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 case 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 fifteen and we
were perfectly serious about it. We were not fools; it was simply that
as yet we had gathered no experience at all of the limits and powers of
legislation and conscious collective inten