f development I perceive now there must have
been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself all
the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious impulses,
utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the statesman's
idea, that idea of social service which is the protagonist of my story,
that real though complex passion for Making, making widely and greatly,
cities, national order, civilisation, whose interplay with all those
other factors in life I have set out to present. It was growing in
me--as one's bones grow, no man intending it.

I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of
disorderliness, the conception of social life as being a multitudinous
confusion out of hand, came to me. One always of course simplifies these
things in the telling, but I do not think I ever saw the world at large
in any other terms. I never at any stage entertained the idea
which sustained my mother, and which sustains so many people in the
world,--the idea that the universe, whatever superficial discords it
may present, is as a matter of fact "all right," is being steered to
definite ends by a serene and unquestionable God. My mother thought that
Order prevailed, and that disorder was just incidental and foredoomed
rebellion; I feel and have always felt that order rebels against and
struggles against disorder, that order has an up-hill job, in gardens,
experiments, suburbs, everything alike; from the very beginnings of my
experience I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping from
control.

The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind was
presently swimming made all in the same direction; in place of my
mother's attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible
Providence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existence and the
survival not of the Best--that was nonsense, but of the fittest to
survive.

The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of the Individualist's
LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me. I disliked Herbert Spencer all my life
until I read his autobiography, and then I laughed a little and loved
him. I remember as early as the City Merchants' days how Britten and I
scoffed at that pompous question-begging word "Evolution," having, so to
speak, found it out. Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at
the Britten lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke
and skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came