if they wanted strongly they would see to it that they lived in the
manner most conducive to their end just as in all this book I am taking
it for granted that to believe truly is to want to do right. It was not
even required of them that they should sedulously propagate their
constructive idea.

Apart from the illumination of my ideas by these experiments and
proposals, my Samurai idea has also had a quite unmerited amount of
subtle and able criticism from people who found it at once interesting
and antipathetic. My friends Vernon Lee and G.K. Chesterton, for
example, have criticized it, and I think very justly, on the ground that
the invincible tortuousness of human pride and class-feeling would
inevitably vitiate its working. All its disciplines would tend to give
its members a sense of distinctness, would tend to syndicate power and
rob it of any intimacy and sympathy with those outside the Order...

It seems to me now that anyone who shares the faith I have been
developing in this book will see the value of these comments and
recognize with me that this dream is a dream; the Samurai are just one
more picture of the Perfect Knight, an ideal of clean, resolute and
balanced living. They may be valuable as an ideal of attitude but not as
an ideal of organization. They are never to be put, as people say, upon
a business footing and made available as a refuge from the individual
problem.

To modernize the parable, the Believer must not only not bury his talent
but he must not bank it with an organization. Each Believer must decide
for himself how far he wants to be kinetic or efficient, how far he
needs a stringent rule of conduct, how far he is poietic and may loiter
and adventure among the coarse and dangerous things of life. There is no