They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was

nothing truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no

definite objective they were just marching and showing themselves

in the more prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of

that great mass of unskilled cheap labour which the now still

cheaper mechanical powers had superseded for evermore. They were

being 'scrapped'-as horses had been 'scrapped.'

Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened

by his own precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt

nothing but despair at the sight; what should be done, what could

be done for this gathering surplus of humanity? They were so

manifestly useless-and incapable-and pitiful.

What were they asking for?

They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had

foreseen--

It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous

shambling enigma below meant. It was an appeal against the

unexpected, an appeal to those others who, more fortunate, seemed

wiser and more powerful, for something-for INTELLIGENCE. This

mute mass, weary footed, rank following rank, protested its

persuasion that some of these others must have foreseen these

dislocations-that anyhow they ought to have foreseen-and

arranged.

That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so

dumbly to assert.

'Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened

room,' he says. 'These men were praying to their fellow

creatures as once they prayed to God! The last thing that men

will realise about anything is that it is inanimate. They had

transferred their animation to mankind. They still believed

there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was careless or

malignant… It had only to be aroused to be

conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion… And I saw, too,

that as yet THERE WAS NO SUCH INTELLIGENCE. The world waits for

intelligence. That intelligence has still to be made, that will

for good and order has still to be gathered together, out of

scraps of impulse and wandering seeds of benevolence and whatever

is fine and creative in our souls, into a common purpose. It's

something still to come…'

It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that

this not very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might

well have been altogether occupied with the problem of his own

individual necessities, should be able to stand there and

generalise about the needs of the race.

But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time

there was already dawning the light of a new era. The spirit of

humanity was escaping, even then it was escaping, from its

extreme imprisonment in individuals. Salvation from the bitter

intensities of self, which had been a conscious religious end for

thousands of years, which men had sought in mortifications, in

the wilderness, in meditation, and by innumerable strange paths,

was coming at last with the effect of naturalness into the talk

of men, into the books they read, into their unconscious

gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and everyday

acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the spirit

of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of

those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very

threat of hell and torment had failed to drive them. And this

young man, homeless and without provision even for the immediate

hours, in the presence of social disorganisation, distress, and

perplexity, in a blazing wilderness of thoughtlesspleasure that

blotted out the stars, could think as he tells us he thought.

'I saw life plain,' he wrote. 'I saw the gigantic task before

us, and the very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable

difficulty filled me with exaltation. I saw that we have still

to discover government, that we have still to discover education,

which is the necessary reciprocal of government, and that all

this-in which my own little speck of a life was so manifestly

overwhelmed-this and its yesterday in Greece and Rome and Egypt

were nothing, the mere first dust swirls of the beginning, the

movements and dim murmurings of a sleeper who will presently be

awake…'

Section 7

And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his

descent from this ecstatic vision of reality.

'Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold

and a little hungry.'

He bethought himself of the John Burns Relief Offices which stood

upon the Thames Embankment. He made his way through the

galleries of the booksellers and the National Gallery, which had