under his breath.

I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.

"I believe we could do--extensive things," I insisted.

"Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often," said
Thorns, "from the Young England movement onward."

"Not one but has produced its enduring effects," I said. "It's the
peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently progressive
and rejuvenescent."

I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our
presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection was
intended to remind me of my duty to my party.

Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the table.
"You can't run a country through its spoilt children," he said. "What
you call aristocrats are really spoilt children. They've had too much of
everything, except bracing experience."

"Children can always be educated," said Crupp.

"I said SPOILT children," said Thorns.

"Look here, Thorns!" said I. "If this Budget row leads to a storm, and
these big people get their power clipped, what's going to happen? Have
you thought of that? When they go out lock, stock, and barrel, who comes
in?"

"Nature abhors a Vacuum," said Crupp, supporting me.

"Bailey's trained officials," suggested Gane.

"Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora," said Thorns. "I
admit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre in three
years."

"One may go on trying possibilities for ever," I said. "One thing
emerges. Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and almost
consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all the
necessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march with that.
For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing. Build your ship
of state as you will; get your men as you will; I concentrate on what is
clearly the affair of my sort of man,--I want to ensure the quality of
the quarter deck."

"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, suddenly--his first remark for a long
time. "A first-rate figure," said Shoesmith, gripping it.

"Our danger is in missing that," I went on. "Muddle isn't ended by
transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed
many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of
a bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the liberal
imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except a rise
in the level of its free intellectual activity. All other