Every modern European state will have in some form or other these three parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and unsympathetic party of establishment and success, the rich party;the confused, sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small, struggling, various, undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a third party sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes reuniting with it, the party of the altogether expropriated masses, the proletarians, Labour.Change Conservative and Liberal to Republican and Democrat, for example, and you have the conditions in the United States.The Crown or a dethroned dynasty, the Established Church or a dispossessed church, nationalist secessions, the personalities of party leaders, may break up, complicate, and confuse the self-expression of these three necessary divisions in the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out none the less for that....
And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;--the ideas go on--as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in some great brain beyond our understanding....
So it was I sat and thought my problem out....I still remember my satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last.It was like clouds dispersing to show the sky.Constructive ideas, of course, couldn't hold a party together alone, "interests and habits, not ideas," I had that now, and so the great constructive scheme of Socialism, invading and inspiring all parties, was necessarily claimed only by this collection of odds and ends, this residuum of disconnected and exceptional people.This was true not only of the Socialist idea, but of the scientific idea, the idea of veracity--of human confidence in humanity--of all that mattered in human life outside the life of individuals....The only real party that would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that in the entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive attack on property.Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted anything in the world.
Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it before?...I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.
I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed.
9
My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to the final convictions that remain.There was the first immediacy of my dream of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and administered territories--the vision I had seen in the haze from that little church above Locarno.Slowly that had passed into a more elaborate legislative constructiveness, which had led to my uneasy association with the Baileys and the professedly constructive Young Liberals.To get that ordered life I had realised the need of organisation, knowledge, expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated methods.On the individual side I thought that a life of urgent industry, temperance, and close attention was indicated by my perception of these ends.I married Margaret and set to work.But something in my mind refused from the outset to accept these determinations as final.There was always a doubt lurking below, always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a feeling of vitally important omissions.
I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political associates, and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow, priggish, and unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were attempting co-operation were preposterously irrelevant to their own theories, that my political life didn't in some way comprehend more than itself, that rather perplexingly I was missing the thing I was seeking.Britten's footnotes to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits of energetic planning, her quarrels and rallies and vanities, his illuminating attacks on Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited triviality of such Liberalism as the Children's Charter, served to point my way to my present conclusions.I had been trying to deal all along with human progress as something immediate in life, something to be immediately attacked by political parties and groups pointing primarily to that end.I now began to see that just as in my own being there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, self-seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled self-consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely growing unpublished personality behind him--my hinterland, I have called it--so in human affairs generally the permanent reality is also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws continually upon human experience and influences human action more and more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the stage.It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a call.Now it was just through the fact that our group about the Baileys didn't understand this, that with a sort of frantic energy they were trying to develop that sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate, and direct the affairs of humanity, that the perplexing note of silliness and shallowness that I had always felt and felt now most acutely under Britten's gibes, came in.They were neglecting human life altogether in social organisation.
