in training these papers collectively display. He is aware that at such
points, for example, as the reference to authorities in the chapter on
the biological problem, and to books in the educational chapter, the
lacunar quality of his reading and knowledge is only too evident; to
fill in and complete his design--notably in the fourth paper--he has
had quite frankly to jerry-build here and there. Nevertheless, he
ventures to publish this book. There are phases in the development of
every science when an incautious outsider may think himself almost
necessary, when sketchiness ceases to be a sin, when the mere facts of
irresponsibility and an untrained interest may permit a freshness, a
freedom of mental gesture that would be inconvenient and compromising
for the specialist; and such a phase, it is submitted, has been reached
in this field of speculation. Moreover, the work attempted is not so
much special and technical as a work of reconciliation, the suggestion
of broad generalizations upon which divergent specialists may meet, a
business for non-technical expression, and in which a man who knows a
little of biology, a little of physical science, and a little in a
practical way of social stratification, who has concerned himself with
education and aspired to creative art, may claim in his very
amateurishness a special qualification. And in addition, it is
particularly a business for some irresponsible writer, outside the
complications of practical politics, some man who, politically,
"doesn't matter," to provide the first tentatives of a political
doctrine that shall be equally available for application in the British
Empire and in the United States. To that we must come, unless our talk
of co-operation, of reunion, is no more than sentimental dreaming. We
have to get into line, and that we cannot do while over here and over
there men hold themselves bound by old party formulae, by loyalties and
institutions, that are becoming, that have become, provincial in
proportion to our new and wider needs. My instances are commonly