Such planless indeterminate lives, plebeian lives, mere lives, fill
the world, and the spectacle of whole nations, our whole
civilization, seems to me to re-echo this planlessness, this
indeterminate confusion of purpose. Plain issues are harder and
harder to find, it is as if they had disappeared. Simple living is
the countryman come to town. We are deafened and jostled and
perplexed. There are so many things afoot that we get nothing. . . .
"That is what is in my mind when I tell you that we have to gather
ourselves together much more than we think. We have to clench
ourselves upon a chosen end. We have to gather ourselves together
out of the swill of this brimming world.
"Or--we are lost. . . ."
("Swill of this brimming world," said White. "Some of this sounds
uncommonly like Prothero." He mused for a moment and then resumed
his reading.)
"That is what I was getting at when, three years ago, I made an
attack upon Democracy to the mother society of this society, an
attack that I expressed ill and failed to drive home. That is what
I have come down now to do my best to make plainer.
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