and fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and

wondering how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great

political ideals. Why should political work always rot down to

personalities and personal appeals in this way? Life is, I suppose,

to begin with and end with a matter of personalities, from

personalities all our broader interests arise and to personalities

they return. All our social and political effort, all of it, is

like trying to make a crowd of people fall intoformation. The

broader lines appear, but then come a rush and excitement and

irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order has vanished and the

marshals must begin the work over again!

Mymemory of all that time is essentiallyconfusion. There was a

frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead

Division is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled

cross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to

the eye in a muddy winter. It is sufficiently near to London to

have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that made

Bromstead the place it is. Several of its overgrown villages have

developed strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines,

and there is an abundance of petty villas. There seemed to be no

place at which one could take hold of more than this or that element

of the population. Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic

Hall or Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking

in the dinner hour outside gas-works and groups of factories. Some

special sort of people was, as it were, secreted inresponse to each

special appeal. One said things carefully adjusted to the

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