re attempting co-operation
were preposterously irrelevant to their own theories, that my political
life didn't in some way comprehend more than itself, that rather
perplexingly I was missing the thing I was seeking. Britten's footnotes
to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits of energetic planning, her
quarrels and rallies and vanities, his illuminating attacks on
Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited triviality of such Liberalism as the
Children's Charter, served to point my way to my present conclusions.
I had been trying to deal all along with human progress as something
immediate in life, something to be immediately attacked by political
parties and groups pointing primarily to that end. I now began to
see that just as in my own being there was the rather shallow, rather
vulgar, self-seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and
bustled self-consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and
indefinitely growing unpublished personality behind him--my hinterland,
I have called it--so in human affairs generally the permanent reality
is also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws
continually upon human experience and influences human action more and
more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the stage. It is
the unseen dramatist who never takes a call. Now it was just through the
fact that our group about the Baileys didn't understand this, that with
a sort of frantic energy they were trying to develop that sham expert
officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate, and direct the affairs of
humanity, that the perplexing note of silliness and shallowness that I
had always felt and felt now most acutely under Britten's gibes, came
in. They were neglecting human life altogether in social organisation.

In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of
statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and all
organising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and
achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of
men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think
out the whole--or at any rate completely think out definite parts--of
the purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set
themselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and,
experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have
taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and
all the stupiditi