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.Iwould 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 TELEPHONEand 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 BLUEWEEKLY, 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.Ireturned 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 understanding relation 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.
