Failing to learn much of working class conditions at first hand, I decided to reform them from the distant security of Westminster.
It was a few weeks after my apostasy from the Wensley Hall Settlement that I asked my uncle what steps he advised me to take in order to get myself elected to the House of Commons. "Thursday Essays" seemed to have committed me to a political career, and faithful reading of the party press had put my mind in a fine ferment over the immorality of the Unionist handling of Education, Licensing and Indentured Labour. Moreover, like most of those who had learned their political economy from Mill, I was intellectually offended that the dead heresy of Protection should be dragged from the grave it shared with Bi-metallism and galvanized into life. And I suffered all the fierce irritation of the impatient idealist at sight of a lethargic Government slumbering in office and barring the path of hurrying academic reformers. I felt that much must be swept away and much more built up. I had nailed on the public doors my theses of Federation, Land Reform, Franchise Adjustment, Single-Chamber Government and the rest. The offer of the Viceroyalty of India would not have kept me from the House.
"Want to stand?" Bertrand echoed. "My dear boy, you'll outgrow that phase."
"But the hopeless chaos!" I protested. "We've become an Imperial people, an industrial nation, and we're still trying to run with an obsolete machine."
"And—you—think—you—can—alter—it?" Paper and ink can never reproduce the cold scorn of his voice.
"I can have a dam' good try," I answered, with assurance.
Bertrand went to his writing-table and scribbled a note.
"Take this to Abingdon Street," he said, handing it to me. "You'll find you're more than welcome these hard times. I should go there on foot," he added gloomily—"along Knightsbridge and through the Park, where you can see the trees and hear the birds singing. London has its charms in the season, George. And you're a dancing man, aren't you?"
I admitted the charge.
"You'll soon outgrow that," he hastened to add, as though repentant of having found one good thing in life. "Well, chacun à son goût. But you'd find, if you came to the Gallery once or twice...."