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nor the Pearl, but the man eating fish and chips with bovine satisfaction. The young girl talking to a soldier could not have spent less than an hour on so wonderful and fearful a make-up. She has been to the flicks four times this week already. Now it is a toss-up whether she does a fifth repeat or whether she and her new friend go down the Drill Hall to the 9d. hop. The young must be young, but is it essential, or unavoidable, that they should be devoid of thought culture, of standards of feeling higher than the vibratory celluloid ? The old devil ME is still the bugbear. He used to have loyalties outside himself, even in the late 'teens, but they are nearly all dead. Even the Family is hardly recognisable as a social unit. True, splitting and re-grouping is the organic life process. But while splits are loud and constant, the gropings after re-grouping, so far, are much like shifting sands. And will continue so until the appeal comes down to that ME, instead of to The Workers, The Women, The Youth of the Country. Impersonalities cannot create. Splitting must be of a different kind. Disintegration must be according to plan, if it is to re-group life fashion. And no use to talk of international law and a world society until the Square is organic again. We are in a mess because WE went to sleep-despite some rumblings about eternal vigilance being the price of liberty. Of course, that's the whole point-it is And politics should conform. But none, except M.Ps, and journalists, who are anybody's slaves at a price, can be vigilant about a parliament representing four countries and 40,000,000 people We could all be vigilant about our town councils- if they had enough sovereignty and initiative to make them interesting. Even now, if we could broadbase on our wards and town councils, we might find a way, as Russia did, of creating district and national- as distinct from state parliaments about which we could be almost equally vigilant. Smashing up, the mass state and democratising politics, bringing them within personal purview, is the only hope of avoid- ing a Third World War and of establishing international sanity. Don't forget, it was not the small countries that made this war, but the mass organised empires. Hi You Break it up there