I cannot stay here to enumerate those causes, but I will mention a few of them.  There is the defective training of children, defective physical training to begin with, and then the failure to equip them with any particular and definite form of skill.  There is the irregular way in which new centres of population are allowed to spring up, so that we go on creating fresh slums as fast as we pull down the old rookeries.  There is the depopulation of the countryside, and the influx of foreign paupers into our already overcrowded towns.  There is the undermining of old-established and valuable British industries by unfair foreign competition.  That is not an exhaustive list, but it is sufficient to illustrate my meaning.  Well, wherever these and similar evils are eating away the health and independence of our working people, there the foundations of the Empire are being undermined, for it is the race that makes the Empire.  Loud is the call to every true Unionist, to every true Imperialist, to come to the rescue.

And now at the risk of wearying you there is one other subject to which I would like specially to refer, lest I should be accused of deliberately giving it the go-by, and that is the question of old age pensions.  It is not a reform altogether of the same nature as those on which I have been dwelling, nor is it perhaps the kind of reform about which I feel the greatest enthusiasm, because I would rather attack the causes, which lead to that irregularity of employment and that under-payment which prevents people from providing for their own old age themselves, than merely remedy the evils arising from it.  But I accept the fact that under present conditions, which it may be that a progressive policy in time will alter, a sufficient case for State aid in the matter of old age pensions has been made out, and I believe that no party is going to oppose the introduction of old age pensions.  But, on the other hand, I foresee great difficulties and great disputes over the question of the manner in which the money is to be provided.  I know how our Radical friends will wish to provide the money.  They will want to get it, in the first instance, by starving the Army and the Navy.  To that way of providing it I hope the Unionist Party, however unpopular such a course may be, and however liable to misrepresentation it may be, will oppose an iron resistance, because this is an utterly rotten and bad way of financing old age pensions, or anything else.  But that method alone, however far it is carried, will not provide money enough, and there will be an attempt to raise the rest by taxes levied exclusively on the rich.  I am against that also, because it is thoroughly wrong in principle.  I am not against making the rich pay, to the full extent of their capacity, for great national purposes, even for national purposes in which they have no direct interest.  But I am not prepared to see them made to pay exclusively.  Let all pay according to their means.  It is a