Providence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existenc and the

survival not of the Best-that was nonsense, but of the fittest to

survive.

The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of the

Individualist's LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me. I disliked Herbert

Spencer all my life until I read his autobiography, and then I

laughed a little and loved him. I remember as early as the City

Merchants' days how Britten and I scoffed at that pompous question-

begging word "Evolution," having, so to speak, found it out.

Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at the Britten

lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke and

skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into things only

through the struggling mind of man. That lit things wonderfully for

us. When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly clear that life was

a various and splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man

sets itself to tame. I have never since fallen away from that

persuasion.

I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these

conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen

or nineteen. I know men and women vary very much in these matters,

just as children do in learning to talk. Some will chatter at

eighteen months and some will hardly speak until three, and the

thing has very little to do with their subsequent mental quality.

So it is with young people; some will begin their religious, their

social, their sexual interests at fourteen, some not until far on in

the twenties. Britten and I belonged to one of the precocious

types, and Cossington very probably to another. It wasn't that

there was anything priggish about any of us; we should have been

prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests and ape the

theoretical boy.

The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still

centres there; the real and present world, that is to say, as

distinguished from the wonder-lands of atomic and microscopic

science and the stars and future time. I had travelled scarcely at

all, I had never crossed the Channel, but I had read copiously and I

had formed a very good working idea of this round globe with its

mountains and wildernesses and forests and all the sorts and

conditions of human life that were scattered over its surface. It

was all alive, I felt, and changing every day; how it was changing,

and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind beyond

measure.

I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to

the Ancients, and I wish I could now without any suspicion of self-

deception write down compactly the world as it was known to me at

nineteen. So far as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the

world I know now at forty-two; I had practically all the mountains

and seas, boundaries and races, products and possibilities that I

have now. But its intension was very different. All the interval

has been increasing and deepening my social knowledge, replacing

crude and second-hand impressions by felt and realised distinctions.

In 1895-that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to

Cambridge in September-my vision of the world had much the same

relation to the vision I have to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a

mask has to the direct vision of a human face. Britten and I looked

at our world and saw-what did we see? Forms and colours side by

side that we had no suspicion were interdependent. We had no

conception of the roots of things nor of the reaction of things. It

did not seem to us, for example, that business had anything to do

with government, or that money and means affected the heroic issues

of war. There were no wagons in our war game, and where there were

guns, there it was assumed the ammunition was gathered together.

Finance again was a sealed book to us; we did not so much connect it

with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as a sort of

intrusive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-minded men.

We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how "interests"

came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by purely

intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest or

dishonest (in which ease they deserved to be shot), good or bad. We

knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a

whole nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition. We

were capable of the most incongruous transfers from the scroll of

history to our own times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and

Hampstead burnt in civil wars for the succession to the throne, or

Cheapside a lane of death and the front of the Mansion House set

about with guillotines in the course of an accurately transposed

French Revolution. We rebuilt London by Act of Parliament, and once

in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred its population EN

MASSE to the North Downs by an order of the Local Government Board.

We thought nothing of throwing religious organisations out of

employment or superseding all the newspapers by freely distributed

bulletins. We could contemplate the possibility of laws abolishing

whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful and

orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul's

Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill,-a close and

not unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading. I

remember quite distinctly evolving that vision. We were then fully