progress is
secondary and dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams of efficient
machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no free-moving brains
behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid ugliness,--that's all.
No doubt things are moving from looseness to discipline, and from
irresponsible controls to organised controls--and also and rather
contrariwise everything is becoming as people say, democratised; but
all the more need in that, for an ark in which the living element may be
saved."

"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing.

It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became
noticeable. He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult that
he didn't get said at all on that occasion. "We could do immense things
with a weekly," he repeated, echoing Neal, I think. And there he left
off and became a mute expressiveness, and it was only afterwards, when I
was in bed, that I saw we had our capitalist in our hands....

We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow--but in that
sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration, and it
was some months before I made my decision to follow up the indications
of that opening talk.

5

I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle. In my
developments it played a large part, not so much by starting new trains
of thought as by confirming the practicability of things I had already
hesitatingly entertained. Discussion with these other men so prominently
involved in current affairs endorsed views that otherwise would have
seemed only a little less remote from actuality than the guardians of
Plato or the labour laws of More. Among other questions that were never
very distant from our discussions, that came apt to every topic, was
the true significance of democracy, Tariff Reform as a method of
international hostility, and the imminence of war. On the first issue
I can still recall little Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that
democracy was really just a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances
of the expert official by means of the polling booth. "If they don't
like things," said he, "they can vote for the opposition candidate
and see what happens then--and that, you see, is why we don't want
proportional representation to let in the wild men." I opened my
eyes--the lids had dropped for a moment under the caress of those smooth
sounds--to see if Bailey's artful forefinger wasn't at the side of his
pr