osal was the one vitalizing
conviction in modern initiative:--indisputably it would pay, _it would
pay_!...

The human mind has a much more complex and fluctuating process than most
of those explanatory people who write about psychology would have us
believe. Instead of that simple, direct movement, like the movement of a
point, forward and from here to there, one's thoughts advance like an
army, sometimes extended over an enormous front, sometimes in echelon,
sometimes bunched in a column throwing out skirmishing clouds of
emotion, some flying and soaring, some crawling, some stopping and
dying.... In this matter of Labor, for example, I have thought so much,
thought over the ground again and again, come into it from this way and
from that way, that for the life of me I find it impossible to state at
all clearly how much I made of these questions during that Johannesburg
time. I cannot get back into those ancient ignorances, revive my old
astonishments and discoveries. Certainly I envisaged the whole process
much less clearly than I do now, ignored difficulties that have since
entangled me, regarded with a tremendous perplexity aspects that have
now become lucidly plain. I came back to England confused, and doing
what confused people are apt to do, clinging to an inadequate phrase
that seemed at any rate to define a course of action. The word
"efficiency" had got hold of me. All our troubles came, one assumed,
from being "inefficient." One turned towards politics with a bustling
air, and was all for fault-finding and renovation.

I sit here at my desk, pen in hand, and trace figures on the
blotting-paper, and wonder how much I understood at that time. I came
back to England to work on the side of "efficiency," that is quite
certain. A little later I was writing articles and letters about it, so
that much is documented. But I think I must have apprehended too by that
time some vague outline at least of those wider issues in the saecular
conflict between the new forms of human association and the old, to
which contemporary politics and our national fate are no more than
transitory eddies and rufflings of the surface waters. It was all so
nakedly plain there. On the one hand was the primordial, on the other
the rankly new. The farm on the veld stood on the veld, a thing of the
veld, a thing rooted and established there and nowhere else. The dusty,
crude, brick-field desolation of the Rand on the other hand did not
reall