tage; claim to be pure
hinterland. That is what bothered me about Codger, about those various
schoolmasters who had prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their
dream of an official ruling class. A human being who is a philosopher
in the first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the
first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like gifts
to the pretence--a quack. These are attempts to live deep-side
shallow, inside out. They produce merely a new pettiness. To understand
Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to join a
Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not even
tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for which it
stands....

I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here. It had taken me
some years to realise the true relation of the great constructive ideas
that swayed me not only to political parties, but to myself. I had
been disposed to identify the formulae of some one party with social
construction, and to regard the other as necessarily anti-constructive,
just as I had been inclined to follow the Baileys in the
self-righteousness of supposing myself to be wholly constructive. But I
saw now that every man of intellectual freedom and vigour is necessarily
constructive-minded nowadays, and that no man is disinterestedly so.
Each one of us repeats in himself the conflict of the race between the
splendour of its possibilities and its immediate associations. We may be
shaping immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong,
and have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a man
counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but
for his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are held
together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the stabler bond
of an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for progress in general, and
nearly everybody is opposed to any change, except in so far as gross
increments are change, in his particular method of living and behaviour.
Every party stands essentially for the interests and mental usages of
some definite class or group of classes in the exciting community, and
every party has its scientific-minded and constructive leading section,
with well-defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a
public-spirited form, and its superficial-minded following confessing
its meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No class will