kelmersdale
and all that Mrs. Skelmersdale symbolized. That would be just louting
from one bad thing to another. He had to settle Mrs. Skelmersdale clean
and right, and he had to do as exquisitely right in politics as he could
devise. If the public life of the country had got itself into a stupid
antagonism of two undesirable things, the only course for a sane man of
honour was to stand out from the parties and try and get them back to
sound issues again. There must be endless people of a mind with himself
in this matter. And even if there were not, if he was the only man in
the world, he still had to follow his lights and do the right. And his
business was to find out the right....

He came back from these imaginative excursions into contemporary
politics with one idea confirmed in his mind, an idea that had been
indeed already in his mind during his Cambridge days. This was the
idea of working out for himself, thoroughly and completely, a political
scheme, a theory of his work and duty in the world, a plan of the
world's future that should give a rule for his life. The Research
Magnificent was emerging. It was an alarmingly vast proposal, but he
could see no alternative but submission, a plebeian's submission to the
currents of life about him.

Little pictures began to flit before his imagination of the way in which
he might build up this tremendous inquiry. He would begin by hunting up
people, everybody who seemed to have ideas and promise ideas he would
get at. He would travel far--and exhaustively. He would, so soon as
the ideas seemed to indicate it, hunt out facts. He would learn how the
world was governed. He would learn how it did its thinking. He would
live sparingly. ("Not TOO sparingly," something interpolated.) He would
work ten or twelve hours a day. Such a course of investigation must
pass almost of its own accord into action and realization. He need not
trouble now how it would bring him into politics. Inevitably somewhere
it would bring him into politics. And he would travel. Almost at once
he would travel. It is the manifest duty of every young aristocrat to
travel. Here he was, ruling India. At any rate, passively, through the
mere fact of being English, he was ruling India. And he knew nothing of
India. He knew nothing indeed of Asia. So soon as he returned to London
his preparations for this travel must begin, he must plot out the men to
whom he would go, and so contrive that also he would go round