THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

plumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became

unconsciously and unthinkingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our

gestures altered. We behaved just as all the other men, rich or

poor, swatters or sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as

we were expected to behave. On the whole it is a population of poor

quality round about Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and

very difficult to idealise. That theoretical Working Man of ours!-

if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I suppose, by assuming

that he came from another part of the country; Esmeer, I remember,

who lived somewhere in the Fens, was very eloquent about the Cornish

fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hampshire man, assured us we

ought to know the Scottish miner. My private fancy was for the

Lancashire operative because of his co-operative societies, and

because what Lancashire thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow…

And also I had never been in Lancashire.

By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder

verities of the problem of socialism came to me. It helped me very

much that I had to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss

my future with my uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley

Wakes and much of the human aspects of organised industrialism at

close quarters for the first time. The picture of a splendid

Working Man cheated out of his i

presently to arise and dash this scoundrelly and scandalous system

of private ownership to fragments, began to give place to a

limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a conception of millions of

people not organised as they should be, not educated as they should

be, not simply prevented from but incapable of nearly every sort of

beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly incompetent, mostly

obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted. Even the

tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing a

limit of painfulexperience, and awakening to a sense of intolerable

wrongs, began to develop into the more appalling conception that the

poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way-

"muddling along"; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very

urgently, that mean fears enslaved them and mean satisfactions

decoyed them, that they took the very gift of life itself with a

spiritless lassitude, hoarding it, being rather anxious not to lose

it than to use it in any way whatever.

The complete development of that realisation was the work of many

years. I had only the first intimations at Cambridge. But I did

have intimations. Most acutely do I remember the doubts that

followed the visit of Chris Robinson. Chris Robinson was heralded

by such heroic anticipations, and he was so entirely what we had not

anticipated.

Hatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him at

Redmayne's rooms in King's, and was very proud and proprietorial.

It failed to stir Cambridge at all profoundly. Beyond a futile

attempt to screw up Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who

used nails instead of screws and gimlets, there was no attempt to

rag. Next day Chris Robinson went and spoke at Be

Newnham College, and left Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers

of twenty men or so. Socialism was at such a low ebb politically in

those days that it didn't even rouse men to opposition.

And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of the

poster, a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-made

clothes, with watchful i

invincible air of being out of his element. He sat with his stout

boots tucked up under his chair, and clung to a teacup and saucer

and looked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on

tables and chair-arms and windowsills and boxes and anywhere except

upon chairs after the ma

whose seat was occupied was the one containing his knitted woollen

comforter and his picturesque old beach-photographer's hat. We were

all shy and didn't know how to take hold of him now we had got him,

and, which was disconcertingly unanticipated, he was manifestly

having the same difficulty with us. We had expected to be gripped.

"I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps," he repeated with a

north-country quality in his speech.

We made reassuring noises.

The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through an

uncomfortable pause.

"I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancashire, what

with the new machines and all that," he speculated at last with red

reflections in his thoughtful eyes.

We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a mess of the

meeting.

But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes of refined

conversation, but speaking with an audience before him, he became a

different man. He declared he would explain to us just exactly what

socialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of

social conditions. "You young men," he said "come from homes of

luxury; every need you feel is supplied-"

We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of

Redmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, and we

listened to him and thought him over. He was the voice of wrongs

that made us indignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he had