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BODISHAM worked out his diagrams for a World Revolution with infinite care and travail. The talks went on. The Group grew in stature and wisdom. Events were not waiting for the Group, they followed no leadership, they were hurrying the Group along, creating new opportunities, confronting it with new problems, subjecting it to fresh ideas. The state of human affairs in the Brigand Forties was a climax of tension between the traditional life of man and the intimations of a new world. Common sense and every material reality insisted upon the unification of human life throughout the planet and the socialisation of its elementary needs, and pitted against that was the fact that every authority, every institution, every established way of thinking and living was framed to preserve the advantages of the ruling and possessing minority and the separate sovereignty of the militant states that had been evolved within the vanished circumstances of the past.

The political states of the period, created by the puny necessities of the foot–and–horse phase of human life, were now like grapes in a wine–press being squeezed together. They pressed upon, distorted and burst one another. Rud's idea of reconstructing elementary political conceptions and general economic processes on a world–wide scale was so obvious that now it scarcely seems original. Yet the fact remains that to Rud's contemporaries, schooled as they were in an unanalytical history and blind traditionalism, such ideas had seemed extravagantly impossible until his coarse, unqualified assertion of the harsh reality of the human situation swept their inhibitions aside. They may have had some anticipation of the new world order deep down in their minds, but until he and his Group began bawling up the new world, and bawling down the world of accepted practice, they seemed incapable of any practical realisations.

Dr. Chanter, in his brilliant History of Human Thought in the Twentieth Century, has made the suggestion that only a very small proportion of people are capable of acquiring new ideas of political or social behaviour after they are twenty–five years old. On the other hand, few people become directive in these matters until they are between forty and fifty. Then they prevail for twenty years or more. The conduct of public affairs therefore is necessarily twenty years or more behind the living thought of the times. This is what Dr. Chanter calls the "delayed realisation of ideas".

In the less hurried past this had not been of any great importance, but in the violent crises of the Revolutionary Period it became a primary fact. It is evident now that whatever the emergency, however obvious the new problem before our species in the nineteen–twenties, it was necessary for the whole generation that had learned nothing and could learn nothing from the Great War and its sequelae, to die out before any rational handling of world affairs could even begin. The cream of the youth of the war years had been killed; a stratum of men already middle–aged remained in control, whose ideas had already set before the Great War. It was, says Chanter, an inescapable phase. The world of the Frightened Thirties and the Brigand Forties was under the dominion of a generation of unteachable, obstinately obstructive men, blinded men, miseducating, misleading the baffled younger people for completely superseded ends. If they could have had their way, they would have blinded the whole world for ever. But the blinding was inadequate, and by the Fifties all this generation and its teachings and traditions were passing away, like a smoke–screen blown aside.

Before a few years had passed it was already incredible that in the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century the whole political life of the world was still running upon the idea of competitive sovereign empires and states. Men of quite outstanding intelligence were still planning and scheming for the "hegemony" of Britain or France or Germany or Japan; they were still moving their armies and navies and air forces and making their combinations and alliances upon the dissolving chess–board of terrestrial reality. Nothing happened as they had planned it; nothing worked out as they desired; but still with a stupefying inertia they persisted. They launched armies, they starved and massacred populations. They were like a veterinary surgeon who suddenly finds he is operating upon a human being, and with a sort of blind helplessness cuts and slashes more and more desperately, according to the best equestrian rules. The history of European diplomacy between 1914 and 1944 seems now so consistent a record of incredible insincerity that it stuns the modern mind. At the time it seemed rational behaviour. It did not seem insincere. The biographical material of the period—and these governing–class people kept themselves in countenance very largely by writing and reading each other's biographies—the collected letters, the collected speeches, the sapient observations of the leading figures make tedious reading, but they enable the intelligent student to realise the persistence of small–society values in that swiftly expanding scene.

Those values had to die out. There was no other way of escaping from them, and so, slowly and horribly, that phase of the moribund sovereign states concluded.

Beneath the formal surface of their traditional politics the historian of human thought notes the whispering advance of the Common Man's Party. There can be no question of the value of the phrase "parallel independent co–operation" in preventing it from congealing into a centralised political dogmatism, after the precedent of Communism. It was becoming a power, as formless as hydraulic pressure, adapting itself to the particular situations in which it discovered itself. It was everywhere a spirit of critical resistance to authority, resistance not in the name of ease and indolence but in the name of efficiency, this spreading conception of a common aim for all human beings. It was the resistance of son to arbitrary father, of pupil to dogmatic and inexplicit teacher.

The essential question was always "Who are these fellows who give us orders? By what warrant? And how do we benefit and how does the world benefit? But they are doing no good to anyone, no real good even to themselves! This is not government and leadership; this is imposture. Why stand it?…Why stand it?"

The lingering disposition on the part of humanity to personify its general creative drive, that curious diffidence, that persistent infantilism, that made it necessary to ascribe its own urgencies to an outside authority, played its part even from the beginning in Rud's elevation. He became the living symbol of the new world. The same imaginative needs that in the past had evoked the legends of Hercules and Prometheus and Moses, fixed now upon Rud. He has still to have a halo woven for him by great art and music and poetic suggestion, his is indeed still a very uncertain halo, but his essential role in the human imagination was the same. It became his function to say the things men dared not say for themselves. He was The Word. Even Rud himself doubted at times whether some masterful pronouncement had not been said first as it were in the world at large and then through him. But the world at large had no such doubts.

The logic of human necessity was bringing the essentials of readjustment into the foreground of the racial mind, simultaneously, round and about the planet. It was sweeping along leaders and adventurers, reactionaries and revolutionaries, masterful men, weaklings and criminals, towards the simplified issues of a renascent world. It was sweeping our Rud along with the rest, but sweeping him now into a foremost place, because of the fact that his vanities and ambitions were sustained by those queer phases of lucidity of his, by his swift intellectual acquisitiveness, and by those outbursts of speech and impulse that predestined him to be, even as he professed to be, the megaphone of the common will and understanding of mankind.

Thus it was fate dealt with him. The mighty, impersonal forces of a world transition, seized upon our scheming little Rud and whirled him higher and higher, until he found himself nominally and physically the head of a new system into which the storm of necessity was forcing the world. It took him and exalted him. His reverie of a new world turned to reality and expanded to exceed his wildest dreams.