CHAPTER THE SECOND
SEEKING ASSOCIATES
1
I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits
of party Liberalism. In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy.
Regarding the development of the social and individual mental
hinterland as the essential thing in human progress, I passed on
very naturally to the practical assumption that we wanted what I may
call "hinterlanders." Of course I do not mean by aristocracy the
changing unorganised medley of rich people and privileged people who
dominate the civilised world of to-day, but as opposed to this, a
possibility of co-ordinating the will of the finer individuals, by
habit and literature, into a broad common aim. We must have an
aristocracy-not of privilege, but of understanding and purpose-or
mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and more clearly when I
look through my various writings of the years between 1903 and 1910.
I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908.
I reasoned after this fashion. The line of human improvement and
the expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and
finer initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far
beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot collectively
invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, broader scale
than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very
much finer order or any more general happiness than it now enjoys.
We must believe, therefore, that it CAN develop such a training and
education, or we must abandon secular constructive hope. And here
my peculiar difficulty as against crude democracy comes in. If
humanity at large is capable of that high education and those
creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better and
more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have power and
leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals, cannot
be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of
humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what has
become my general conception in politics, the conception of the
constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful
people, clever people, enterprising people, influential people,
amidst whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-
conscious, highly selective, open-minded, devoted aristocratic
culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in the
development of human affairs. I see human progress, not as the
spontaneous product of crowds of raw minds swayed by elementary
needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human
interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and
acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified and
redirected by literature and art…
But now the reader will understand how it came about that,
disappointed by the essential littleness of Liberalism, and
disillusioned about the representative quality of the professed
Socialists, I turned my mind more and more to a scrutiny of the big
people, the wealthy and influential people, against whom Liberalism
pits its forces. I was asking myself definitely whether, after all,
it was not my particular job to work through them and not against
them. Was I not altogether out of my element as an Anti-? Weren't
there big bold qualities about these people that common men lack,
and the possibility of far more splendid dreams? Were they really
the obstacles, might they not be rather the vehicles of the possible
new braveries of life?
2
The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough. The
conception of the Boer War had been clumsy and puerile, the costly
errors of that struggle appalling, and the subsequent campaign of
Mr. Chamberlain for Tariff Reform seemed calculated to combine the
financial adventurers of the Empire in one vast conspiracy against
the consumer. The cant of Imperialism was easy to learn and use; it
was speedily adopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned to
all sorts of base ends. But a big child is permitted big mischief,
and my mind was now continually returning to the persuasion that
after all in some development of the idea of Imperial patriotism
might be found that wide, rough, politically acceptable expression
of a constructive dream capable of sustaining a great educational
and philosophical movement such as no formula of Liberalism
supplied. The fact that it readily took vulgar forms only witnessed
to its strong popular appeal. Mixed in with the noisiness and
humbug of the movement there appeared a real regard for social
efficiency, a realspirit of animation and enterprise. There
suddenly appeared in my world-I saw them first, I think, in 1908-a
new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the
slouching, cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small
boy in a khaki hat, and with bare knees and athletic bearing,
earnestly engaged in wholesome and invigorating games up to and
occasionally a little beyond his strength-the Boy Scout. I liked
the Boy Scout, and I find it difficult to express how much it
mattered to me, with my growing bias in favour of deliberate
national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able to produce, and
had indeed never attempted to produce, anything of this kind.