Part 46

“It's what I've told Remington again and again,” said Crupp, “we've got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make it work. But he's certainly suggested a method.”

“There won't be much aristocracy to pick up,” said Dayton, darkly to the ceiling, “if the House of Lords throws out the Budget.”

“All the more reason for picking it up,” said Neal. “For we can't do without it.”

“Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes, aristocrats indeed--if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?” said Britten.

“It's we who might decide that,” said Crupp, insidiously.

“I agree,” said Gane.

“No one can tell,” said Thorns. “I doubt if they will get beaten.”

It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night. We were all with ideas in our minds at once fine and imperfect. We threw out suggestions that showed themselves at once far inadequate, and we tried to qualify them by minor self-contradictions. Britten, I think, got more said than any one. “You all seem to think you want to organise people, particular groups and classes of individuals,” he insisted. “It isn't that. That's the standing error of politicians. You want to organise a culture. Civilisation isn't a matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of prevailing ideas. The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail. The question for Remington and us is just what groups of people will most help this culture forward.”

“Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?” said Crupp. “You yourself were asking that a little while ago.”

“If they win or if they lose,” Gane maintained, “there will be a movement to reorganise aristocracy--Reform of the House of Lords, they'll call the political form of it.”

“Bailey thinks that,” said some one.

“The labour people want abolition,” said some one. “Let 'em,” said Thorns.

He became audible, sketching a possibility of action.

“Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of those indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady jet of ideas might produce enormous results.”

“Leave me out of it,” said Dayton, “IF you please.”

“We should,” said Thorns under his breath.

I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.

“I believe we could do--extensive things,” I insisted.

“Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often,” said Thorns, “from the Young England movement onward.”

“Not one but has produced its enduring effects,” I said. “It's the peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently progressive and rejuvenescent.”

I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection was intended to remind me of my duty to my party.

Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the table. “You can't run a country through its spoilt children,” he said. “What you call aristocrats are really spoilt children. They've had too much of everything, except bracing experience.”

“Children can always be educated,” said Crupp.

“I said SPOILT children,” said Thorns.

“Look here, Thorns!” said I. “If this Budget row leads to a storm, and these big people get their power clipped, what's going to happen? Have you thought of that? When they go out lock, stock, and barrel, who comes in?”

“Nature abhors a Vacuum,” said Crupp, supporting me.

“Bailey's trained officials,” suggested Gane.

“Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora,” said Thorns. “I admit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre in three years.”