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By Root 564 0

been unacquainted except for one of them whom he knew fairly well by sight. They were good-looking young men, serious-minded and intelligent, or so he should judge. Their hair was controlled and stylish, their clothes were well cut though not unduly old-fashioned. Looking at them, Stafford Nye was unable to deny that he liked the look of them. At the same time he wondered what they wanted with him. One of them he knew was the son of an oil king. Another of them, since leaving the university, had interested himself in politics. He had an uncle who owned a chain of restaurants. The third one was a young man with beetle brows who frowned and to whom perpetual suspicion seemed to be second nature.

‘It’s very good of you to let us come and call upon you, Sir Stafford,’ said the one who seemed to be the blond leader of the three.

His voice was very agreeable. His name was Clifford Bent.

‘This is Roderick Ketelly and this is Jim Brewster. We’re all anxious about the future. Shall I put it like that?’

‘I suppose the answer to that is, aren’t we all?’ said Sir Stafford Nye.

‘We don’t like things the way they’re going,’ said Clifford Bent. ‘Rebellion, anarchy, all that. Well, it’s all right as a philosophy. Frankly I think we may say that we all seem to go through a phase of it but one does come out the other side. We want people to be able to pursue academic careers without their being interrupted. We want a good sufficiency of demonstrations but not demonstrations of hooliganism and violence. We want intelligent demonstrations. And what we want, quite frankly, or so I think, is a new political party. Jim Brewster here has been paying serious attention to entirely new ideas and plans concerning trade union matters. They’ve tried to shout him down and talk him out, but he’s gone on talking, haven’t you, Jim?’

‘Muddle-headed old fools, most of them,’ said Jim Brewster.

‘We want a sensible and serious policy for youth, a more economical method of government. We want different ideas to obtain in education but nothing fantastic or high-falutin’. And we shall want, if we win seats, and if we are able finally to form a government–and I don’t see why we shouldn’t–to put these ideas into action. There are a lot of people in our movement. We stand for youth, you know, just as well as the violent ones do. We stand for moderation and we mean to have a sensible government, with a reduction in the number of MP’s, and we’re noting down, looking for the men already in politics no matter what their particular persuasion is, if we think they’re men of sense. We’ve come here to see if we can interest you in our aims. At the moment they are still in a state of flux but we have got as far as knowing the men we want. I may say that we don’t want the ones we’ve got at present and we don’t want the ones who might be put in instead. As for the third party, it seems to have died out of the running, though there are one or two good people there who suffer now for being in a minority, but I think they would come over to our way of thinking. We want to interest you. We want, one of these days, perhaps not so far distant as you might think–we want someone who’d understand and put out a proper, successful foreign policy. The rest of the world’s in a worse mess than we are now. Washington’s razed to the ground, Europe has continual military actions, demonstrations, wrecking of airports. Oh well, I don’t need to write you a news letter of the past six months, but our aim is not so much to put the world on its legs again as to put England on its legs again. To have the right men to do it. We want young men, a great many young men and we’ve got a great many young men who aren’t revolutionary, who aren’t anarchistic, who will be willing to try and make a country run profitably. And we want some of the older men–I don’t mean men of sixty-odd, I mean men of forty or fifty–and we’ve come to you because, well, we’ve heard things about you. We know about you and you’re the sort of man we want.’

‘Do you think you are wise?’ said Sir Stafford.

‘Well, we, think we