casionally a little beyond
his strength--the Boy Scout. I liked the Boy Scout, and I find it
difficult to express how much it mattered to me, with my growing bias in
favour of deliberate national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able
to produce, and had indeed never attempted to produce, anything of this
kind.

3

In those days there existed a dining club called--there was some lost
allusion to the exorcism of party feeling in its title--the Pentagram
Circle. It included Bailey and Dayton and myself, Sir Herbert Thorns,
Lord Charles Kindling, Minns the poet, Gerbault the big railway man,
Lord Gane, fresh from the settlement of Framboya, and Rumbold, who later
became Home Secretary and left us. We were men of all parties and very
various experiences, and our object was to discuss the welfare of the
Empire in a disinterested spirit. We dined monthly at the Mermaid in
Westminster, and for a couple of years we kept up an average attendance
of ten out of fourteen. The dinner-time was given up to desultory
conversation, and it is odd how warm and good the social atmosphere of
that little gathering became as time went on; then over the dessert, so
soon as the waiters had swept away the crumbs and ceased to fret us, one
of us would open with perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes' exposition
of some specially prepared question, and after him we would deliver
ourselves in turn, each for three or four minutes. When every one
present had spoken once talk became general again, and it was rare we
emerged upon Hendon Street before midnight. Sometimes, as my house
was conveniently near, a knot of men would come home with me and go on
talking and smoking in my dining-room until two or three. We had Fred
Neal, that wild Irish journalist, among us towards the end, and his
stupendous flow of words materially prolonged our closing discussions
and made our continuance impossible.

I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but more
particularly did I become familiarised with the habits of mind of such
men as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New Imperialists
who belonged to us. They were nearly all like Bailey Oxford men, though
mostly of a younger generation, and they were all mysteriously and
inexplicably advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it were the principal
instead of at best a secondary aspect of constructive policy. They
seemed obsessed by the idea that streams of trade could be diverted
violently