Family," but if raising these issues were essential to the social
reconstructions on which my life was set, that did not matter. It
only implied that I should take them up with deliberate caution.
There was no release because of risk or difficulty.
The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project
in this direction was going on in my mind concurrently with my
speculations about a change of party, like bass and treble in a
complex piece of music. The two drew to a conclusion together. I
would not only go over to Imperialism, but I would attempt to
biologise Imperialism.
I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous uphill task.
But as I came to look into the possibilities of the matter, a strong
persuasion grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislative
proposals affecting the family basis was excessive, that things were
much riper for development in this direction than old-experienced
people out of touch with the younger generation imagined, that to
phrase the thing in a parliamentary fashion, "something might be
done in the constituencies" with the Endowment of Motherhood
forthwith, provided only that it was made perfectly clear that
anything a sane person could possibly intend by "morality" was left
untouched by these proposals.
I went to work very carefully. I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE
and Burkett of the DIAL to try over a silly-season discussion of
State Help for Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics,
upon the fall in the birth-rate, and similar topics in the BLUE
WEEKLY, leading up to a tentative and generalised advocacy of the
public endowment of the nation's children. I was more and more
struck by the acceptance won by a sober and restrained presentation
of this suggestion.
And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came the
Handitch election, and I was forced by the clamour of my antagonist,
and very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test. I
returned triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of
Motherhood as part of my open profession and with the full approval
of the party press. Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me
on my way to the table between the whips.
That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of new
members, but salient, an event, a symbol of profound changes and new
purposes in the national life.
Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my book
ends altogether. For the rest is but to tell how I was swept out of
this great world of political possibilities. I close this Third
Book as I opened it, with an admission of difficulties and
complexities, but now with a pile of manuscript before me I have to
confess them unsurmounted and still entangled.
Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growing
realisation that the essential quality of all political and social
effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay
of individual lives. That is the collective human reality, the
basis of morality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives must
be given, from that will come the perpetual fresh release and
further ennoblement of individual lives…
I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this
book the part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE. I have
called it the hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a
dominating truth and rightness which must force men's now sporadic
motives more and more into a disciplined and understandingrelation
to a plan. And I have tried to indicate how I sought to serve this
great clarification of our confusions…
Now I come back to personality and the story of my self-betrayal,
and how it is I have had to leave all that far-reaching scheme of
mine, a mere project and beginning for other men to take or leave as
it pleases them.
BOOK THE FOURTH
ISABEL
CHAPTER THE FIRST
LOVE AND SUCCESS
1
I come to the most evasive and difficult part of my story, which is
to tell how Isabel and I have made a common wreck of our joint
lives.
It is not the telling of one simple disastrous accident. There was
a vein in our natures that led to this collapse, gradually and at
this point and that it crept to the surface. One may indeed see our
destruction-for indeed politically we could not be more extinct if
we had been shot dead-in the form of a catastrophe as disconnected
and conclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven upon two
friends and crushing them both. But I do not think that is true to
our situation or ourselves. We were not taken by surprise. The
thing was in us and not from without, it was akin to our way of
thinking and our habitual attitudes; it had, for all its impulsive
effect, a certain necessity. We might have escaped no doubt, as two
men at a hundred yards may shoot at each other with pistols for a
considerable time and escape. But it isn't particularly reasonable
to talk of the contrariety of fate if they both get hit.
Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several years of
friendship, and not quite unwittingly so.