It was cold even for me,
who had eaten a large breakfast and purposed to eat a perfectly
Gargantuan lunch; it was colder for the men under the trees.
And to eastward through the opalescent haze, the warmer whites
and yellows of the houses in Park-lane shone as unsubstantially
as if the clouds themselves had taken on the shape of mansions to mock
the men who sat there in the cold. But the mansions were real--
like the mockery.
No one worth calling a man allows his moods to change his convictions;
but it is by moods that we understand other men's convictions.
The bigot is not he who knows he is right; every sane man knows
he is right. The bigot is he whose emotions and imagination
are too cold and weak to feel how it is that other men go wrong.
At that moment I felt vividly how men might go wrong, even unto dynamite.
If one of those huddled men under the trees had stood up and asked
for rivers of blood, it would have been erroneous--but not irrelevant.
It would have been appropriate and in the picture; that lurid grey
picture of insolence on one side and impotence on the other.
It may be true (on the whole it is) that this social machine
we have made is better than anarchy. Still, it is a machine;
and we have made it. It does hold those poor men helpless:
and it does lift those rich men high ... and such men--good Lord!
By the time I flung myself on a bench beside another man I was half
inclined to try anarchy for a change.
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