G ASSOCIATES

1

I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits of
party Liberalism. In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy. Regarding
the development of the social and individual mental hinterland as the
essential thing in human progress, I passed on very naturally to the
practical assumption that we wanted what I may call "hinterlanders." Of
course I do not mean by aristocracy the changing unorganised medley of
rich people and privileged people who dominate the civilised world of
to-day, but as opposed to this, a possibility of co-ordinating the will
of the finer individuals, by habit and literature, into a broad common
aim. We must have an aristocracy--not of privilege, but of understanding
and purpose--or mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and more
clearly when I look through my various writings of the years between
1903 and 1910. I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908.

I reasoned after this fashion. The line of human improvement and the
expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and finer
initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far beyond anything
that is now provided, if it cannot collectively invent devices and solve
problems on a much richer, broader scale than it does at the present
time, it cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more
general happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe, therefore, that
it CAN develop such a training and education, or we must abandon secular
constructive hope. And here my peculiar difficulty as against crude
democracy comes in. If humanity at large is capable of that high
education and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must
its better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have
power and leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals,
cannot be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole
of humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what
has become my general conception in politics, the conception of the
constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful
people, clever people, enterprising people, influential people, amidst
whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-conscious, highly
selective, open-minded, devoted aristocratic culture, which seems to me
to be the necessary next phase in the development of human affairs.
I see human progress, not as the spontaneous product o