their developing, to lessen misery, to broaden and exalt life. It

is very hard-perhaps it is impossible-to present in a page or two

the substance and quality of nearly a month's conversation,

conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that ranges

carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly

resuming a constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and

jest and go and come back, and all the while build.

We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose

beneath all its varied aspects must needs be order and discipline.

"Muddle," said I, "is the enemy." That remains my belief to this

day. Clearness and order, light and foresight, these things I know

for Good. It was muddle had just given us all the still freshly

painful disasters and humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us

the visibly sprawling disorder of our cities and industrial country-

side, muddle that gives us the waste of life, the limitations,

wretchedness and unemployment of the poor. Muddle! I remember

myself quoting Kipling-

"All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,

All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less."

"We build the state," we said over and over again. "That is what we

are for-servants of the new reorganisation!"

We planned half in earnest and half Utopianising, a League of Social

Service.

We talked of the splendid world of men that might grow out of such

unpaid and ill-paid work as we were setting our faces to do. We

spoke of the intricate difficulties, the monstrous passive

resistances, the hostilities to such a development as we conceived

our work subserved, and we spoke with that underlying confidence in

the invincibility of the causes we adopted that is natural to young

and scarcely tried men.

We talked much of the detailed life of politics so far as it was

known to us, and there Willersley was more experienced and far

better informed than I; we discussed possible combinations and

possible developments, and the chances of some great constructive

movement coming from the heart-searchings the Boer war had

occasioned. We would sink to gossip-even at the Suetonius level.

Willersley would decline towards illuminating anecdotes that I

capped more or less loosely from my private reading. We were

particularly wise, I remember, upon the management of newspapers,

because about that we knew nothing whatever. We perceived that

great things were to be done through newspapers. We talked of

swaying opinion and moving great classes to massive action.

Men are egotistical even in devotion. All our splendid projects

were thickset with the first personal pronoun. We both could write,

and all that we said in general terms was reflected in the

particular in our minds; it was ourselves we saw, and no others,

writing and speaking that moving word. We had already produced

manuscript and passed the initiations of proof reading; I had been a

frequent speaker in the Union, and Willersley was an active man on

the School Board. Our feet were already on the lower rungs that led

up and up. He was six and twenty, and I twenty-two. We intimated

our individual careers in terms of bold expectation. I had

prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardings clamorous with "Vote for

Remington," and Willersley no doubtsawhimself chairman of this

committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical words after the

declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendly beside me on the

government benches. There was nothing impossible in such dreams.

Why not the Board of Education for him? My preference at that time

wavered between the Local Government Board-I had great ideas about

town-planning, about revisions of municipal areas and re-organised

internal transit-and the War Office. I swayed strongly towards the

latter as the journey progressed. My educational bias came later.

The swelling ambitions that have tramped over Alpine passes! How

many of them, like mine, have come almost within sight of

realisation before they failed?

There were times when we posed like young gods (of unassuming

exterior), and times when we were full of the absurdest little

solicitudes about our prospects. There were times when one surveyed

the whole world of men as if it was a little thing at one's feet,

and by way of contrast I remember once lying in bed-it must have

been during this holiday, though I cannot for the life of me fix

where-and speculating whether perhaps some day I might not be a

K. C. B., Sir Richard Remington, K. C. B., M. P.

But the big style prevailed…

We could not tell from minute to minute whether we were planning for

a world of solid reality, or telling ourselves fairy tales about

this prospect of life. So much seemed possible, and everything we

could think of so improbable. There were lapses when it seemed to

me I could never be anything but just the entirely unimportant and

undistinguished young man I was for ever and ever. I couldn't even

think of myself as five and thirty.

Once I remember Willersley going over a list of failures, and why