the poor less necessary and less free. The men I met in the casual
wards and the relief offices were all smouldering for revolt, talking
of justice and injustice and revenge. I saw no hope in that talk, nor in
anything but patience....'

But he did not mean a passive patience. He meant that the method
of social reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectual
rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled aspects
was solved. 'I tried to talk to those discontented men,' he wrote,
'but it was hard for them to see things as I saw them. When I talked of
patience and the larger scheme, they answered, "But then we shall all be
dead"--and I could not make them see, what is so simple to my own mind,
that that did not affect the question. Men who think in lifetimes are of
no use to statesmanship.'

He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, and
a chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in the market-place at
Bishop's Stortford announcing a 'Grave International Situation' did
not excite him very much. There had been so many grave international
situations in recent years.

This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly attacking
the Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to the help of the
Slavs.

But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the vagrants
in the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master that all
serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the morrow to their
mobilisation centres. The country was on the eve of war. He was to go
back through London to Surrey. His first feeling, he records, was one of