ill health, he has some weakness of the heart that grips him and holds
him at times white and silent.

At first we talked of his Institute and its work. Then we came to
shipping and transport. Whenever one talks now of human affairs one
comes presently to shipping and transport generally. In Paris, in Italy,
when I returned to England, everywhere I found "cost of carriage"
was being discovered to be a question of fundamental importance. Yet
transport, railroads and shipping, these vitally important services in
the world's affairs, are nearly everywhere in private hands and run
for profit. In the case of shipping they are run for profit on such
antiquated lines that freights vary from day to day and from hour to
hour. It makes the business of food supply a gamble. And it need not be
a gamble.

But that is by the way in the present discussion. As we talked, the
prospect broadened out from a prospect of the growing and distribution
of food to a general view of the world becoming one economic community.

I talked of various people I had been meeting in the previous few weeks.
"So many of us," I said, "seem to be drifting away from the ideas of
nationalism and faction and policy, towards something else which is
larger. It is an idea of a right way of doing things for human purposes,
independently of these limited and localised references. Take such
things as international hygiene for example, take _this_ movement. We
are feeling our way towards a bigger rule."

"The rule of Righteousness," said Mr. Lubin.

I told him that I had been coming more and more to the idea--not as a
sentimentality or a metaphor, but as the ruling and directing idea, the
structural idea, of all one's political and social activities--of the
whole world as one state and community and of God as the King of that
state.

"But _I_ say that," cried Mr. Lubin, "I have put my name to that.
And--it is _here!_"

He struggled up, seized an Old Testament that lay upon a side table.
He stood over it and rapped its cover. "It is _here_," he said, looking
more like Gladstone than ever, "in the Prophets."

4

That is all I mean to tell at present of that conversation.

We talked of religion for two hours. Mr. Lubin sees things in terms of
Israel and I do not. For all that we see things very much after the same
fashion. That talk was only one of a number of talks about religion
that I have had with hard and practical men who want to get the world
straig