Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/103

Rh 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.”

“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gentry appoint their own tame experts after their own hearts,—experts who will make merely advisory reports, which will not be published....”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