THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

3

In those days there existed a dining club called-there was some

lost allusion to the exorcism of party feeling in its title-the

Pentagram Circle. It included Bailey and Dayton and myself, Sir

Herbert Thorns, Lord Charles Kindling, Minns the poet, Gerbault the

big railway man, Lord Gane, fresh from the settlement of Framboya,

and Rumbold, who later became Home Secretary and left us. We were

men of all parties and very various experiences, and our object was

to discuss the welfare of the Empire in a disinterested spirit. We

dined monthly at the Mermaid in Westminster, and for a couple of

years we kept up an average attendance of ten out of fourteen. The

dinner-time was given up to desultory conversation, and it is odd

how warm and good the social atmosphere of that little gathering

became as time went on; then over the dessert, so soon as the

waiters had swept away the crumbs and ceased to fret us, one of us

would open with perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes' exposition of

some specially prepared question, and after him we would deliver

ourselves in turn, each for three or four minutes. When every one

present had spoken once talk became general again, and it was rare

we emerged upon Hendon Street before midnight. Sometimes, as my

house was conveniently near, a knot of men would come home with me

and go on talking and smoking in my dining-room until two or three.

We had Fred Neal, that wild Irish journalist, among us towards the

end, and his stupendous flow of words materially prolonged our

closing discussions and made our continuance impossible.

I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but more

particularly did I become familiarised with the habits of mind of

such men as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New

Imperialists who belonged to us. They were nearly all like Bailey

Oxford men, though mostly of a younger generation, and they were all

mysteriously and inexplicably advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it

were the principal instead of at best a secondary aspect of

constructive policy. They seemed obsessed by the idea that streams

of trade could be diverted violently so as to link the parts of the

Empire by common interests, and they were persuaded, I still think

mistakenly, that Tariff Reform would have an immense popular appeal.

They were also very keen on military organisation, and with a

curious little martinet twist in their minds that boded ill for that

side of public liberty. So much against them. But they were

disposed to spend money much more generously on education and

research of all sorts than our formless host of Liberals seemed

likely to do; and they were altogether more accessible than the

Young Liberals to bold, constructive ideas affecting the

universities and upper classes. The Liberals are abjectly afraid of

the universities. I found myself constantly falling into line with

these men in our discussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's

sentimentalising evasions of definite schemes and Minns' trust in

such things as the "Spirit of our People" and the "General Trend of

Progress." It wasn't that I thought them very much righter than

their opponents; I believe all definite party "sides" at any time

are bound to be about equally right and equally lop-sided; but that

I thought I could get more out of them and what was more important

to me, more out of myself if I co-operated with them. By 1908 I had

already arrived at a point where I could be definitely considering a

transfer of my political allegiance.

These abstract questions are inseparably interwoven with my memory

of a shining long white table, and our hock bottles and burgundy

bottles, and bottles of Perrier and St. Galmier and the disturbed

central trophy of dessert, and scattered glasses and nut-shells and

cigarette-ends and menu-cards used for memoranda. I see old Dayton

sitting back and cocking his eye to the ceiling in a way he had

while he threw warmth into the ancient platitudes of Liberalism, and

Minns leaning forward, and a little like a cockatoo with a taste for

confidences, telling us in a hushed voice of his faith in the

Destiny of Mankind. Thorns lounges, rolling his round face and

round eyes from speaker to speaker and sounding the visible depths

of misery whenever Neal begins. Gerbault and Gane were given to

conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursued mysterious purposes

in lisping whispers. It was Crupp attracted me most. He had, as

people say, his eye on me from the beginning. He used to speak at

me, and drifted into a custom of coming home with me very regularly

for an after-talk.

He opened his heart to me.

"Neither of us," he said, "are dukes, and neither of us are horny-

handed sons of toil. We want to get hold of the handles, and to do

that, one must go where the power is, and give it just as

constructive a twist as we can. That's MY Toryism."

"Is it Kindling's-or Gerbault's?"

"No. But theirs is soft, and mine's hard. Mine will wear theirs

out. You and I and Bailey are all after the same thing, and why

aren't we working together?"

"Are you a Confederate?" I asked suddenly.

"That's a secret nobody tells," he said.

"What are the Confederates after?"

"Making aristocracy work, I suppose. Just as, I gather, you want to

do."…

The Confederates were beingheard of at that time. They were at

once attractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose

membership nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff

Reform and an ample constructive policy upon the Conservatives. In

the press, at any rate, they had an air of deliberately organised

power. I have no doubt the rumour of them greatly influenced my

ideas…

In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two

years I was hesitating. Hesitations were inevitable in such a

matter. I was not dealing with any simple question of principle,

but with elusive and fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse

forces and of the nature of my own powers. All through that period

I was asking over and over again: how far are these Confederates

mere dreamers? How far-and this was more vital-are they rendering

lip-service to social organisations? Is it true they desire war

because it confirms the ascendency of their class? How far can

Conservatism be induced to plan and construct before it resists the

thrust towards change. Is it really in bulk anything more than a

mass of prejudice and conceit, cynical indulgence, and a hard

suspicion of and hostility to the expropriated classes in the

community?

That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like

asking what is the ruling colour of a chameleon. The shadowy answer

varied with my health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the

people I was watching. How fine can people be? How generous?-not

incidentally, but all round? How far can you educate sons beyond

the outlook of their fathers, and how far lift a rich, proud, self-

indulgent class above the protests of its business agents and

solicitors and its own habits and vanity? Is chivalry in a class

possible?-was it ever, indeed, or will it ever indeed be possible?

Is the progress that seems attainable in certain directions worth

the retrogression that may be its price?