of impulse and wandering
seeds of benevolence and whatever is fine and creative in our souls,
into a common purpose. It's something still to come....'

It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that this not
very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might well have been
altogether occupied with the problem of his own individual necessities,
should be able to stand there and generalise about the needs of the
race.

But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time there
was already dawning the light of a new era. The spirit of humanity was
escaping, even then it was escaping, from its extreme imprisonment in
individuals. Salvation from the bitter intensities of self, which had
been a conscious religious end for thousands of years, which men had
sought in mortifications, in the wilderness, in meditation, and by
innumerable strange paths, was coming at last with the effect of
naturalness into the talk of men, into the books they read, into their
unconscious gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and
everyday acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the
spirit of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of
those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very threat
of hell and torment had failed to drive them. And this young man,
homeless and without provision even for the immediate hours, in the
presence of social disorganisation, distress, and perplexity, in a
blazing wilderness of thoughtless pleasure that blotted out the stars,
could think as he tells us he thought.

'I saw life plain,' he wrote. 'I saw the gigantic task before us, and
the very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable difficulty filled
me with exaltation. I saw that we have still to discover government,
that we have still to discover education, which is the necessary
reciprocal of government, and that all this--in which my own little
speck of a life was so manifestly overwhelmed--this and its yesterday
in Greece and Rome and Egypt were nothing, the mere first dust swirls
of the beginning, the movements and dim murmurings of a sleeper who will
presently be awake....'

Section 7

And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his descent
from this ecstatic vision of reality.

'Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold and a
little hungry.'

He bethought himself of the John Burns Relief Offices which stood upon
the Thames Em