a gun. . . .



4


All through those years of development I perceive now there must
have been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself
all the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious
impulses, utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the
statesman's idea, that idea of social service which is the
protagonist of my story, that real though complex passion for
Making, making widely and greatly, cities, national order,
civilisation, whose interplay with all those other factors in life I
have set out to present. It was growing in me--as one's bones grow,
no man intending it.

I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of
disorderliness, the conception of social life as being a
multitudinous confusion out of hand, came to me. One always of
course simplifies these things in the telling, but I do not think I
ever saw the world at large in any other terms. I never at any
stage entertained the idea which sustained my mother, and which
sustains so many people in the world,--the idea that the universe,
whatever superficial discords it may present, is as a matter of fact
"all right," is being steered to definite ends by a serene and
unquestionable God. My mother thought that Order prevailed, and
that disorder was just incidental and foredoomed rebellion; I feel
and have always felt that order rebels against and struggles against