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Updated: May 8, 2025
Those of us who have lived in the pure air of free, country home-life can not easily realize the moral plague of drunkenness as it blights the home in the crowded districts of city slum life. Nor is the home of the city alone cursed by the drink evil. Three years ago this last holiday season we were doing some evangelistic work in a neighboring town, a mere village of a couple hundred inhabitants.
It has become almost extinct in consequence of protracted blights: the island air is far too damp. But the climate does not agree with European fruits and vegetables; strawberries and French beans are equally flavourless. I remarked the same in the glorious valley of the Lower Congo: it must result from some telluric or atmospheric condition which we cannot yet appreciate.
The ancient site of the village of Chaillot seemed like one of those spots of which we read in monkish legends, which are haunted by a demon that destroys the work and blights the existence of whoever attempts to build upon them. Palace, barracks, monument and temple alike never existed, and were but the shadowy precursors of disaster to their projectors.
When we see how this system induces fashionable extravagance, with its entailed bankruptcy and ruin when we mark how greatly it limits the amount of social intercourse among the less wealthy classes when we find that many who most need to be disciplined by mixing with the refined are driven away by it, and led into dangerous and often fatal courses when we count up the many minor evils it inflicts, the extra work which its costliness entails on all professional and mercantile men, the damage to public taste in dress and decoration by the setting up of its absurdities as standards for imitation, the injury to health indicated in the faces of its devotees at the close of the London season, the mortality of milliners and the like, which its sudden exigencies yearly involve; and when to all these we add its fatal sin, that it blights, withers up, and kills, that high enjoyment it professedly ministers to that enjoyment which is a chief end of our hard struggling in life to obtain shall we not conclude that to reform our system of etiquette and fashion, is an aim yielding to few in urgency?
She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.
It's all very sad, and it used to make me feel uncomfortable, and keep away for fear of making him think of my superseding him; but there, we're all like plants and flowers, Miss Mary, and suffer from our blights and east winds." He looked across at Mary, whose face was stony, and her eyes fixed upon him so strangely that he felt abashed, and turned to Mrs Ellis.
It was now that the loneliness that blights seemed waiting for him.... Life used one and that in the ugly, not the noble sense of being used. Stripped of the fine fancies men wove around it, what was it beyond just a matter of being sucked dry and then thrown aside? Why not admit that, and then face it?
Let them practice heart-virtue, and search humbly and diligently for the Truth which frees the soul from all error and sin, from all that blights the human heart, and that darkens, as with unending night, the pathway of the wandering souls of earth. There is one great all-embracing Law which is the foundation and cause of the universe, the Law of Love.
We must do a better job in community development in creating more livable communities, in which all of our children can grow up with fuller access to opportunity and greater immunity to the social evils and blights which now plague so many of our towns and cities. I shall have proposals to help us achieve this.
Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very soul of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing; a murder here, a theft there, a blow now and a curse there: what do they matter? They are only the accidents and illnesses of life; there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London.
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