turned me round. It hasn't turned them.
I go East and they go West. And they don't want to be turned round.
Tremendously, they don't."

"Creative undertow," said Dr. Martineau, making notes, as it were.
"An increasing force in modern life. In the psychology of a new age
strengthened by education--it may play a directive part."

"They fight every little point. But, you see, because of this creative
undertow--if you like to call it that--we do get along. I am leader or
whipper-in, it is hard to say which, of a bolting flock....I believe
they will report for a permanent world commission; I believe I have got
them up to that; but they will want to make it a bureau of this League
of Nations, and I have the profoundest distrust of this League of
Nations. It may turn out to be a sort of side-tracking arrangement for
all sorts of important world issues. And they will find they have to
report for some sort of control. But there again they will shy. They
will report for it and then they will do their utmost to whittle it down
again. They will refuse it the most reasonable powers. They will alter
the composition of the Committee so as to make it innocuous."

"How?"

"Get rid of the independent scientific men, load it up so far as Britain
is concerned with muck of the colonial politician type and tame labour
representatives, balance with shady new adventurer millionaires, get in
still shadier stuff from abroad, let these gentry appoint their own tame
experts after their own hearts,--experts who will make merely advisory
reports, which will not be published...."

"They want in fact to keep the old system going under the cloak of YOUR
Committee, reduced to a cloak and nothing more?"

"That is what it amounts to. They want to have the air of doing
right--indeed they do want to have the FEEL of doing right--and still
leave things just exactly what they were before. And as I suffer under
the misfortune of seeing the thing rather more clearly, I have to
shepherd the conscience of the whole Committee.... But there is a
conscience there. If I can hold out myself, I can hold the Committee."

He turned appealingly to the doctor. "Why should I have to be the
conscience of that damned Committee? Why should I do this exhausting
inhuman job?.... In their hearts these others know.... Only they won't
know.... Why should it fall on me?"

"You have to go through with it," said Dr. Martineau.

"I have to go through with it, but it's a hell