arched wearily, marched with a kind of
implacable futility, along the roadway underneath him. He was, he says,
moved to join them, but instead he remained watching. They were a dingy,
shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part incapable of
any but obsolete and superseded types of labour. They bore a few banners
with the time-honoured inscription: 'Work, not Charity,' but otherwise
their ranks were unadorned.

They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was nothing
truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no definite
objective they were just marching and showing themselves in the more
prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of that great mass of
unskilled cheap labour which the now still cheaper mechanical powers had
superseded for evermore. They were being 'scrapped'--as horses had been
'scrapped.'

Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened by
his own precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt nothing but
despair at the sight; what should be done, what could be done for this
gathering surplus of humanity? They were so manifestly useless--and
incapable--and pitiful.

What were they asking for?

They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had foreseen----

It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous shambling
enigma below meant. It was an appeal against the unexpected, an appeal
to those others who, more fortunate, seemed wiser and more powerful,
for something--for INTELLIGENCE. This mute mass, weary footed, rank
following rank, protested its persuasion that some of these others
must have foreseen these dislocations--that anyhow they ought to have
foreseen--and arranged.

That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so dumbly
to assert.

'Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened room,'
he says. 'These men were praying to their fellow creatures as once they
prayed to God! The last thing that men will realise about anything is
that it is inanimate. They had transferred their animation to mankind.
They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it
was careless or malignant.... It had only to be aroused to be
conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion.... And I saw, too, that
as yet THERE WAS NO SUCH INTELLIGENCE. The world waits for intelligence.
That intelligence has still to be made, that will for good and order has
still to be gathered together, out of scraps