The honourable Member went on speaking showy, memorable, mischievous things. The seconds ticked away. And then--then it happened. The Author made a faint rattling sound in his throat and clung to the rail before him. The devil broke into a cold sweat. There, visible to all men, was a large black Wild Ass, kicking up its heels upon the floor of the House. And braying. And nobody was minding! The Speaker listened patiently, one long finger against his cheek. The clerks bowed over the papers. The honourable Member's two colleagues listened like men under an anæsthetic, each sideways, each with his arm over the back of the seat. Across the House one Member was furtively writing a letter and three others were whispering together. The Author felt for the salt, then he gripped the devil's wrist. "Say those words!" he shouted quite loudly--"say those words! Say them now. Then--we shall have him." But you know those House of Commons ushers. And at that time their usual alertness had been much quickened by several Suffragette outrages. Before the devil had got through his second sentence or the Author could get his salt out of his pocket both devil and Author were travelling violently, scruff and pant-seat irresistibly gripped, down Saint Stephen's Hall.... § 2 "And you really begin to think," said Wilkins, "that there has been an increase in violence and unreasonableness in the world?" "My case is that it is an irruption," said Boon. "But I do begin to see a sort of violence of mind and act growing in the world." "There has always been something convulsive and extravagant in human affairs," said Wilkins. "No public thing, no collective thing, has ever had the sanity of men thinking quietly in a study." And so we fell to discussing the Mind of the Race again, and whether there was indeed any sanity growing systematically out of human affairs, or whether this Mind of the Race was just a poor tormented rag of partial understanding that would never control the blind forces that had made and would destroy it. And it was inevitable that such a talk should presently drift to the crowning human folly, to that crowned Wild Ass of the Devil, aggressive militarism. That talk was going on, I remember, one very bright, warm, sunny day in May, or it may be in June, of 1914. And we talked of militarism as a flourish, as a kicking up of the national heels, as extravagance and waste; but, what seems to me so singular now, we none of us spoke of it or thought of it as a thing that could lead to the full horror of a universal war. Human memory is so strange and treacherous a thing that I doubt now if many English people will recall our habitual disregard in those days of war as a probability. We thought of it as a costly, foolish threatening, but that it could actually happen----! § 3