what I'm up
against. You don't know the job I have to do. You don't know what a
Commission of that sort is. The moral tangle of it. You don't know how
its possibilities and limitations are canvassed and schemed about, long
before a single member is appointed. Old Cassidy worked the whole thing
with the prime minister. I can see that now as plain as daylight. I
might have seen it at first.... Three experts who'd been got at; they
thought _I_'d been got at; two Labour men who'd do anything you wanted
them to do provided you called them 'level-headed.' Wagstaffe the
socialist art critic who could be trusted to play the fool and make
nationalization look silly, and the rest mine owners, railway managers,
oil profiteers, financial adventurers...."

He was fairly launched. "It's the blind folly of it! In the days before
the war it was different. Then there was abundance. A little grabbing
or cornering was all to the good. All to the good. It prevented things
being used up too fast. And the world was running by habit; the inertia
was tremendous. You could take all sorts of liberties. But all this
is altered. We're living in a different world. The public won't stand
things it used to stand. It's a new public. It's--wild. It'll smash up
the show if they go too far. Everything short and running shorter--food,
fuel, material. But these people go on. They go on as though nothing had
changed.... Strikes, Russia, nothing will warn them. There are men on
that Commission who would steal the brakes off a mountain railway just
before they went down in it.... It's a struggle with suicidal imbeciles.
It's--! But I'm talking! I didn't come here to talk Fuel."

"You think there may be a smash-up?"

"I lie awake at night, thinking of it."

"A social smash-up."

"Economic. Social. Yes. Don't you?"

"A social smash-up seems to me altogether a possibility. All sorts of
people I find think that," said the doctor. "All sorts of people lie
awake thinking of it."

"I wish some of my damned Committee would!"

The doctor turned his eyes to the window. "I lie awake too," he said and
seemed to reflect. But he was observing his patient acutely--with his
ears.

"But you see how important it is," said Sir Richmond, and left his
sentence unfinished.

"I'll do what I can for you," said the doctor, and considered swiftly
what line of talk he had best follow.

Section 2

"This sense of a coming smash is epidemic," said the doctor. "It's at
the