It would have been unfair to call his
enthusiasm for social reform spurious. It was real enough in its way,
and did certainly testify that he was not altogether lacking either in
imagination or good-heartedness. But it was over and overlaid with the
public-school habit--that peculiar, extraordinarily English habit, so
powerful and beguiling that it becomes a second nature stronger than
the first--of relating everything in the Universe to the standards
and prejudices of a single class. Since practically all his intimate
associates were immersed in it, he was naturally not in the least
conscious of this habit; indeed there was nothing he deprecated so
much in politics as the narrow and prejudiced outlook, such as he had
observed in the Nonconformist, or labour politician. He would never
have admitted for a moment that certain doors had been banged-to at his
birth, bolted when he went to Eton, and padlocked at Cambridge. No
one would have denied that there was much that was valuable in his
standards--a high level of honesty, candour, sportsmanship, personal
cleanliness, and self-reliance, together with a dislike of such cruelty
as had been officially (so to speak) recognized as cruelty, and a sense
of public service to a State run by and for the public schools; but it
would have required far more originality than he possessed ever to look
at Life from any other point of view than that from which he had been
born and bred to watch Her.
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