nd vanished, to give place to darkness
again. Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to darkness
again--and so it's got to keep its light burning." I went on to attack
the present organisation of our schools and universities, which
seemed elaborately designed to turn the well-behaved, uncritical, and
uncreative men of each generation into the authoritative leaders of the
next, and I suggested remedies upon lines that I have already indicated
in the earlier chapters of this story....

So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened new
ground and set Crupp agog by confessing my doubt from which party or
combination of groups these developments of science and literature and
educational organisation could most reasonably be expected. I looked up
to find Crupp's dark little eye intent upon me.

There I left it to them.

We had an astonishingly good discussion; Neal burst once, but we emerged
from his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude. The rest was
all close, keen examination of my problem.

I see Crupp now with his arm bent before him on the table in a way we
had, as though it was jointed throughout its length like a lobster's
antenna, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a walnut shell into
smaller and smaller fragments. "Remington," he said, "has given us the
data for a movement, a really possible movement. It's not only possible,
but necessary--urgently necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on."

"We're working altogether too much at the social basement in education
and training," said Gane. "Remington is right about our neglect of the
higher levels."

Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called the
spirit of a country and what made it. "The modern community needs its
serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken seriously," I
remember his saying. "The day has gone by for either dull responsibility
or merely witty art."

I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown out
of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate these
conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.

"It would have to be done amazingly well," said Britten, and my mind
went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and how
Cossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers nowadays
to interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some defensive devices.

"But this thing has to be linked to som