Aye, and when you speak o’ taxes, there’s another thing comes to mind.  These folk who ha’ sae a muckle to say aboot the injustice of conditions pay few taxes.  They ha’ no property, as a rule, and no great stake in the land.  But they’re aye ready to mak’ rules and regulations for those who’ve worked till they’ve a place in the world.  If they were busier themselves, maybe they’d not have so much time to see how much is wrong.  Have you not thought, whiles, it was strange you’d not noticed all these terrible things they talk to you aboot?  And has it not been just that you’ve had too many affairs of your ain to handle?

There are things for us all to think about, dear knows.  We’ve come, of late years, we were doing it too much before the war, to give too great weight to things that were not of the spirit.  Men have grown used to more luxury than it is good for man to have.  Look at our clubs.  Palaces, no less, some of them.  What need has a man of a temple or a palace for a club.  What should a club be?  A comfortable place, is it no, whaur a man can go to meet his friends, and smoke a pipe, maybe—­find a bit and a sup if the wife is not at hame, and he maun be eating dinner by his lane.  Is there need of marble columns and rare woods?

And a man’s own hoose.  We’ve been thinking lately, it seems to me, too much of luxury, and too little of use and solid comfort.  We wasted much strength and siller before the war.  Aweel, we’ve to pay, and to go on paying, noo, for a lang time.  We’ve paid the price in blood, and for a lang time the price in siller will be kept in our minds.  We’ll ha’ nae choice aboot luxury, maist of us.  And that’ll be a rare gude thing.

Things!  Things!  It’s sae easy for them to rule us.  We live up to them.  We act as if they owned us, and a’ the time it’s we who own them, and that we maun not forget.  And we grow to think that a’thing we’ve become used to is something we can no do wi’oot.  Oh, I’m as great a sinner that way as any.  I was forgetting, before the war came to remind me, the days when I’d been puir and had had tae think longer over the spending of a saxpence than I had need to in 1914, in you days before the Kaiser turned his Huns loose, over using a hundred poonds.

I’m not blaming a puir body for being bitter when things gae wrong.  All I’m saying is he’ll be happier, and his troubles will be sooner mended if he’ll only be thinking that maybe he’s got a part in them himsel’.  It’s hard to get things richt when you’re thinking they’re a’ the fault o’ some one else, some one you can’t control.  Ca’ the guilty one what you will—­a prime minister, a capitalist, a king.  Is it no hard to mak’ a wrong thing richt when it’s a’ his fault?

But suppose you stop and think, and you come tae see that some of your troubles lie at your ain door?  What’s easier then than to mak’ them come straight?  There are things that are wrong wi’ the world that we maun all pitch in together to mak’ richt—­I’m kenning that as well as anyone.  But there’s muckle that’s only for our own selves to correct, and until that’s done let’s leave the others lie.