hat; my interlocutors would insist upon telling me just what they would
like to do or just what they would like to see done to stop-the-war
pacifists and conscientious objectors; pleasant rather than fruitful
imaginative exercises from which I could effect no more than
platitudinous uplifts.

But the general drift of such talks as did seem to penetrate the
question was this, that among these stop-the-war people there are really
three types. First there is a type of person who hates violence and
the infliction of pain under any circumstances, and who have a mystical
belief in the rightness (and usually the efficacy) of non-resistance.
These are generally Christians, and then their cardinal text is the
instruction to "turn the other cheek." Often they are Quakers. If they
are consistent they are vegetarians and wear _Lederlos_ boots. They do
not desire police protection for their goods. They stand aloof from all
the force and conflict of life. They have always done so. This is an
understandable and respectable type. It has numerous Hindu equivalents.
It is a type that finds little difficulty about exemptions--provided the
individual has not been too recently converted to his present habits.
But it is not the prevalent type in stop-the-war circles. Such genuine
ascetics do not number more than a thousand or so, all three of our
western allied countries. The mass of the stop-the-war people is made up
quite other elements.

2

In the complex structure of the modern community there are two groups
or strata or pockets in which the impulse of social obligation, the
gregarious sense of a common welfare, is at its lowest; one of these is
the class of the Resentful Employee, the class of people who, without
explanation, adequate preparation or any chance, have been shoved at an
early age into uncongenial work and never given a chance to escape, and
the other is the class of people with small fixed incomes or with small
salaries earnt by routine work, or half independent people practising
some minor artistic or literary craft, who have led uneventful,
irresponsible lives from their youth up, and never came at any point
into relations of service to the state. This latter class was more
difficult to define than the former--because it is more various within
itself. My French friends wanted to talk of the "Psychology of the
Rentier." I was for such untranslatable phrases as the "Genteel Whig,"
or the "Donnish Liberal." But I lit u