"Fuel."

"Of course! The Fuel Commission. Stupid of me! We certainly can't afford
to have you ill."

"I AM ill. But you can't afford to have me absent from that Commission."

"Your technical knowledge--"

"Technical knowledge be damned! Those men mean to corner the national
fuel supply. And waste it! For their profits. That's what I'm up
against. You don't know the job I have to do. You don't know what a
Commission of that sort is. The moral tangle of it. You don't know how
its possibilities and limitations are canvassed and schemed about, long
before a single member is appointed. Old Cassidy worked the whole thing
with the prime minister. I can see that now as plain as daylight. I
might have seen it at first.... Three experts who'd been got at; they
thought _I_'d been got at; two Labour men who'd do anything you wanted
them to do provided you called them 'level-headed.' Wagstaffe the
socialist art critic who could be trusted to play the fool and make
nationalization look silly, and the rest mine owners, railway managers,
oil profiteers, financial adventurers...."

He was fairly launched. "It's the blind folly of it! In the days before
the war it was different. Then there was abundance. A little grabbing
or cornering was all to the good. All to the good. It prevented things
being used up too fast. And the world was running by habit; the inertia
was tremendous. You could take all sorts of liberties. But all this
is altered. We're living in a different world. The public won't stand