emerges. Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and

almost consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all

the necessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march

with that. For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing.

Build your ship of state as you will; get your men as you will; I

concentrate on what is clearly the affair of my sort of man,-I want

to ensure the quality of the quarter deck."

"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, suddenly-his first remark for a long

time. "A first-rate figure," said Shoesmith, gripping it.

"Our danger is in missing that," I went on. "Muddle isn't ended by

transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed

many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of

a bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the

liberal imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except

a rise in the level of its free intellectual activity. All other

progress is secondary and dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams

of efficient machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no

free-moving brains behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid

ugliness,-that's all. No doubt things are moving from looseness to

discipline, and from irresponsible controls to organised controls-

and also and rather contrariwise everything is becoming as people

say, democratised; but all the more need in that, for an ark in

which the living element may be saved."

"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing.

It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became

noticeable. He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult

that he didn't get said at all on that occasion. "We could do

immense things with a weekly," he repeated, echoing Neal, I think.

And there he left off and became a mute expressiveness, and it was

only afterwards, when I was in bed, that I saw we had our capitalist

in our hands…

We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow-but in

that sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration,

and it was some months before I made my decision to follow up the

indications of that opening talk.

5

I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle. In my

developments it played a large part, not so much by starting new

trains of thought as by confirming the practicability of things I

had already hesitatingly entertained. Discussion with these other

men so prominently involved in current affairs endorsed views that

otherwise would have seemed only a little less remote from actuality

than the guardians of Plato or the labour laws of More. Among other

questions that were never very distant from our discussions, that

came apt to every topic, was the true significance of democracy,

Tariff Reform as a method of international hostility, and the

imminence of war. On the first issue I can still recall little

Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that democracy was really just

a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances of the expert official

by means of the polling booth. "If they don't like things," said

he, "they can vote for the opposition candidate and see what happens

then-and that, you see, is why we don't want proportional

representation to let in the wild men." I opened my eyes-the lids

had dropped for a moment under the caress of those smooth sounds-to

see if Bailey's artful forefinger wasn't at the side of his

predominant nose.

The international situation exercised us greatly. Our meetings were

pervaded by the feeling that all things moved towards a day of

reckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up

the suggestion that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium,

that sooner or later something must happen there-something very

serious to our Empire. Dayton frankly detested these topics. He

was full of that old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is

inconvenient or disagreeable to the English mind could be

annihilated by not thinking about it. He used to sit low in his

chair and look mulish. "Militarism," he would declare in a tone of

the utmost moral fervour, is a curse. It's an unmitigated curse."

Then he would cough shortly and twitch his head back and frown, and

seem astonished beyond measure that after this conclusive statement

we could still go on talking of war.

All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international

conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses

that had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental

journey with Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors."

That quite justifiable dread of a punishment for all the slackness,

mental dishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and

sentimentalised commercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands

of the better organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly

civilised peoples of Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a

good and bad series of consequences. It seemed the only thing

capable of bracing English minds to education, sustained