We thought nothing of throwing religious organisations out of
employment or superseding all the newspapers by freely distributed
bulletins. We could contemplate the possibility of laws abolishing
whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful and
orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul's
Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill,--a close and
not unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading. I
remember quite distinctly evolving that vision. We were then fully
fifteen and we were perfectly serious about it. We were not fools;
it was simply that as yet we had gathered no experience at all of
the limits and powers of legislation and conscious collective
intention. . . .

I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my
doubts. It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one
did not understand. It isn't only that every day changed one's
general outlook, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases of
quite adult understanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent
puerility. Sometimes I myself was in those tumbrils that went along
Cheapside to the Mansion House, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white
defeated Mirabean; sometimes it was I who sat judging and condemning
and ruling (sleeping in my clothes and feeding very simply) the soul
and autocrat of the Provisional Government, which occupied, of all
inconvenient places! the General Post Office at St. Martin's-le-
Grand! . . .

I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I
believe the mere physical fact of going two hours' journey away from
London gave that place for the first time an effect of unity in my
imagination. I got outside London. It became tangible instead of