“Look here, Thorns!” said I. “If this Budget row leads to a storm, and these big people get their power clipped, what's going to happen? Have you thought of that? When they go out lock, stock, and barrel, who comes in?” “Nature abhors a Vacuum,” said Crupp, supporting me. “Bailey's trained officials,” suggested Gane. “Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora,” said Thorns. “I admit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre in three years.” “One may go on trying possibilities for ever,” I said. “One thing emerges. Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and almost consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all the necessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march with that. For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing. Build your ship of state as you will; get your men as you will; I concentrate on what is clearly the affair of my sort of man,--I want to ensure the quality of the quarter deck.” “Hear, hear!” said Shoesmith, suddenly--his first remark for a long time. “A first-rate figure,” said Shoesmith, gripping it. “Our danger is in missing that,” I went on. “Muddle isn't ended by transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of a bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the liberal imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except a rise in the level of its free intellectual activity. All other progress is secondary and dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams of efficient machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no free-moving brains behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid ugliness,--that's all. No doubt things are moving from looseness to discipline, and from irresponsible controls to organised controls--and also and rather contrariwise everything is becoming as people say, democratised; but all the more need in that, for an ark in which the living element may be saved.” “Hear, hear!” said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing. It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became noticeable. He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult that he didn't get said at all on that occasion. “We could do immense things with a weekly,” he repeated, echoing Neal, I think. And there he left off and became a mute expressiveness, and it was only afterwards, when I was in bed, that I saw we had our capitalist in our hands.... We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow--but in that sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration, and it was some months before I made my decision to follow up the indications of that opening talk. 5