l reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectual
rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled aspects
was solved. 'I tried to talk to those discontented men,' he wrote,
'but it was hard for them to see things as I saw them. When I talked of
patience and the larger scheme, they answered, "But then we shall all be
dead"--and I could not make them see, what is so simple to my own mind,
that that did not affect the question. Men who think in lifetimes are of
no use to statesmanship.'
He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, and
a chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in the market-place at
Bishop's Stortford announcing a 'Grave International Situation' did
not excite him very much. There had been so many grave international
situations in recent years.
This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly attacking
the Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to the help of the
Slavs.
But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the vagrants
in the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master that all
serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the morrow to their
mobilisation centres. The country was on the eve of war. He was to go
back through London to Surrey. His first feeling, he records, was one of
extreme relief that his days of 'hopeless battering at the underside
of civilisation' were at an end. Here was something definite to do,
something definitely provided for. But his relief was greatly modified
when he found that the mobilisation arrangements had been made
so hastily and carelessly that for nearly thirty-six hours at the
improvised depot at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink but
a cup of cold water. The depot was absolutely unprovisioned, and no one
was free to leave it.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE LAST WAR
Section 1
Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order, it is
difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow, the motives
that plunged mankind into the war that fills the histories of the middle
decades of the twentieth century.
It must always be remembered that the political structure of the world
at that time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the collective
intelligence. That is the central fact of that history. For two hundred
years there had been no great changes in political or legal methods and
pretensions, the utmost change had been a certain shif
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