§ 10
He turned over the rest of the night's writing presently, and read it now as though it was the work of another man.
These later notes were fragmentary, and written in a sprawling hand.
"Let us make ourselves watchers and guardians of the order of the world....
"If only for love of our dead....
"Let us pledge ourselves to service. Let us set ourselves with all our minds and all our hearts to the perfecting and working out of the methods of democracy and the ending for ever of the kings and emperors and priestcrafts and the bands of adventurers, the traders and owners and forestallers who have betrayed mankind into this morass of hate and blood—in which our sons are lost—in which we flounder still...."
How feeble was this squeak of exhortation! It broke into a scolding note.
"Who have betrayed," read Mr. Britling, and judged the phrase.
"Who have fallen with us," he amended....
"One gets so angry and bitter—because one feels alone, I suppose. Because one feels that for them one's reason is no reason. One is enraged by the sense of their silent and regardless contradiction, and one forgets the Power of which one is a part...."
The sheet that bore the sentence he criticised was otherwise blank except that written across it obliquely in a very careful hand were the words "Hugh," and "Hugh Philip Britling."...
On the next sheet he had written: "Let us set up the peace of the World Republic amidst these ruins. Let it be our religion, our calling."
There he had stopped.
The last sheet of Mr. Britling's manuscript may be more conveniently given in fac-simile than described.
