reluctant, protesting business employee. We imaginative people
are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only in rare moods of bitter
penetration that we pierce down to the baser lusts, the viler shames,
the everlasting lying and muddle-headed self-justification of the dull.

I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see others of him and
others. What did he think he was up to? Did he for a moment realise that
his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with me meant, if it
had any rational meaning at all, that we were jointly doing something
with the nation and the empire and mankind?... How on earth could any
one get hold of him, make any noble use of him? He didn't read beyond
his newspaper. He never thought, but only followed imaginings in his
heart. He never discussed. At the first hint of discussion his temper
gave way. He was, I knew, a deep, thinly-covered tank of resentments
and quite irrational moral rages. Yet withal I would have to resist an
impulse to go over to him and nudge him and say to him, "Look here!
What indeed do you think we are doing with the nation and the empire and
mankind? You know--MANKIND!"

I wonder what reply I should have got.

So far as any average could be struck and so far as any backbone could
be located, it seemed to me that this silent, shy, replete, sub-angry,
middle-class sentimentalist was in his endless species and varieties and
dialects the backbone of our party. So far as I could be considered as
representing anything in the House, I pretended to sit for the elements
of HIM....

7

For a time I turned towards the Socialists. They at least had an air of
coherent intentions. At that time Socialism had come into politics again
after a period of depression and obscurity, with a tremendous ECLAT.
There was visibly a following of Socialist members to Chris Robinson;
mysteriously uncommunicative gentlemen in soft felt hats and short
coats and square-toed boots who replied to casual advances a little
surprisingly in rich North Country dialects. Members became aware of a
"seagreen incorruptible," as Colonel Marlow put it to me, speaking on
the Address, a slender twisted figure supporting itself on a stick and
speaking with a fire that was altogether revolutionary. This was Philip
Snowden, the member for Blackburn. They had come in nearly forty
strong altogether, and with an air of presently meaning to come in much
stronger. They were only one aspect of what seeme