’I don’t like it, Arthur.  I feel as if we had all climbed up out of a very horrible pit into a place of safety and prosperity and honour, and as if the child was preparing to leap down into the pit again.  She doesn’t know what it’s like to be a Jew.  I do, and I’ve saved you both from it, and you both seem bent on returning to the pit whence you were digged.  We’re an outcast people, my dear; an outcast people....’

His black eyes were haunted by memories of old fears; the fears his ancestors had had in them, listening behind frail locked doors for the howl ‘Down with the Jews!’ The fears that had been branded by savages into his own infant consciousness half a century ago; the fears seared later into the soul of a boy by boyish savages at an English school; the fears of the grown man, always hiding something, always pretending, always afraid....

I discovered then—­and this is why I am recording this family incident here, why it connects with the rest of my life at this time—­that Potterism has, for one of its surest bases, fear.  The other bases are ignorance, vulgarity, mental laziness, sentimentality, and greed.  The ignorance which does not know facts; the vulgarity which cannot appreciate values; the laziness which will not try to learn either of these things; the sentimentality which, knowing neither, is stirred by the valueless and the untrue; the greed which grabs and exploits.  But fear is worst; the fear of public opinion, the fear of scandal, the fear of independent thought, of loss of position, of discomfort, of consequences, of truth.

My poor parents were afraid of social damage to their child; afraid lest she should be mixed up with something low, outcast, suspected.  Not all my father’s intellectual brilliance, nor all my mother’s native wit, could save them from this pathetic, vulgar, ignorant piece of snobbery.  Pathetic, vulgar, and ignorant, because, if they had only known it, Rosalind stood to lose nothing she cared for by allying herself with a Jewish painter of revolutionary theories.  Not a single person whose friendship she cared for but would be as much her friend as before.  She had nothing to do with the bourgeoisie, bristling with prejudices and social snobberies, who made, for instance, my mother’s world.  And that is what one generation should always try to understand about another—­how little (probably) each cares for the other’s world.

Of course, Rosalind married Boris Stefan.  And, as I have said, the whole incident is only mentioned to illustrate how Potterism lurks in secret places, and flaunts in open places, pervading the whole fabric of human society.

2

Peace with Germany was signed, as every one knows, on June 28th.  Nearly every one crabbed it, of course, the Fact with the rest.  I have no doubt that it did, as Garvin put it, sow dragon’s teeth over Europe.  It certainly seemed a poor, unconstructive, expensive, brittle thing enough.  But I am inclined to think that nearly all peace treaties are pretty bad.  You have to have them, however, and you may as well make the best of them.  Anyhow, bad peace as it looked, at least it was peace, and that was something new and unusual.  And I confess frankly that it has, so far, held together longer than I, for one, ever expected it would. (I am writing this in January, 1920).