o risk a worse disaster--or do something patently
futile."

"I don't follow that," said Chris Robinson. "We don't propose anything
futile, so far as I can see."

6

The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism
but Kiplingism. Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic
professions. And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly
Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the "White Man's
Burden."

It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that
period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively mocked,
criticised and torn to shreds;--never was a man so violently exalted and
then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the middle
nineties this spectacled and moustached little figure with its heavy
chin and its general effect of vehement gesticulation, its wild shouts
of boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in the
sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderful
discovery of machinery and cotton waste and the under officer and the
engineer, and "shop" as a poetic dialect, became almost a national
symbol. He got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and
haunting quotations, he stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations,
he coloured the very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax
with his "Recessional," while I was still an undergraduate.

What did he give me exactly?

He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he provided
phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion and organised
effort the Socialism of our time failed to express, that the current
socialist movement still fails, I think, to express. The sort of thing
that follows, for example, tore something out of my inmost nature and
gave it a shape, and I took it back from him shaped and let much of
the rest of him, the tumult and the bullying, the hysteria and the
impatience, the incoherence and inconsistency, go uncriticised for the
sake of it:--

"Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience--Clear the land of evil,
drive the road and bridge the ford, Make ye sure to each his own That he
reap where he hath sown; By the peace among Our peoples let men know we
serve the Lord!"

And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my mind,
sticks there now as quintessential wisdom:

"The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;
'E don't obey no or