To him the future has always been an unexplored miracle—ever in travail with some new birth. To him, behind the veil of the coming time, there always lies a possibility of some event such as the world has never known—of some creation such as the world has never seen. He has moods when he seems “fey” with his belief. “I am out to abolish slums,” he cried one evening, in 1912, walking across London upon a winter’s night beneath a starless sky. He meant it. His bitterest enemy could not have laughed at that utterance if he had heard it. In such moods he was at that time (1908-12) indeed “The little Brother of the poor.” He was filled with a certain storming passion of pity, so powerful that it seemed to destroy all obstacles—to bridge all difficulties. All the accumulated memories of his own childhood—all the recollections of the poor cottagers among whom he had been brought up, all their sufferings and pains, all their oppressions and tragedies, seemed to be moving behind him like some great tide and driving him on. I remember his explaining once his own consciousness of the mark which such an upbringing left on a man’s life. He was talking about the East End Settlement movement, and of its attempt to bring the leisured classes nearer to the workers. He was a little doubtful. “It is a gulf which can never be bridged,” he said. “You people can never understand what it is to be really hungry or out of work. The difference lies in security. The poor man is always in danger, and he always knows it.” It was such a knowledge that inspired him with his enthusiasm for Old Age Pensions and for his Insurance Schemes. It was just this security that he wanted to give to the life of the poor. And yet he has never been a sentimentalist over their troubles. He looks at them, so to speak, from the inside. The sentimentalism of the philanthropic middle classes rather annoys him. What he always craves for the poor is justice, and not charity. In the days of the Insurance Act he was sincerely afraid of creating a dependent working class. He was surprised when he received so little help in his contributory policy. “I will never try to be good again,” he said laughingly one day. “They call me a demagogue, and next time I will really be one.” Such was his chaff.