“And yet,” I exclaimed in sudden reaction, “those books have left things where they were!” The treaty, which could not be enforced, had to be modified: the British representatives had to explain why their crazy election-pledges could not be fulfilled. At regular intervals Germany threatened to default; France retaliated with a threat of further occupation; a flustered knot of prime ministers collected at the first convenient watering-place; and a punctual press announced that the results of the conference were wholly satisfactory. “I sometimes despair of education. . . . And, damn it, Raney, you haven’t told me what to do when I get back to London!” “You’ve not yet told me what you want to do. . . . It’s strange how people can hold mutually destructive opinions at the same moment! Lucien de Grammont talks piteously about German ‘revenge’ at a time when the French are pouring Senegalese troops into the occupied area!” “Roger Dainton will tell you that a restored Germany means a new war and that an unrestored Germany is losing us our best customer.” . . . At O’Rane’s skilled prompting, we argued our way farther west and farther until, at the end of a week, we stalled the car and strolled on foot, because we had reached Land’s End. Surrounded by water, in the spray and wind of the last rocky outposts of England, I felt my sanity and self-control returning to me; but a single day without the distraction of driving brought back the obsession. I flung myself into a voluminous report on _Unemployment and Public Feeling_, only to discover that my four folios might have been compressed into the single word “indifference”. There was no question of class or party: every one flabbily deplored the breakdown of industry, flabbily pitied the unemployed, flabbily felt that somebody should do something. Accent and idiom might change, but the stale thought and worn expression changed only by becoming more stale: the wayside tap echoed the slipshod reasoning of an Atlantic liner; a benighted book-maker in a forgotten Cornish village talked of trades unions in a way that I had thought only possible in my father-in-law; and there were Roger Daintons manipulating beer-engines in every bar. I reminded O’Rane of his scheme for endowing schools and buying papers till the education of an entire people proceeded from a single pair of lips. “I still believe a press-monopoly is possible,” he answered, “but who’s to be trusted with it? Horatio Bottomley is a political messiah to several millions; but I’d never give a messiah the power of a messiah unless he were ready to die as a messiah.” “Talleyrand’s advice to those about to found new religions,” I said.