better, and he must accept them in order to live at all;
and for his recreation, he is given the life of the streets and the
public-house--nothing else. It is only such groups of unselfish men as
are represented by the Oxford and Bermondsey Mission and by the men who
run the London Working Boys' Clubs in the poorest parts of London,
together with those other men and women, clergymen and laymen, who are
struggling to bring a little happiness and light into the lives of the
men and boys of the East-end by providing them with comfort and warmth in
the club houses and with healthy recreation for their hours of freedom,
who are helping to kill Bolshevism at its roots. For it seems to me that
youth is the supreme charge of those who have grown old. The salvation
of the world will come through the young; the glory of the old is that
age and experience have taught them to perceive this fact. Give the
majority of men something noble to live for, and the vast majority will
live up to their "star."
_Mysticism and the Practical Man_
I wish the Mystics and the Practical Men could meet, fraternise, and
still not yearn to murder one another. It would be of immense benefit to
you and me and the rest of us who make up the "hum-drum" world. For the
Practical Man who is not something of a mystic is at best a commonplace
nuisance, and at his worst a clog on the wheels of progress. And the
mystic who is only mystical is even less good to anyone, since his Ideals
and his Theories, and often his personal example, fade away in the smoke
of factory chimneys belching out the sweat of men and women's labour into
the pure air of heaven. No, the Mystic who is to do any good to his
brother men must be at the same time a practical man, just as the
practical man must possess some Big Idea behind his commerce and his
success in order to escape the ignominy of being a mere money-maker, the
inglorious driver of sweated labourers. If only these two could
meet--_and agree_--there might possibly be some hope for the Dawn of that
New World which the War surely came to found and the washy kind of Peace
which followed seems to have thrust back again into darkness. True,
there are some business men who perceive behind their business a goal, an
ideal, in which there is something more than their own personal wealth
and glory, the be-diamonding of a fat wife, and the expensive upbringing
of a spoilt family. They make their wealth, but they seek
|