find their faction-fighting may be turned for a time towards his
remoter ends. These parties derive from that past when the new view of
life had yet to establish itself, they carry faded and obliterated
banners that the glare and dust of conflict, the vote-storms of great
campaigns, have robbed long since of any colour of reality they once
possessed. They express no creative purpose now, whatever they did in
their inception, they point towards no constructive ideals. Essentially
they are things for the museum or the bonfire, whatever momentary
expediency may hold back the New Republican from an unqualified
advocacy of such a destination. The old party fabrics are no more than
dead rotting things, upon which a great tangle of personal jealousies,
old grudges, thorny nicknames, prickly memories, family curses, Judas
betrayals and sacred pledges, a horrible rubbish thicket, maintains a
saprophytic vitality.

It is quite possible I misjudge the thing altogether. Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman, for example, may hide the profoundest and most
wide-reaching aims beneath his superficial effect of utter
superficiality. His impersonation of an amiable, spirited, self-
conscious, land-owning gentleman with a passion for justice in remote
places and a whimsical dislike of motor cars in his immediate
neighbourhood, may veil the operations of a stupendous intelligence
bent upon the regeneration of the world. It may do, but if it does, it
is a very amazing and purposeless impersonation. I at any rate do not
believe that it does. I do not believe that he or any other Liberal
leader or any Conservative minister has any comprehensive aim at all--
as we of the new generation measure comprehensiveness. These parties,
and the phrases of party exposition--in America just as in England--
date from the days of the limited outlook. They display no
consciousness of the new dissent. They are absorbed in the long