s, discovers with disloyal
impartiality a justice and a defect on each disputing side. "Good honest
men," as Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinking
out decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfast
pleasure in hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists "blaggards
and scoundrels"--it justified his opposition--the Lords were
"scoundrels," all people richer than he were "scoundrels," all
Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails and
justice being done. His public spirit was saturated with the sombre
joys of conflict and the pleasant thought of condign punishment for
all recalcitrant souls. That was the way of it, I perceived. That had
survival value, as the biologists say. He was fool enough in politics to
be a consistent and happy politician....

Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat me
down that night! I couldn't remember that I had known this all along,
and that it did not really matter in the slightest degree. I had worked
it all out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how all parties
stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in life achieves
itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product of the war
of individuals and classes. Hadn't I always known that science and
philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the passion and
narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness of their
servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of contemporary things?
Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of "that greater mind in men, in which
we are but moments and transitorily lit cells?" Hadn't I known that the
spirit of man still speaks like a thing that struggles out of mud and
slime, and that the mere effort to speak means choking and disaster?
Hadn't I known that we who think without fear and speak without
discretion will not come to our own for the next two thousand years?

It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid. Before
mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of confusion,
vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish temporary triumphs
of order, lapses, set-backs, despairs, catastrophes, new beginnings, a
multitudinous wilderness of time, a nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed
energies. In order to assuage my parting from Isabel we had set
ourselves to imagine great rewards for our separation, great personal
rewards; we had promised ourselves success visible