wsiest sentimentalist; for he
must be always looking back. If he only likes victory he must always
come late for the battle. For the man of action there is nothing but
idealism.

This definite ideal is a far more urgent and practical matter in our
existing English trouble than any immediate plans or proposals. For the
present chaos is due to a sort of general oblivion of all that men were
originally aiming at. No man demands what he desires; each man demands
what he fancies he can get. Soon people forget what the man really
wanted first; and after a successful and vigorous political life, he
forgets it himself. The whole is an extravagant riot of second bests,
a pandemonium of pis-aller. Now this sort of pliability does not merely
prevent any heroic consistency, it also prevents any really practical
compromise. One can only find the middle distance between two points if
the two points will stand still. We may make an arrangement between two
litigants who cannot both get what they want; but not if they will
not even tell us what they want. The keeper of a restaurant would much
prefer that each customer should give his order smartly, though it
were for stewed ibis or boiled elephant, rather than that each customer
should sit holding his head in his hands, plunged in arithmetical
calculations about how much food there can be on the premises. Most of
us have suffered from a certain sort of ladies who, by their perverse
unselfishness, give more trouble than the selfish; who almost clamor
for the unpopular dish and scramble for the worst seat. Most of us
have known parties or expeditions full of this seething fuss of
self-effacement. From much meaner motives than those of such admirable
women, our practical politicians keep things in the same confusion
through the same doubt about their real demands. There is nothing that
so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders. We are
bewildered on every side by politicians who are in favor of secular
education, but think it hopeless to work for it; who desire total
prohibition, but are certain they should not demand it; who regret
compulsory education, but resignedly continue it; or who want peasant
proprietorship and therefore vote for something else. It is this dazed
and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything. If our
statesmen were visionaries something practical might be done. If we ask
for something in the abstract we might get something in the