and feeding this appetite for destruction.  Hence, when we feel virtuously indignant, we would do well to inquire of ourselves if that is the limit and Z of our virtue.  Have we no sins of our own to amend that we have all this time for barking and biting at the vices of our neighbours?  And if we must attack the sins of our fellows, would it not be the more heroic course to begin with those we are most tempted by, instead of those to which we have no mind?  Do not let the drunkard feel virtuous because he is able with an undivided heart to denounce simony, and do not let the forger, who happens to be a teetotaller because of the weakness of his stomach, be too virtuously indignant at the red-nosed patron of the four-ale bar.  Any of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us.  Most of us can boast than we have never been cruel to a hippopotamus or had dealings with a succubus or taken a bribe of a million pounds to betray a friend.  On these points we can look forward with perfect confidence to the scrutiny of the Day of Judgment.  I fear, however, the Recording Angel is likely to devote such little space as he can afford to each of us to the vices we have rather than to the vices we have not.  Even Charles Peace would have been acquitted if he had been accused of brawling in church instead of murder.  Hence it is to be hoped that passengers in railway trains will not remain content with gloating down upon the unappetising sins of which the forty-seven thousand are accused by Mr Pemberton Billing.  Steep and perilous is the ascent of virtue, and the British public may well be grateful to Mr Billing and Mr Bottomley if they help it with voice or outstretched hand to climb to the snowy summits.  So far as can be seen, however, all that Mr Billing and Mr Bottomley do is to interrupt the British public in its upward climb and orate to it on the monstrous vices of the Cities of the Plain.  This may be an agreeable diversion for weary men, but it obviously involves the neglect of virtue, not the pursuit of it.  Most people imagine that to pursue vice is to pursue virtue.  But the wisdom of the ages tells us that the only thing to do to vice is to fly from it.  Lot’s wife was a lady who looked round once too often to see what was happening to the forty-seven thousand.  Let Mr Billing and Mr Bottomley beware.  Their interest in the Cities of the Plain will turn them into pillars of salt a thousand years before it turns them into pillars of society.

As for virtue, then, how is it to be achieved?  Merely by blackening the rest of the world, we cannot hope to make ourselves white.  Modern writers tell us that we cannot make ourselves white even by blackening ourselves.  They denounce the sense of sin as a sin, and tell us that there is nothing of which we should repent except repentance.  We need not stay to discuss this point.  We know well enough that, so long as the human intellect (to