a day pass without an ugly
caricature of him. What I object to in this is that it is talking
Brummagem--it is not "devising liberal things" but spiteful,
superficial, illiberal things. It is claptrap and temporary
deception of the "Patriotism before Politics" order. . . .

To all this you will say there is an obvious answer. The _Speaker_
is a party paper and does not profess to be otherwise. But here I am
sure we are mistaking our mission. What the _Speaker_ is (I hope and
believe) destined to do, is to renovate Liberalism, and though
Liberalism (like every other party) is often conducted by claptrap,
it has never been renovated by claptrap, but by great command of
temper and the persistent exposition of persuasive and unanswerable
truths. It is while we are in the desert that we have the vision: we
being a minority, must be all philosophers: we must think for both
parties in the State. It is no good our devoting ourselves to the
flowers of mob oratory with no mob to address them to. We must, like
the Free Traders, for instance, have discoveries, definite truths and
endless patience in explaining them. We must be more than a political
party or we shall cease to be one. Time and again in history victory
has come to a little party with big ideas: but can anyone conceive
anything with the mark of death more on its brow than a little party
with little ideas?*

[* Undated, handwritten letter in a notebook.]

Such Liberalism was not perhaps of this world. It certainly was not
of the Liberal Party!

Gilbert argued much with himself during these years. He had come out
of his time of trial with firm faith in God and in man. But his
philosophy was still in the making, and he made it largely out of the
material supplied by ordinary London suburban society and by the
rather less usual society of cranks and enthusiasts so plentiful at
the end of the nineteenth century. He has written in the
_Autobiography_ of the artistic and dilettante groups where everyone
discussed religion and no one practised it, of the Christian
Socialists and other societies into which he and Cecil found their
way, and of some of the friendships they formed. Among these one of
the closest was with Conrad Noel who wrote in answer to my request
for his recollections:

We met G.K.C. for the first time at the Stapleys' in Bloomsbury
Square, at a series of meetings of the Christo-Theosophi