



Produced by Al Haines, prepared from scans obtained from
The Internet Archive.










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 <DW72>
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