e soundly good, or a thousand bad lives, if you like,
lives which are thoroughly bad--that's the old and perpetual choice,
that has always been--but what is more evident to me and more remarkable
and disconcerting is that there are nowadays ten thousand muddled lives
lacking even so much moral definition, even so much consistency as is
necessary for us to call them either good or bad, there are planless
indeterminate lives, more and more of them, opening out as the possible
lives before us, a perfect wilderness between salvation and damnation,
a wilderness so vast and crowded that at last it seems as though the
way to either hell or heaven would be lost in its interminable futility.
Such planless indeterminate lives, plebeian lives, mere lives, fill the
world, and the spectacle of whole nations, our whole civilization, seems
to me to re-echo this planlessness, this indeterminate confusion of
purpose. Plain issues are harder and harder to find, it is as if they
had disappeared. Simple living is the countryman come to town. We are
deafened and jostled and perplexed. There are so many things afoot that
we get nothing....

"That is what is in my mind when I tell you that we have to gather
ourselves together much more than we think. We have to clench ourselves
upon a chosen end. We have to gather ourselves together out of the swill
of this brimming world.

"Or--we are lost...."

("Swill of this brimming world," said White. "Some of this sounds
uncommonly like Prothero." He mused for a moment and then resumed his
reading.)

"That is what I was getting at when, three years ago, I made an attack
upon Democracy to the mother society of this society, an attack that I
expressed ill and failed to drive home. That is what I have come down
now to do my best to make plainer. This age of confusion is Democracy;
it is all that Democracy can ever give us. Democracy, if it means
anything, means the rule of the planless man, the rule of the unkempt
mind. It means as a necessary consequence this vast boiling up of
collectively meaningless things.

"What is the quality of the common man, I mean of the man that is common
to all of us, the man who is the Standard for such men as Carnac,
the man who seems to be the ideal of the Catholic Democrat? He is the
creature of a few fundamental impulses. He begins in blind imitation of
the life about him. He lusts and takes a wife, he hungers and tills
a field or toils in some other way to earn a