When Jim went away I came to a sudden resolution: I would fight for Jim. I'll do all in my power to help the lad to preserve his own personality.... Frank Thomson is his uncle and I'll try to get Jim to see me often. Professional etiquette! Professional etiquette be damned! I'm not in the profession now anyhow, and all the professional etiquette in the world is as nothing to the saving of a soul. * * * I find that I enjoy my food now. Formerly I looked on a meal as an appetiser for a smoke; now I look on a meal as an event. I feel healthier than I ever did in my life before. The land dulls one, however. The old cry "Back to the Land" means "Back to Elemental Mental Stagnation." I spent this forenoon cutting turnips, and I know that I thought of nothing all the time. I have a theory that great thoughts are the product of disease. Possibly this is only another way of saying that genius is allied to madness. Shelley was a physical weakling; Ibsen and Nietzsche went mad. Yes, geniuses are diseased folk, but the converse does not hold. Macdonald came up to see me to-night; he wanted to ask a few things about the school. We lay on a bank and lit our pipes. "I can't find your 'Record of Work,'" he said. "I never kept one." "But ... the Code demands one!" "I know ... but I didn't keep one. My record of work is my pupils in after life." "Yes," he said drily, "I know all about that, but you are supposed to keep a record that will show an inspector what you are doing to produce this after life record." "Macdonald," I said impatiently, "if you mean to tell me that any man can tell what I am doing to prepare children for after life by squinting at a crowd of entries of the Took-the-History-of-the-Great-Rebellion-this-week order ... well, I don't understand your attitude to life in general." "That's all very well," he protested, "but we aren't there to make the rules; we're paid servants who have to administer the laws of wiser men." "How do you know that they are wiser?" I asked. "They're wiser than I am anyway," he said with a smile. "I'm not so sure of it, Macdonald; they are more unscrupulous than you are. They know what they want, definitely and finally; they want efficient wage-slaves." "That's merely a Socialistic cry." "It may be, but it's true. Who rule us? A definite governing class of trained aristocrats." "H'm! I shouldn't call Lloyd George and that Labour man Hodge trained aristocrats." "They aren't born aristocrats I admit, but they are aristocratised democrats. They've adapted themselves to the aristocratic tradition. They are on the side of aristocracy; you won't find them alienating the good opinion of the moneyed classes. We are governed from above; do you admit that?" "In the main ... yes," he said grudgingly.