Page:The world set free.djvu/90

 government and education to the rustling traditions of hundreds of years ago? Those traditions come from the Dark Ages when there was really not enough for every one, when life was a fierce struggle that might be masked but could not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony between material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and the poor grew savage and every added power that came to men made the rich richer and the poor less necessary and less free. The men I met in the casual wards and the relief offices were all smouldering for revolt, talking of justice and injustice and revenge. I saw no hope in that talk, nor in anything but patience"

But he did not mean a passive patience. He meant that the method of social reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectual rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled aspects was solved. "I tried to talk to those discontented men," he wrote, "but it was hard for them to see things as I saw them. When I talked of patience and the larger scheme, they answered, 'But then we shall all be dead'—and I could not make them see, what is so simple to my own mind, that that did not affect the question.