“How?”

“Get rid of the independent scientific men, load it up so far as Britain is concerned with muck of the colonial politician type and tame labour representatives, balance with shady new adventurer millionaires, get in still shadier stuff from abroad, let these gentry appoint their own tame experts after their own hearts,—­experts who will make merely advisory reports, which will not be published....”

“They want in fact to keep the old system going under the cloak of your Committee, reduced to a cloak and nothing more?”

“That is what it amounts to.  They want to have the air of doing right—­indeed they do want to have the feel of doing right—­and still leave things just exactly what they were before.  And as I suffer under the misfortune of seeing the thing rather more clearly, I have to shepherd the conscience of the whole Committee....  But there is a conscience there.  If I can hold out myself, I can hold the Committee.”

He turned appealingly to the doctor.  “Why should I have to be the conscience of that damned Committee?  Why should I do this exhausting inhuman job?....  In their hearts these others know....  Only they won’t know....  Why should it fall on me?”

“You have to go through with it,” said Dr. Martineau.

“I have to go through with it, but it’s a hell of utterly inglorious squabbling.  They bait me.  They have been fighting the same fight within themselves that they fight with me.  They know exactly where I am, that I too am doing my job against internal friction.  The one thing before all others that they want to do is to bring me down off my moral high horse.  And I loathe the high horse.  I am in a position of special moral superiority to men who are on the whole as good men as I am or better.  That shows all the time.  You see the sort of man I am.  I’ve a broad streak of personal vanity.  I fag easily.  I’m short-tempered.  I’ve other things, as you perceive.  When I fag I become obtuse, I repeat and bore, I get viciously ill-tempered, I suffer from an intolerable sense of ill usage.  Then that ass, Wagstaffe, who ought to be working with me steadily, sees his chance to be pleasantly witty.  He gets a laugh round the table at my expense.  Young Dent, the more intelligent of the labour men, reads me a lecture in committee manners.  Old Cassidy sees his opening and jabs some ridiculous petty accusation at me and gets me spluttering self-defence like a fool.  All my stock goes down, and as my stock goes down the chances of a good report dwindle.  Young Dent grieves to see me injuring my own case.  Too damned a fool to see what will happen to the report!  You see if only they can convince themselves I am just a prig and an egotist and an impractical bore, they escape from a great deal more than my poor propositions.  They escape from the doubt in themselves.  By dismissing me they dismiss their own consciences.  And then they can scamper off and be sensible little piggy-wigs and not bother any more about what is to happen to mankind in the long run....  Do you begin to realize the sort of fight, upside down in a dustbin, that that Committee is for me?”