enterprises and beginnings; but it emphatically wasn't. It was a queer,
inconclusive, lazy, muddled, reckless, unsatisfactory, rather ludicrous
time. It seemed as if the world was suffering from vertigo. I have seen
men who have been badly hit spinning round and round madly, like dancing
dervishes. That was, I think, what we were all doing for some time after
the war--spinning round and round, silly and dazed, without purpose or
power. At least the only purpose in evidence was the fierce quest of
enjoyment, and the only power that of successfully shirking facts. We
were like bankrupts, who cannot summon energy to begin life and work
again in earnest. And we were represented by the most comic parliament
that ever sat in Westminster, upon which it would be too painful here to
expatiate.

One didn't know what had happened, or what was happening, or what was
going to happen. We had won the war. But what was that going to mean?
What were we going to get out of it? What did we want the new world to
be? What did we want this country to be? Every one shouted a different
answer. The December elections seemed to give one answer. But I don't
think it was a true one. The public didn't really want the England of
_John Bull_ and Pemberton Billing; they showed that later.

A good many people, of course, wanted and want revolution and the
International. I don't, and never did. I hate red-flaggery, and all other
flaggery. The sentimentalism of Bob Smillie is as bad as the
sentimentalism of the Pinkerton press; as untruthful, as greedy, as
muddle-headed. Smillie's lot are out to get, and the Potterites out to
keep. The under-dog is more excusable in its aims, but its methods aren't
any more attractive. Juke can swallow it all. But Jukie has let his
naturally clear head get muddled by a mediaeval form of religion.
Religion is like love; it plays the devil with clear thinking. Juke