ink that,
for instance, paper supply concerned us, for we use cruel quantities,
yet no recognised author sat on the commission; a publisher was the
nearest approach. Apparently there were two great consumers of paper,
authors and grocers, but alone the grocers were consulted. What is the
matter with us? Is our crime that we put down in indecent ink what we
think and feel, while other people think and feel the same, but
prudently keep it down? Possibly our crimes are our imagination and our
tendency to carry this imagination into action. Bismarck said that a
State conducted on the lines of the Sermon on the Mount would not last
twenty-four hours; perhaps it is thought that a State in the conduct of
which a novelist had a share would immediately resolve itself into a
problem play. Something like that, though in fact it is unlikely that
Ariel come to judgment would be much more fanciful in his decrees than
the historic Solomon.

All this because we lack solidity ... and yet the public calls us
commercial, self-advertisers, money-grubbers. It is thought base that we
should want three meals a day, though nobody suggests that we can hope
to find manna in the street, or drink in our parks from the fountain
Hippocrene. We are told that we make our contracts too keenly, that we
are grasping, that we are not straight ... and yet we are told that we
are not business men. What are we to do? Shall we form a trade union and
establish a piece rate? Shall we sell our novels by the yard? May we not
be as commercial and respected as the doctor who heals with words and
the lawyer who strangles with tape? Now and then the defences of
society and state are breached, and a novelist enters Parliament. Mr
Hilaire Belloc, Mr A. E. W. Mason, followed Disraeli into the House of
Commons, but it is very extraordinary. No one knows how these gentlemen
managed to convince the electors that with their eye 'in fine frenzy
rolling' they would not scandalise their party by voting against it.
(Those writing chaps, you know, they aren't _safe_!)

It must be said that in Parliament the novelists did not have a very
good time; they were lucky in having been preferred to a landowner or a
pawnbroker, but once in they had not the slightest chance of being
preferred to those estimable members of society. It was not a question
of straight votes; it never came to that, for Mr Belloc soon disagreed
with both sides and became a party of one, while Mr A. E. W. Mason