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“We're working altogether too much at the social basement in education and training,” said Gane. “Remington is right about our neglect of the higher levels.”

Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called the spirit of a country and what made it. “The modern community needs its serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken seriously,” I remember his saying. “The day has gone by for either dull responsibility or merely witty art.”

I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown out of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate these conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.

“It would have to be done amazingly well,” said Britten, and my mind went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and how Cossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers nowadays to interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some defensive devices.

“But this thing has to be linked to some political party,” said Crupp, with his eye on me. “You can't get away from that. The Liberals,” he added, “have never done anything for research or literature.”

“They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship,” said Thorns, with a note of minute fairness. “It shows what they were made of,” he added.

“It's what I've told Remington again and again,” said Crupp, “we've got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make it work. But he's certainly suggested a method.”

“There won't be much aristocracy to pick up,” said Dayton, darkly to the ceiling, “if the House of Lords throws out the Budget.”

“All the more reason for picking it up,” said Neal. “For we can't do without it.”

“Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes, aristocrats indeed—if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?” said Britten.

“It's we who might decide that,” said Crupp, insidiously.

“I agree,” said Gane.

“No one can tell,” said Thorns. “I doubt if they will get beaten.”

It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night. We were all with ideas in our minds at once fine and imperfect. We threw out suggestions that showed themselves at once far inadequate, and we tried to qualify them by minor self-contradictions. Britten, I think, got more said than any one. “You all seem to think you want to organise people, particular groups and classes of individuals,” he insisted. “It isn't that. That's the standing error of politicians. You want to organise a culture. Civilisation isn't a matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of prevailing ideas. The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail. The question for Remington and us is just what groups of people will most help this culture forward.”

“Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?” said Crupp. “You yourself were asking that a little while ago.”

“If they win or if they lose,” Gane maintained, “there will be a movement to reorganise aristocracy—Reform of the House of Lords, they'll call the political form of it.”

“Bailey thinks that,” said some one.

“The labour people want abolition,” said some one. “Let 'em,” said Thorns.

He became audible, sketching a possibility of action.

“Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of those indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady jet of ideas might produce enormous results.”

“Leave me out of it,” said Dayton, “IF you please.”

“We should,” said Thorns under his breath.

I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.

“I believe we could do—extensive things,” I insisted.

“Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often,” said Thorns, “from the Young England movement onward.”

“Not one but has produced its enduring effects,” I said. “It's the peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently progressive and rejuvenescent.”

I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection was intended to remind me of my duty to my party.

Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the table. “You can't run a country through its spoilt children,” he said. “What you call aristocrats are really spoilt children. They've had too much of everything, except bracing experience.”

“Children can always be educated,” said Crupp.

“I said SPOILT children,” said Thorns.

“Look here, Thorns!” said I. “If this Budget row leads to a storm, and these big people get their power clipped, what's going to happen? Have you thought of that? When they go out lock, stock, and barrel, who comes in?”

“Nature abhors a Vacuum,” said Crupp, supporting me.

“Bailey's trained officials,” suggested Gane.

“Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora,” said Thorns. “I admit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre in three years.”

“One may go on trying possibilities for ever,” I said. “One thing emerges. Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and almost consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all the necessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march with that. For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing. Build your ship of state as you will; get your men as you will; I concentrate on what is clearly the affair of my sort of man,—I want to ensure the quality of the quarter deck.”

“Hear, hear!” said Shoesmith, suddenly—his first remark for a long time. “A first-rate figure,” said Shoesmith, gripping it.

“Our danger is in missing that,” I went on. “Muddle isn't ended by transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of a bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the liberal imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except a rise in the level of its free intellectual activity. All other progress is secondary and dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams of efficient machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no free-moving brains behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid ugliness,—that's all. No doubt things are moving from looseness to discipline, and from irresponsible controls to organised controls—and also and rather contrariwise everything is becoming as people say, democratised; but all the more need in that, for an ark in which the living element may be saved.”