WERE a damned lot, Margaret!"

I looked up at the little noise she made. "TWICE!" she said, smiling
indulgently, "to-day!" (Even the smile was Altiora's.)

I returned to my thoughts. They WERE a damned human lot. It was an
excellent word in that connection....

But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men's
brains were no more than stepping-stones, just as though some great
brain in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinking
them!...

"I don't think there is a man among them who makes me feel he is
trustworthy," said Margaret; "unless it is Featherstonehaugh."

I sat taking in this proposition.

"They'll never help us, I feel," said Margaret.

"Us?"

"The Liberals."

"Oh, damn the Liberals!" I said. "They'll never even help themselves."

"I don't think I could possibly get on with any of those people," said
Margaret, after a pause.

She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel, perplexed
by me, but I wanted to go on with my thinking, and so I did not look up,
and presently she stooped to my forehead and kissed me and went rustling
softly to her room.

I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts crystallising
out....

It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly how that
opposition to which I have already alluded of the immediate life and the
mental hinterland of a man, can be applied to public and social affairs.
The ideas go on--and no person or party succeeds in embodying them. The
reality of human progress never comes to the surface, it is a power
in the deeps, an undertow. It goes on in silence while men think, in
studies where they write self-forgetfully, in laboratories under the
urgency of an impersonal curiosity, in the rare illumination of honest
talk, in moments of emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not
in everyday affairs. Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everyday
affair, are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits,
interests, usage. Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation, personal
feeling, are their substance. No man can abolish his immediate self and
specialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he simply turns himself
into something a little less than the common man. He may have an immense
hinterland, but that does not absolve him from a frontage. That is the
essential error of the specialist philosopher, the specialist teacher,
the specialist publicist. They repudiate fron