The Seeds of Enchantment | Page 3

military service, was anxious
to make personal acquaintance of the markets from which the bulk of
his riches would derive.
Also, after forty-two months of almost continuous fighting on the
Western front, during which he had risen from second lieutenant to
command of an infantry battalion a progress punctuated by two
bullet-wounds and a brace of fairly earned decorations Dicky felt
himself in need of a holiday. Beamish, newly demobilized from the
Royal Army Medical Corps, fell in with the suggestion as "he wanted
to study the social progress of the East at first hand."
So far they had been away from home six months the journey had been
pleasant and uneventful except for an incident at Amritsar, which had
brought the old fighting fire back to Dicky's languid eyes, and slightly
shaken his friend's belief in the universal brotherhood of man.

And here since the incidents which follow were not devoid of influence
on the opinions of both it seems necessary to explain the intellectual
viewpoints of our two adventurers.
The Honourable Richard Smith, then, as his name implies, was a very
average Englishman who believed in the doctrine of individual liberty
at home and the exercise of benevolent force abroad. This doctrine of
individual liberty probably owing to the fact that his father had been
one of the first to introduce profit-sharing into his factories Dicky
modified by a leaning towards co-partnership and amalgamation in
industry: the exercise of benevolent force over lesscivilized races
possibly because of his mixed parentage he deemed the especial
prerogative of the English-speaking peoples.
Not so Beamish! In Beamish's eyes dreamy, visionary eyes,
small-pupiled, dull-irised his friend's domestic ideas were
"reactionary," his international standpoint "militaristic." Beamish saw,
emerging from the welter of Armageddon, a new world, warless, full of
strangely changed peoples, old enmities put aside, old ambitions
abandoned, lying down lamb-like with the lion and the eagle. The
millennium, according to Beamish, had almost arrived; the "battle-flags
were furled," and the "Parliament of Man" duly and expensively in
session at Geneva. Beamish, therefore mind free from the paltry cares
of "nationalism" could afford exclusive devotion to "The Cause".
And it was not Beamish's fault, but that of his manifold and
contradictory advisers, if their pupil found it rather difficult to explain
the exact objects of the cause to which he had vowed allegiance.
The doctor's brain never a very efficient one had so befuddled itself
with studying the abstract problems of Internationalism, Communism,
Collectivism, Syndicalism, Karl Marxism, Guild-, State-, Christian-
and other Socialism, had perused so many pronunciamentos including
the mathematical gymnastics of Sir Leo Chiozza Money and Professor
John Atkinson Hobson, M.A., the sentimental inaccuracies of Mr. &
Mrs. Sidney Webb, the lucubrations of Herrn Bernhard Shaw, and the
bucolic phenomena of .Prince Kropotkin as to be almost incapable of
individual judgment. Till, eventually, the doctor's bemused soul had

taken refuge in generalities.
"International Socialism," Beamish used to say, "is not so much a
system as a principle. The Capitalist must go. Capitalism is the prime
source of all evils, war included, in the world. Abolish it, organize
production for the benefit of everybody, eliminate the sordid motive of
private gain, and we shall return to the Merrie England of the Middle
Ages."
Exact economic details of this transformation escaped the Fabian's ken;
nor, in gloomier moments, was he quite certain about the merriness of
England in those joyous early days. Being a medical man, he could not
help looking back on the Middle Ages as a rather insanitary,
untherapeutic period. In the Merrie England of 1931 there would have
to be plumbers; and even Beamish found the merry plumber a difficult
conception. Still Socialism could work miracles.
Relying on these miracles, and on the protection afforded to a warless
world by the super-salaried idealists of the League of Nations, the soul
of Cyprian Beamish had created for itself two dream-countries.
In the first dream-country, the "State" a nebulous entity, compound of
Christian love and Jewish sagacity controlled all industry. Resultantly,
said Beamish, labour was reduced to its correct minimum of four hours
per diem a working week containing four days. For the remainder of its
time the "community" ("jolly word", quoth our doctor) devoted itself to
"the Arts", to "social intercourse" (compulsory), to "joyous physical
self -expression" (including universal Morris-dancing), to the
cultivation of crocuses in artgreen pots, and the building with its own
hands of "jolly little houses" wherein a limited number of "jolly"
children were born, fed, clothed, educated, and of course doctored, free
of charge, by the said beneficent State.
Beamish had not progressed quite as far as the doctrine of free love
being, among other things, a strict vegetarian, that is to say he ate meat
only at other people's expense or when living, as now, on the