One goes on from phase to phase in these things.

"After all," I told myself, "if one wants to get to Westminster one
must follow the road that leads there," but I found the road
nevertheless rather unexpectedly distasteful. "When one gets
there," I said, "then it is one begins."

But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache
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 into formation. 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!

My memory of all that time is essentially confusion. 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