would make food dearer for the agricultural
labourer. I began to speak of Mr. Alfred Lyttelton as an influence at
once insane and diabolical, as a man inspired by a passionate desire
to substitute manacled but still criminal Chinese for honest British
labourers throughout the world. And when it came to the mention of our
own kindly leader, of Mr. John Burns or any one else of any prominence
at all on our side I fell more and more into the intonation of one who
mentions the high gods. And I had my reward in brighter meetings and
readier and readier applause.

One goes on from phase to phase in these things.

"After all," I told myself, "if one wants to get to Westminster one must
follow the road that leads there," but I found the road nevertheless
rather unexpectedly distasteful. "When one gets there," I said, "then it
is one begins."

But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache and
fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and wondering
how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great political
ideals. Why should political work always rot down to personalities and
personal appeals in this way? Life is, I suppose, to begin with and
end with a matter of personalities, from personalities all our broader
interests arise and to personalities they return. All our social and
political effort, all of it, is like trying to make a crowd of people
fall into formation. The broader lines appear, but then come a rush
and excitement and irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order has
vanished and the marshals must begin the work over again!

My memory of all that time is essentially confusion. There was a
frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead
Division is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled
cross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to
the eye in a muddy winter. It is sufficiently near to London to
have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that made
Bromstead the place it is. Several of its overgrown villages have
developed strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines, and
there is an abundance of petty villas. There seemed to be no place
at which one could take hold of more than this or that element of the
population. Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic Hall or
Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking in the
dinner hour outside gas-works and groups of fac