n the way that I want
Crews and Jordan and Saxon and all those patient people to be useful._

"_I wish you could meet Crews and Jordan and Saxon. They're very
dissimilar, but they've got something like the unifying motive of a
monastery, and they're willing to serve and to plod and to be patient. I
fight with Saxon because he's a pacifist, but like all pacifists he's a
very pugnacious person, and he can get frightfully angry, but it's
pitiful to see him when he's been angry, because he's so sorry
afterwards. I'm not a pacifist, but I haven't a tenth of his pluck. He'd
endure anything, that man. Crews and Jordan are younger than he, and
very brainy. Crews looks as if he were one of the Don't-Care-a-Damn
Brigade ... Dublin's full of them ... but he does care. He has a
curiously subtle brain, and I do not know any one so imperturbable as he
is. He never loses his temper ... at least I've never seen him lose it
... except, so he says, with stockbrokers and haberdashers and that kind
of rubbish. Jordan is one of the brainiest men in Ireland ... that, I
suppose, is because he has got some English blood in him: a
cynical-looking man, but that's all his fun. And he works, my goodness,
he works!_

"_It's with men like these that I want to work, because I believe that
they will prepare the place for the foundation of a decent commonwealth.
They aren't miracle-mongers, thank God, like John Marsh and Galway and
Mineely. They aren't up in the sky to-day and down in the mud to-morrow.
They keep to the level._

"_Then there's the Plunkett House lot. You remember, I told you about
Sir Horace Plunkett and the Co-operative Movement. Well, I want to get
Crews and Jordan and Saxon to link themselves on to the Plunkett House
people and form the nucleus of a new Irish Group. There are a few of the
men at Trinity College who will come into it, but I'm afraid all the men
at the National University are under the influence of Marsh and
MacDonagh and the sloppy romantics._

"_You see, dear, don't you, that this job of making a commonwealth of
worth in Ireland is a long and difficult one. That's why we've got to be
very patient. Everything's against us. We have a contemptible press, a
cowardly crowd of corrupt politicians, a greedy people, an ignorant and
bigoted priesthood (that includes the Protestant clergy) and a complete
lack of social consciousness and plan of life. But then, what's life
for, if it isn't to cope with difficulties like th