Crupp, with his eye on me. "You can't get away from that. The
Liberals," he added, "have never done anything for research or
literature."
"They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship," said
Thorns, with a note of minute fairness. "It shows what they were
made of," he added.
"It's what I've told Remington again and again," said Crupp, "we've
got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make
it work. But he's certainly suggested a method."
"There won't be much aristocracy to pick up," said Dayton, darkly to
the ceiling, "if the House of Lords throws out the Budget."
"All the more reason for picking it up," said Neal. "For we can't
do without it."
"Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes,
aristocrats indeed-if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?" said
Britten.
"It's we who might decide that," said Crupp, insidiously.
"I agree," said Gane.
"No one can tell," said Thorns. "I doubt if they will get beaten."
It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night. We were all with
ideas in our minds at once fine and imperfect. We threw out
suggestions that showed themselves at once far inadequate, and we
tried to qualify them by minor self-contradictions. Britten, I
think, got more said than any one. "You all seem to think you want
to organise people, particular groups and classes of individuals,"
he insisted. "It isn't that. That's the standing error of
politicians. You want to organise a culture. Civilisation isn't a
matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of prevailing ideas.
The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail. The question
for Remington and us is just what groups of people will most help
this culture forward."
"Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?" said Crupp. "You
yourself were asking that a little while ago."
"If they win or if they lose," Gane maintained, "there will be a
movement to reorganise aristocracy-Reform of the House of Lords,
they'll call the political form of it."
"Bailey thinks that," said some one.
"The labour people want abolition," said some one. "Let 'em," said
Thorns.
He became audible, sketching a possibility of action.
"Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of
those indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady
jet of ideas might produce enormous results."
"Leave me out of it," said Dayton, "IF you please."
"We should," said Thorns under his breath.
I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.
"I believe we could do-extensive things," I insisted.
"Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often," said
Thorns, "from the Young England movement onward."
"Not one but has produced its enduring effects," I said. "It's the
peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently
progressive and rejuvenescent."
I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our
presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection
was intended to remind me of my duty to my party.
Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the
table. "You can't run a country through its spoilt children," he
said. "What you call aristocrats are really spoilt children.
They've had too much of everything, except bracing experience."
"Children can always be educated," said Crupp.
"I said SPOILT children," said Thorns.
"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