f crowds of raw
minds swayed by elementary needs, but as a natural but elaborate result
of intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity
liberated and acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified
and redirected by literature and art....

But now the reader will understand how it came about that, disappointed
by the essential littleness of Liberalism, and disillusioned about the
representative quality of the professed Socialists, I turned my
mind more and more to a scrutiny of the big people, the wealthy and
influential people, against whom Liberalism pits its forces. I was
asking myself definitely whether, after all, it was not my particular
job to work through them and not against them. Was I not altogether out
of my element as an Anti-? Weren't there big bold qualities about these
people that common men lack, and the possibility of far more splendid
dreams? Were they really the obstacles, might they not be rather the
vehicles of the possible new braveries of life?

2

The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough. The
conception of the Boer War had been clumsy and puerile, the costly
errors of that struggle appalling, and the subsequent campaign of Mr.
Chamberlain for Tariff Reform seemed calculated to combine the financial
adventurers of the Empire in one vast conspiracy against the consumer.
The cant of Imperialism was easy to learn and use; it was speedily
adopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned to all sorts of base
ends. But a big child is permitted big mischief, and my mind was
now continually returning to the persuasion that after all in some
development of the idea of Imperial patriotism might be found that wide,
rough, politically acceptable expression of a constructive dream capable
of sustaining a great educational and philosophical movement such as
no formula of Liberalism supplied. The fact that it readily took vulgar
forms only witnessed to its strong popular appeal. Mixed in with the
noisiness and humbug of the movement there appeared a real regard for
social efficiency, a real spirit of animation and enterprise. There
suddenly appeared in my world--I saw them first, I think, in 1908--a
new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the slouching,
cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small boy in a khaki
hat, and with bare knees and athletic bearing, earnestly engaged in
wholesome and invigorating games up to and oc