es of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their
good intentions they have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress
thought, crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental
desires. And so it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with
the making, that any extension of social organisation is at present
achieved.

Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is
grasped, directly the dominating importance of this critical, less
personal, mental hinterland in the individual and of the collective mind
in the race is understood, the whole problem of the statesman and
his attitude towards politics gain a new significance, and becomes
accessible to a new series of solutions. He wants no longer to "fix
up," as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces to the
development of that needed intellectual life without which all his
shallow attempts at fixing up are futile. He ceases to build on the
sands, and sets himself to gather foundations.

You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and
harbours for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring only
to serve and increase a general process of thought, a process fearless,
critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give cities,
harbours, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality and in
a light altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of a
contemporary mind. I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion, vigour of
thought, and the cultivation of that impulse of veracity that lurks
more or less discouraged in every man. With that I felt there must go an
emotion. I hit upon a phrase that became at last something of a refrain
in my speech and writings, to convey the spirit that I felt was at the
very heart of real human progress--love and fine thinking.

(I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England gets through a week
without the repetition of that phrase.)

My convictions crystallised more and more definitely upon this. The
more of love and fine thinking the better for men, I said; the less,
the worse. And upon this fresh basis I set myself to examine what I as
a politician might do. I perceived I was at last finding an adequate
expression for all that was in me, for those forces that had rebelled at
the crude presentations of Bromstead, at the secrecies and suppressions
of my youth, at the dull unrealities of City Merchants, at the
conventions and timidities of the Pinky Dinkys, at the