One needs but a little glance at history, or even at one's own personal history. It is by being inconsistent that people grow, and without meaning to, give other people materials for growing. For the particular purpose of making the best things grow, of pointing up truths, of giving definite edges to right and wrong, an inconsistent man—a man who is trying to pry himself out a little at a time from an impossible situation in an impossible world, is likely to do the world more good than a very large crowd of angels who have made up their minds that they are going to be consistent and going to keep up a consistent look in this same world—whatever happens to it.
If one is marking people on consistency, and if one takes a scale of 100 as perfect, perhaps one should not always insist on 98. One does not always insist on 98 for one's self. And when one does and does not get it, one feels forgiving sometimes.
In dealing with public men and with other people that we know less than we know ourselves—if they really do things, it is well to make allowances, and let them off at 65.
In some cases, in fact, when men are doing something that no one else volunteers to do for a world, I find I get on very well with letting them off at 51. I have sometimes wished, when I have been in England, that Tories and Liberals and Socialists and the Wise and the Good would consider letting George Cadbury off at 51.
Perhaps people are being more safely educated by George Cadbury in his journals than they might be by other people in what seem to seem to many of us unfamiliar and dangerous ideas.
Perhaps posterity, in 1953, looking down this precipice of revolution England did not fall into in 1913, may mark George Cadbury 73—possibly 89.
If, in any way, in the crisis of England, George Cadbury can crowd in and can keep thousands and thousands of Englishmen and women from being educated by John Bottomley Bull or by Mrs. John Bottomley Bull and hosts of other would-be friends of the people—by Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and Vernon Hartshorn, does it really seem after all a matter of grave national importance that George Cadbury—a professional non-better—in educating these people should allow them to keep on in his paper, having a betting column?
So long as he really helps stave off John Bottomley Bull and Mrs. John Bottomley Bull, let him slump into being a millionaire, if he cannot very well help it! We say, some of us, let him even make cocoa! or have family prayers! or be a Liberal!
At least this is the way one American visiting England feels about it, if he may be permitted.