（九月七日）
读韦儿斯（Herbert George Wells）名著 （《新马基雅维里》）。
韦氏生一八六六年，今年四十九岁，为当代文学巨子之一。著书甚富；所著皆富于理想，不独以文胜也。
为政治小说，读之增益吾之英伦政界之知识不少。
书中颇多名言，撷其一二：
In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of statesmanship. It has been chronic mistake of statecraft and all organizing spirits to attempt to scheme and arrange and achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of men have alwayg slipped into the error of assuming that they can think out the whole—or at any rate completely think out definite parts—of the purpose and future of men, clearly and finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education, and all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their good intentions they have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress thought, crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires…
He (the statesman) wants no longer to "fix up," as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces to the development of that needed intellectual life (the "mental hinterland" both in the individual and in the race) without which all his shallow attempts at fixing up are futile. He ceases to build on the sands, and sets himself to gather foundations.
You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and harbors for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring only to serve and increase a general process of thought, a process fearless, critical, realspirited, that would in its own time give cities, harbors, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality and in a light altogether beyond the matchstriking imaginations of a contemporary mind. —pp. 306—8
Privilege and legal restrictions are not the only enemies of liberty. An uneducated, underbred, and underfed propertyless man is a man who has lost the possibility of liberty. There's no libert
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