to myself. I had been disposed to identify the formulae of some one
party with social construction, and to regard the other as
necessarily anti-constructive, just as I had been inclined to follow
the Baileys in the self-righteousness of supposing myself to be
wholly constructive. But I saw now that every man of intellectual
freedom and vigour is necessarily constructive-minded nowadays, and
that no man is disinterestedly so. Each one of us repeats in
himself the conflict of the race between the splendour of its
possibilities and its immediate associations. We may be shaping
immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and
have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a man
counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but
for his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are
held together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the
stabler bond of an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for
progress in general, and nearly everybody is opposed to any change,
except in so far as gross increments are change, in his particular
method of living and behaviour. Every party stands essentially for
the interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of
classes in the exciting community, and every party has its
scientific-minded and constructive leading section, with well-
defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a public-
spirited form, and its superficial-minded following confessing its
meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No class will abolish
itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstruct
itself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited
socialisation of any other class. In that capacity for aggression
upon other classes lies the essential driving force of modern
affairs. The instincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway
and struggle. The ideas and understandings march on and achieve