claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted

anything in the world.

Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it

before?… I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.

I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed.

9

My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to

the final convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of

my dream of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and

administered territories-the vision I had seen in the haze from

that little church above Locarno. Slowly that had passed into a

more elaborate legislative constructiveness, which had led to my

uneasy association with the Baileys and the professedly constructive

Young Liberals. To get that ordered life I had realised the need of

organisation, knowledge, expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated

methods. On the individual side I thought that a life of urgent

industry, temperance, and close attention was indicated by my

perception of these ends. I married Margaret and set to work. But

something in my mind refused from the outset to accept these

determinations as final. There was always a doubt lurking below,

always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a feeling of

vitally important omissions.

I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political

associates, and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow,

priggish, and unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were

attempting co-operation were preposterously irrelevant to their own

theories, that my political life didn't in some way comprehend more

than itself, that rather perplexingly I was missing the thing I was

seeking. Britten's footnotes to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits

of energetic planning, her quarrels and rallies and vanities, his

illuminating attacks on Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited

triviality of such Liberalism as the Children's Charter, served to

point my way to my present conclusions. I had been trying to deal

all along with human progress as something immediate in life,

something to be immediately attacked by political parties and groups

pointing primarily to that end. I now began to see that just as in

my own being there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, self-

seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled self-

consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely

growing unpublished personality behind him-my hinterland, I have

called it-so in human affairs generally the permanent reality is

also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws

continually upon human experience and influences human action more

and more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the

stage. It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a call. Now it

was just through the fact that our group about the Baileys didn't

understand this, that with a sort of frantic energy they were trying

to develop that sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate,

and direct the affairs of humanity, that the perplexing note of

silliness and shallowness that I had always felt and felt now most

acutely under Britten's gibes, came in. They were neglecting human

life altogether in social organisation.

In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of

statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and

all organising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange

and achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers,

leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that

they can think out the whole-or at any rate completely think out

definite parts-of the purpose and future of man, clearly and

finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that

assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions

of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training,

pruning, secretive education; and all the stupidities of self-

sufficient energy. In the passion of their good intentions they

have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress thought, crush

disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so

it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that

any extension of social organisation is at present achieved.

Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is

grasped, directly the dominating importance of this critical, less

personal, mental hinterland in the individual and of the collective

mind in the race is understood, the whole problem of the statesman

and his attitude towards politics gain a new significance, and