little cells and corpuscles in
some great brain beyond our understanding....

So it was I sat and thought my problem out.... I still remember my
satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last. It was like clouds
dispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas, of course, couldn't hold
a party together alone, "interests and habits, not ideas," I had that
now, and so the great constructive scheme of Socialism, invading and
inspiring all parties, was necessarily claimed only by this collection
of odds and ends, this residuum of disconnected and exceptional people.
This was true not only of the Socialist idea, but of the scientific
idea, the idea of veracity--of human confidence in humanity--of all that
mattered in human life outside the life of individuals.... The only real
party that would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that
in the entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive
attack on property. Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and
claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted
anything in the world.

Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it
before?... I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.

I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed.

9

My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to the
final convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of my dream
of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and administered
territories--the vision I had seen in the haze from that little church
above Locarno. Slowly that had passed into a more elaborate legislative
constructiveness, which had led to my uneasy association with the
Baileys and the professedly constructive Young Liberals. To get that
ordered life I had realised the need of organisation, knowledge,
expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated methods. On the individual
side I thought that a life of urgent industry, temperance, and close
attention was indicated by my perception of these ends. I married
Margaret and set to work. But something in my mind refused from the
outset to accept these determinations as final. There was always a doubt
lurking below, always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a
feeling of vitally important omissions.

I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political associates,
and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow, priggish, and
unreal, that the Socialists with whom we we