also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws
continually upon human experience and influences human action more
and more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the
stage. It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a call. Now it
was just through the fact that our group about the Baileys didn't
understand this, that with a sort of frantic energy they were trying
to develop that sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate,
and direct the affairs of humanity, that the perplexing note of
silliness and shallowness that I had always felt and felt now most
acutely under Britten's gibes, came in. They were neglecting human
life altogether in social organisation.

In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of
statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and
all organising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange
and achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers,
leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that
they can think out the whole--or at any rate completely think out
definite parts--of the purpose and future of man, clearly and
finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that
assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions
of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training,
pruning, secretive education; and all the stupidities of self-
sufficient energy. In the passion of their good intentions they
have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress thought, crush
disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so
it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that
any extension of social organisation is at present achieved.

Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is