIII
BEHIND YOU IS GOD
{1}
CHAPTER I
THE EMPTY CRADLE
The greatest disaster of these days has befallen in the streets and
lanes of our cities at home, and, because it has happened in our own
midst, we are blind to it. And, also, it has come upon us so gradually
and so surreptitiously that, though we are overwhelmed by it, we know
not that we are overwhelmed. Our capital cities are leading the nation
in the march to the graveyard. In London the birthrate has fallen in
Hampstead from 30 to 17.55, and in the City itself to 17.4; in
Edinburgh it has fallen in some districts to 10. In many places there
are already more coffins than cradles. What would the city of
Edinburgh say or do if suddenly one half of its children were slain in
a night? What a cry of horror would rise to heaven! {2} Yet, that is
exactly the calamity which has overtaken the city. In the year 1871
there were 34 children born in Edinburgh for every thousand of the
population; in the year 1915 the number of births per thousand of the
population was 17. Edinburgh has, compared to forty-four years ago,
sacrificed half its children. And because this calamity is the slowly
ripening fruit of forty years, and did not occur with dramatic
swiftness in a night, there is no sound of lamentation in the streets.
I
What has happened in London and Edinburgh is only what has happened
over all the British Empire, with this difference--that these cities
are leading the van in the process of desiccating the fountain of the
national life. While the birthrate for the whole of Scotland is 23.9,
that of Edinburgh is 17.8. For the nation as a whole the policy of
racial suicide has become a national policy. The marriage-rate
increases, but the {3} birth-rate decreases. A birthrate of 35.6 per
thousand in 1874 decreased to 33.7 in 1880, 32.9 in 1886, 30.4 in 1890,
and to 23.8 in 1912. If the city of Edinburgh is sacrificing at the
fountain-head half of its possible population, the rest of the
English-speaking race is following hard in its wake. The facts which
to-day confront us spell doom. In the year 1911 the legitimate births
in England and Wales numbered 843,505, but if the birthrate had
remained as it was in the years 1876-80, the number would have been
1,273,698. 'That is to say, there was a potential loss to the nation
of 430,000 in that one year 1911.'[1] In the year 1914 the loss is
even greater, for it amounted to 467,837. The nation as a whole is now
sacrificing every year a third of its possible population. This is
surely a terrible fact. The ravages of war, awful though these ravages
have been, are nothing to the ravages which have been self-inflicted.
In the years that are past, the race recovered from the {4} greatest
calamities of war and pestilence because there was a power mightier
than these--that of the child. The abounding birthrate rapidly
replaced the wastage of war. Through the greatest calamities the
nation ever marched forward on the feet of little children. One
generation might be overwhelmed, but
'Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring our boats ashore.'
But alas! when the greatest of all calamities has overtaken the race;
when the young, the noble, and the brave have lain down in death that
the nation might live, the feet of the little children, on which
erstwhile the race marched forward, are not there. We have offered
them up a sacrifice to Moloch.
II
The nation must be wakened to the dire peril in which the steadily
falling birthrate has placed the race. Militarism {5} slays its
thousands; this has strangled its hundreds of thousands. But no
warning note has been sounded by our statesmen. They were doubtless
waiting to see!
The might of every nation depends on the reservoir of its vitality.
Let that desiccate and the nation desiccates. Of this France is the
proof. That France which, a hundred years ago, overran Europe, fifty
years later lay prostrate under the feet of Germany. Twenty years
before that national humiliation, France began to sacrifice her
children. Lord Acton pointed out the inevitable result; the wise of
their own number warned them--but France went on its way down the slope
of moral degeneration. Its birthrate fell from 30.8 in 1821 to 26.2 in
1851, 25.4 in 1871, 22.1 in 1891, 20.6 in 1901, and to 19 in 1914. The
result was inevitable. In the race of empire France fell slowly back.
The alien had to be imported to cultivate her own fair fields. She
annexed territories, but she could {6} not colonise them. The prophets
who prophesied doom have been abundantly justified. To-day France,
risen from the dead, is wrestling for her life; she is impotent to
drive back the foe without the help of Britain and Russia--she who
dominated Europe a century ago! When we read of a Russian army, after
a journey round half the world, landing at Marseilles to take their
place in the trenches that Paris may be saved from the devastators of
Belgium and Poland, we see the fields ripe for the harvest of that
policy which sacrificed the race to the individual. The hope for
France is that she will rise from the grave of her degeneration,
new-born.
What has happened in France is what happened in Rome long before. It
was not because of the inrush of barbaric hosts that Rome perished, but
because Rome sacrificed its children. In its golden age, when luxury
clouded the heart, Rome began to avoid the responsibilities of family
life, and so sounded the death-knell of its empire. Here is ever the
source of human {7} decay. The most perfect intellectual and aesthetic
civilisation ever developed on earth was that of the ancient Greeks.
'We know and may guess something more of the reason why this
marvellously gifted race declined,' says Francis Galton. 'Social
morality grew exceedingly lax, marriage became unfashionable and was
avoided; many of the more ambitious and accomplished women were avowed
courtesans and consequently infertile, and the mothers of the incoming
population were of a heterogeneous class.' And the misery which lay so
heavily on the heart of Hosea was that Israel was rushing to
destruction because children ceased to be born. National
licentiousness produced a diminishing population. 'And there are no
more births,' cries the prophet beholding the coming doom. Over us the
skies are darkening with the portents of the same doom. For we also
have given ourselves to the same degeneration. To Puritanic Scotland,
a generation ago, France was oft quoted as a solemn {8} warning of the
depths to which atheism and materialism bring a nation. To-day
Scotland as a whole is only four points behind France in the matter of
this degeneration, and the city of Edinburgh has outstripped even
France. And though this policy of the silent nursery and the empty
cradle is a policy of racial doom, the land of the Covenanters and the
capital of Presbyterianism have made it their own. They have
out-Heroded Herod.
III
It is only when this disease, which is threatening the life of the
body-politic, is probed, that the full extent of its ravages is
manifest. For it is the educated, the cultured, and the rich who are
eluding the responsibility of parentage, while the poor and the
diseased are still continuing to multiply. In inverse ratio to the
income and the size of house is the number of the children. It is the
same sad story in every city. In London, the birthrate of Hampstead, a
suburb mainly inhabited {9} by the rich, fell from 30.01 in 1881 to
17.55 in 1911, while that of Shoreditch, a working-class district, only
fell in the same period from 31.32 to 30.16. In his evidence before
the Birthrate Commission, Dr. Chalmers, the Medical Officer of Health
for the city of Glasgow, contrasted the birthrate in two of the poor
districts of the city with that in two of the best districts. In the
two worst wards the birthrate was equal to 161 per thousand married
women between the ages of 15 and 45 years, whereas in the two
well-to-do wards it was only 34.[2] In the city of Aberdeen, the
birthrate in the poor and congested district of Greyfriars is almost
double that of Rubislaw which includes the best housing in the city.
In no city is this grim contrast more marked than in the city of
Edinburgh.
When the different districts of Edinburgh are considered, it is
apparent that in the poor districts the birthrate maintains still some
vitality, but among the {10} well-to-do and the rich it is rapidly
diminishing. In the Canongate district there is a birthrate per
thousand of 24; in Gorgie, 23.9; in St. Leonard's, 22.4; in Merchiston,
12.6; in Haymarket, 11.5; and in Morningside, 10.9. In the three
districts of Edinburgh where the wealthy, the cultured, and the
well-to-do abound, there the birthrate is but half of those districts
where the poor, the miserable, and the criminal are congregated in
noisome slums. In Morningside and Haymarket the birthrate is only a
third of what it was in Scotland in 1871. These districts of the city
have sacrificed two-thirds of their children to their ease. It is
among the terraces and squares of the West Ends of great cities, and
among the gardened villas of suburbs that this degeneration has evinced
the fulness of its power. Where children could grow in health and
happiness, thence selfishness has banished them; where, amid squalor,
filth, and vice they are almost doomed from birth, there they are
multiplied. Degeneration always {11} begins at the top, and works
downward. At the top only one-fourth are left; at the bottom,
two-thirds are still left. But the dry-rot is creeping downward. The
lower middle class is following its betters; and the artisan is
following hard after. Only in the Canongate is the shouting of
children at play still to be heard, and there the State surrounds the
last survivors of the race with every temptation to evil and ruin.
This is a grim fact when the future of the race is considered; and of
its grimness there can be no doubt. The vital statistics do not lie,
and they are the proof. There are other proofs. The statistics of
baptisms are steadily falling. In many West End congregations the
sacrament of baptism has become a rarity! Sunday schools are getting
smaller and smaller. The records of seven years (1908-14) showed the
appalling fact that fourteen of the chief Free Church denominations of
Britain have lost 257,952 scholars. The materials out of which the
Church {12} was formerly built are crumbling away. Empty cradles mean
empty Sunday schools, empty classes, and, ere long, empty pews. The
strangest thing is that in face of the forces that threaten destruction
the Churches are silent--as if mesmerised! In these last years even
the church-going population of this country was rapidly reverting to
the base conditions in which Christianity found humanity, and from
which the Cross in a measure rescued it. And the Church has lost the
power of sounding the trumpet and warning the people of coming judgment.
IV
When we inquire into the causes of this parlous state to which the race
has been brought, we find that the greatest is self-deception. If men
and women realised what they were doing, they would be horrified. But
they don't realise it. They are acting on noble principles! They can
provide for and educate two children {13} better than six; therefore,
in the interests of the race, they will only have two! One parent
wrote to the Press recently that he could only give a public-school
education to one boy, and therefore he had no more! They have the idea
that by coddling the few they will usher in the super-race. In short,
they murder the race, but they do it on noble principles, in conformity
with the sanctions of religion, and in the name of the most high God!
Their lives are a direct reversal of the elementary canons of morality;
but they themselves imagine that they are the most perfect products of
evolution, and that they are, by a process of racial suicide, bringing
the race to its perfection--ushering in the super-race and the
super-man.
What a false education must that be to which the race is thus
sacrificed. Education is not a matter of money or accomplishments, but
of wonder, reverence, imagination, and awe. Heaven and earth are
waiting, without money or price, to {14} thrill the young heart with
glory and loveliness; but the poor soul must not be born because he
cannot go to Eton. And the great wide world is calling for men;
provinces added yearly to the Empire demand men; great plains wait the
spade and the plough; the realms of King George have as yet only their
fringes occupied, and the race must produce the men who will go in and
possess, or other races, not yet tired of life, will enter in. And
yet, in the name of the race, the race is being sacrificed.
The real root of the evil is selfishness. A generation that sought
only its own pleasure refused the burden of parentage. They nursed
lap-dogs and preferred bridge to babies. They could not have the
luxuries they craved and also nurseries ringing with the joyous voices
of children; and they made their choice. There were found those who
called them fashionable; but nobody will ever call them blessed. And
because of that choice families whose names were great in the land are
to-day {15} extinct. Names which in other days raised those who bore
them into the fellowship of high ideals and noble service, have
disappeared for ever, because a generation which knew no altar at which
to worship save the altar of self, sacrificed even the generations to
come at that altar. But there is found some saving grace among them.
Having silenced the voices of children in their own houses, they
organise societies to care for the children in the slums, and preserve
their precarious lives. 'In communities like Letchworth or the
Hampstead Garden Suburb, families of more than two children are rare
among the educated classes, but nearly every one is giving time,
energy, and money to the reform movements which they believe to be
urgently needed in the interests of the community.'[3] They themselves
decline to bear the burden of parentage, but they are ready to teach
the poor the best way of bearing the burden. Unconscious that they
themselves, the victims of {16} race-weariness and of selfishness, are
in direst need of some mission among them that would quicken them to
life, they organise missions to quicken others. The dead in the valley
of the Dry Bones organise to reform Jerusalem! Not all the earth can
present a stranger spectacle than this--the citizens of the West Ends,
who have sacrificed the race to their own ease, solicitous over keeping
alive the children of the miserable in the slums! Their own gardens
and nurseries are empty; but they would keep the children alive in
airless, foetid closes. Thus would they condone. But it is no boon to
the race to keep alive the children of the diseased and of the unfit;
nor is it a kindness to these children to ensure that they shall grow
into the consciousness of the misery into which they are born. The
generations of the healthy and the clean have been sacrificed on the
altar of selfishness, and no service at any other altar can ever atone.
{17}
V
But it might have been worse with the race than it is even to-day, for
this obsession of racial suicide might have possessed the nation sooner
than it did; and if it had, then we would truly have been poor indeed.
For Sir Walter Scott was the seventh child of his parents; and it is as
certain as most human surmisings, that if the ideal of life which
to-day dominates the professional classes in Scotland, had, in the year
1771, found sway in the College Wynd of Edinburgh, Walter Scott would
never have been born. John Wesley was one of nineteen children:
fortunately for the race, the gospel of the salvation of men through
racial limitation had not yet gained devotees in that vicarage where
the children were taught to cry quietly! Alfred Tennyson was the third
of seven sons, and if yesterday were as to-day, then 'In Memoriam'
would never have been written. But now, alas! the door {18} is shut
against the Walter Scotts and Wesleys of the future.
It is unnecessary to multiply instances. Any 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. {19} 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 {20} 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.
{21}
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!"'
{22}
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 {23} 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.
{24}