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It was natural that Sir Richmond should talk of his Fuel
Commission to a young woman whose interests in fuel were even
greater than his own. He found that she was very much better
read than he was in the recent literature of socialism, and
that she had what he considered to be a most unfeminine grasp
of economic ideas. He thought her attitude towards socialism
a very sane one because it was also his own. So far as
socialism involved the idea of a scientific control of
natural resources as a common property administered in the
common interest, she and he were very greatly attracted by
it; but so far as it served as a form of expression for the
merely insubordinate discontent of the many with the few,
under any conditions, so long as it was a formula for class
jealousy and warfare, they were both repelled by it. If she
had had any illusions about the working class possessing as a
class any profounder political wisdom or more generous public
impulses than any other class, those illusions had long since
departed. People were much the same, she thought, in every
class; there was no stratification of either rightness or
righteousness.
He found he could talk to her of his work and aims upon the
Fuel Commission and of the conflict and failure of motives he
found in himself, as freely as he had done to Dr. Martineau
and with a surer confidence of understanding. Perhaps his
talks with the doctor had got his ideas into order and made
them more readily expressible than they would have been
otherwise. He argued against the belief that any class could
be good as a class or bad as a class, and he instanced the
conflict of motives he found in all the members of his
Committee and most so in himself. He repeated the persuasion
he had already confessed to Dr. Martineau that there was not
a single member of the Fuel Commission but had a considerable
drive towards doing the right thing about fuel, and not one
who had a single-minded, unencumbered drive towards the right
thing. "That," said Sir Richmond, "is what makes life so
interesting and, in spite of a thousand tragic
disappointments, so hopeful. Every man is a bad man, every
man is a feeble man and every man is a good man. My motives
come and go. Yours do the same. We vary in response to the
circumstances about us. Given a proper atmosphere, most men
will be public-spirited, right-living, generous. Given
perplexities and darkness, most of us can be cowardly and
vile. People say you cannot change human nature and perhaps
that is true, but you can change its responses endlessly. The
other day I was in Bohemia, discussing Silesian coal with
Benes, and I went to see the Festival of the Bohemian Sokols.
Opposite to where I sat, far away across the arena, was a
great bank of men of the Sokol organizations, an unbroken
brown mass wrapped in their brown uniform cloaks. Suddenly
the sun came out and at a word the whole body flung back
their cloaks, showed their Garibaldi shirts and became one
solid blaze of red. It was an amazing transformation until
one understood what had happened. Yet nothing material had
changed but the sunshine. And given a change in laws and
prevailing ideas, and the very same people who are greedy
traders, grasping owners and revolting workers to-day will
all throw their cloaks aside and you will find them working
together cheerfully, even generously, for a common end. They
aren't traders and owners and workers and so forth by any
inner necessity. Those are just the ugly parts they play in
the present drama. Which is nearly at the end of its run."
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