3


I was never at any stage a loyal party man. I doubt if party will
ever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Men are becoming increasingly constructive and
selective, less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial
circumstances. As education becomes more universal and liberating,
men will sort themselves more and more by their intellectual
temperaments and less and less by their accidental associations.
The past will rule them less; the future more. It is not simply
party but school and college and county and country that lose their
glamour. One does not hear nearly as much as our forefathers did of
the "old Harrovian," "old Arvonian," "old Etonian" claim to this or
that unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy. Even the Scotch and the
Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness. A widening sense
of fair play destroys such things. They follow freemasonry down--
freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays in England by
propitiatory symbols outside shady public-houses. . . .

There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to
party ties. These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations
and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example,
or Dayton. They are the scholars-at-large in life. For them the
fact that the party system has been essential in the history of
England for two hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour.
They have read histories and memoirs, they see the great grey pile
of Westminster not so much for what it is as for what it was, rich
with dramatic memories, populous with glorious ghosts, phrasing
itself inevitably in anecdotes and quotations. It seems almost