He reverted several times to the men who had been torn from their homes, the men who, but for war, would never have gone beyond the limit of their parish. He compared himself angrily with them, and I perceived that his theory, in embryo at Sampiero, had struck deep roots under the rain of present day realities. “... I want to shout it aloud: objectivity! objectivity! action, the parent of thought. We had worn thought to a shadow, with hunting him over hill, plain, and valley. We were miners who had exhausted the drift of gold. Thank God, we are daily burying fresh gold for our successors. We were sick with the sugar of introspection; introspection, subtlest of vanities; introspection, the damnable disease. We were old and outworn in spirit. The soil bore weakly crops, and cried out for nourishment. We are giving it blood to drink, and it grows fertile in the drinking. “I am aware of the coarsening of my fibres; I grow more conscious of my body, less conscious of my mind. I am very humble. I know that the meanest hind who turned the ridges under the ploughshare had a truer value than I, the critic, the analyst—I use the words disparagingly—the commentator. He silently constructed while I noisily destroyed.” Malory continued at great length in this strain, and I read between the lines of his letter that he had devoted much of the intolerable leisure of his soldier’s life to the evolution of a new creed, not really new to him, for its precepts were and must always have been in his blood, but now for perhaps the first time formulated and taken close to his heart. He wrote to me more and more openly, and I knew that I was getting the expression of his inmost thoughts. I have all his letters—for they came now in numbers though with great irregularity—and have sometimes thought that I have not the right, nor he the right to compel me, to keep them to myself. As he said:— “... All men have creeds, and I behold myself a faddist in a universe of faddists. I cannot be wholly right, nor they wholly wrong. But I argue in my own defence, that a creed such as mine, resting on many pillars, the most mighty of which is the pillar of tolerance, is at least inoffensive in a world it does not even seek to convert. I offer my little gift—and if it is rejected I withdraw my hand, and tender it elsewhere. “I am not concerned with practical matters, nor with controversial subjects; I am not a political or a social reformer, nor a nut-eater, nor a prophet of the Pit. I am not, I fear, a very practical preacher even in my own region, for my words, were I ever to spread them abroad, could germinate only in the ready tilled field of a contented soul, and will put no bread into the mouth of the hungry. So I desist, for mere reflection is of no value in our times, and he alone has justified his existence who has relieved the poor, benefited the sickly, or fed the starving.” I do not wholly agree with him.