sit and watch and suspect me, too stupid to grasp what I am driving at and too incompetent to get out a scheme of their own.  They want a world control on scientific lines even less than the owners.  They try to think that fuel production can carry an unlimited wages bill and the owners try to think that it can pay unlimited profits, and when I say; ’This business is something more than a scramble for profits and wages; it’s a service and a common interest,’ they stare at me—­” Sir Richmond was at a loss for an image.  “Like a committee in a thieves’ kitchen when someone has casually mentioned the law.”

“But will you ever get your Permanent Commission?”

“It can be done.  If I can stick it out.”

“But with the whole Committee against you!”

“The curious thing is that the whole Committee isn’t against me.  Every individual is....”

Sir Richmond found it difficult to express.  “The psychology of my Committee ought to interest you....  It is probably a fair sample of the way all sorts of things are going nowadays.  It’s curious....  There is not a man on that Committee who is quite comfortable within himself about the particular individual end he is there to serve.  It’s there I get them.  They pursue their own ends bitterly and obstinately I admit, but they are bitter and obstinate because they pursue them against an internal opposition—­which is on my side.  They are terrified to think, if once they stopped fighting me, how far they might not have to go with me.”

“A suppressed world conscience in fact.  This marches very closely with my own ideas.”

“A world conscience?  World conscience?  I don’t know.  But I do know that there is this drive in nearly every member of the Committee, some drive anyhow, towards the decent thing.  It is the same drive that drives me.  But I am the most driven.  It has turned me round.  It hasn’t turned them.  I go East and they go West.  And they don’t want to be turned round.  Tremendously, they don’t.”

“Creative undertow,” said Dr. Martineau, making notes, as it were.  “An increasing force in modern life.  In the psychology of a new age strengthened by education—­it may play a directive part.”

“They fight every little point.  But, you see, because of this creative undertow—­if you like to call it that—­we do get along.  I am leader or whipper-in, it is hard to say which, of a bolting flock....I believe they will report for a permanent world commission; I believe I have got them up to that; but they will want to make it a bureau of this League of Nations, and I have the profoundest distrust of this League of Nations.  It may turn out to be a sort of side-tracking arrangement for all sorts of important world issues.  And they will find they have to report for some sort of control.  But there again they will shy.  They will report for it and then they will do their utmost to whittle it down again.  They will refuse it the most reasonable powers.  They will alter the composition of the Committee so as to make it innocuous.”