an who is in a grim, serious business like being good, must expect to
give up many of his little self-indulgences in the way of looking good.
Looking inconsistent, possibly even inconsistency itself, may be
sometimes, temporarily, a man's most important public service to his
time.

One needs but a little glance at history, or even at one's own personal
history. It is by being inconsistent that people grow, and without
meaning to, give other people materials for growing. For the particular
purpose of making the best things grow, of pointing up truths, of giving
definite edges to right and wrong, an inconsistent man--a man who is
trying to pry himself out a little at a time from an impossible
situation in an impossible world, is likely to do the world more good
than a very large crowd of angels who have made up their minds that they
are going to be consistent and going to keep up a consistent look in
this same world--whatever happens to it.

* * * * *

If one is marking people on consistency, and if one takes a scale of 100
as perfect, perhaps one should not always insist on 98. One does not
always insist on 98 for one's self. And when one does and does not get
it, one feels forgiving sometimes.

In dealing with public men and with other people that we know less than
we know ourselves--if they really do things, it is well to make
allowances, and let them off at 65.

In some cases, in fact, when men are doing something that no one else
volunteers to do for a world, I find I get on very well with letting
them off at 51. I have sometimes wished, when I have been in England,
that Tories and Liberals and Socialists and the Wise and the Good would
consider letting George Cadbury off at 51.

Perhaps people are being more safely educated by George Cadbury in his
journals than they might be by other people in what seem to seem to many
of us unfamiliar and dangerous ideas.

Perhaps posterity, in 1953, looking down this precipice of revolution
England did not fall into in 1913, may mark George Cadbury 73--possibly
89.

If, in any way, in the crisis of England, George Cadbury can crowd in
and can keep thousands and thousands of Englishmen and women from being
educated by John Bottomley Bull or by Mrs. John Bottomley Bull and hosts
of other would-be friends of the people--by Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and
Vernon Hartshorn, does it really seem after all a matter of grave
national importance that Geo