More subtle are the difficulties in the way of the deliberate intensification by adult politicians of their own political emotions.  A life-long worker for education on the London School Board once told me that when he wearied of his work—­when the words of reports become mere words, and the figures in the returns mere figures—­he used to go down to a school and look closely at the faces of the children in class after class, till the freshness of his impulse came back.  But for a man who is about to try such an experiment on himself even the word ‘emotion’ is dangerous.  The worker in full work should desire cold and steady not hot and disturbed impulse, and should perhaps keep the emotional stimulus of his energy, when it is once formed, for the most part below the level of full consciousness.  The surgeon in a hospital is stimulated by every sight and sound in the long rows of beds, and would be less devoted to his work if he only saw a few patients brought to his house.  But all that he is conscious of during the working hours is the one purpose of healing, on which the half-conscious impulses of brain and eye and hand are harmoniously concentrated.

Perhaps indeed most adult politicians would gain rather by becoming conscious of new vices than of new virtues.  Some day, for instance, the word ‘opinion’ itself may become the recognised name of the most dangerous political vice.  Men may teach themselves by habit and association to suspect those inclinations and beliefs which, if they neglect the duty of thought, appear in their minds they know not how, and which, as long as their origin is not examined, can be created by any clever organiser who is paid to do so.  The most easily manipulated State in the world would be one inhabited by a race of Nonconformist business men who never followed up a train of political reasoning in their lives, and who, as soon as they were aware of the existence of a strong political conviction in their minds, should announce that it was a matter of ‘conscience’ and therefore beyond the province of doubt or calculation.

But, it may be still asked, is it not Utopian to suppose that Plato’s conception of the Harmony of the Soul—­the intensification both of passion and of thought by their conscious co-ordination—­can ever become a part of the general political ideals of a modern nation?  Perhaps most men before the war between Russia and Japan would have answered, Yes.  Many men would now answer, No.  The Japanese are apparently in some respects less advanced in their conceptions of intellectual morality than, say, the French.  One hears, for instance, of incidents which seem to show that liberty of thought is not always valued in Japanese universities.  But both during the years of preparation for the war, and during the war itself, there was something in what one was told of the combined emotional and intellectual attitude of the Japanese, which to a European seemed wholly new.  Napoleon contended against the ‘ideologues’