But he did not mean a passive patience.  He meant that the method of social reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectual rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled aspects was solved.  ‘I tried to talk to those discontented men,’ he wrote, ’but it was hard for them to see things as I saw them.  When I talked of patience and the larger scheme, they answered, “But then we shall all be dead”—­and I could not make them see, what is so simple to my own mind, that that did not affect the question.  Men who think in lifetimes are of no use to statesmanship.’

He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, and a chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in the market-place at Bishop’s Stortford announcing a ‘Grave International Situation’ did not excite him very much.  There had been so many grave international situations in recent years.

This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly attacking the Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to the help of the Slavs.

But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the vagrants in the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master that all serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the morrow to their mobilisation centres.  The country was on the eve of war.  He was to go back through London to Surrey.  His first feeling, he records, was one of extreme relief that his days of ’hopeless battering at the underside of civilisation’ were at an end.  Here was something definite to do, something definitely provided for.  But his relief was greatly modified when he found that the mobilisation arrangements had been made so hastily and carelessly that for nearly thirty-six hours at the improvised depot at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink but a cup of cold water.  The depot was absolutely unprovisioned, and no one was free to leave it.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE LAST WAR

Section 1

Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order, it is difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow, the motives that plunged mankind into the war that fills the histories of the middle decades of the twentieth century.

It must always be remembered that the political structure of the world at that time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the collective intelligence.  That is the central fact of that history.  For two hundred years there had been no great changes in political or legal methods and pretensions, the utmost change had been a certain shifting of boundaries and slight readjustment of procedure, while in nearly every other aspect of life there had been fundamental revolutions, gigantic releases, and an enormous enlargement of scope and outlook.  The absurdities of courts and the indignities of representative parliamentary government, coupled with the opening of vast fields