I always have the lurking feeling that Democracy would be all right but for its numbers. I am aware that this sounds paradoxical, and that in its numbers is supposed to lie its strength, but I do not see how that can ever be a properly directed executive strength. There are too many cooks. Taken one at a time, how admirable are its impulses, how just in the main its judgments! But block-vote it——! Take away its trust in Princes and put it in Polls——! Convert its votes, not into effective action, but into arid deserts of statistics——!... Two men can make a holy friendship; among three there can be a useful understanding; but ten will ever winnow the wind with talk, and a hundred are a mere arithmetical obstruction in the way of ever getting anything done at all.

I am moved to these reflections (as no younger novelist ever dares to say) by a series of occurrences that began at that time so to harass me and to put me so completely off my private work that, like poor Monty Rooke, I might almost as well have stopped in bed till midday. These were the occurrences that I had already dimly foreseen when that photograph of the house in Lennox Street had so suddenly appeared in that morning's issue of the Roundabout. By an unforeseen fluke the peril of the coroner's inquest had been safely passed, but I had felt in my bones that others were gathering.

Well, they gathered. I learned, no matter how, that the Scepter Insurance Company was consulting its solicitors and its solicitors were instructing counsel. The plane and parachute people, as I had expected, were investigating scraps of twisted metal and pieces of scorched fabric, and the Accidents Investigation Committees were getting to work.

Understand that none of these happenings were official happenings. If the Scepter wanted to resist, it had its ordinary remedy at civil law. The Committees had no authority whatever except to draw up reports for their own information and satisfaction. The interests of the owners and manufacturers were likewise purely private ones.

In fact, as far as I could see, the only charge that could lay Charles Valentine Smith directly by the heels would be one under those half-baked Orders that so far were the best that could be done towards solving an entirely new problem with totally unascertained powers.

But there are wheels within wheels, and it is the little wheels that are the devil. We still speak of things being "official" long after that imposing word has ceased to have much significance. If only for the arithmetical reason mentioned above, Government works ever more and more through channels that are not official and votable on at all. Many a private concern has a Minister, or at any rate a Minister's adviser or an influential Member, safely tucked away in its pocket, and you may invert this if you wish in the sense of an understanding. This is why bright-eyed secretaries, fresh from a dinner-table or a conference that has let them into the very heart of some secret matter, are not supposed to be asked what knowledge they have in their extra-secretarial capacities; and this is what the Man in the Club understands and what his brother in the Pub does not. He thumps no tub, enunciates no "first principles." A name, a glance, a shake of the head, and block-votes are put back where they belong. "I'm told Glenfield doesn't wish it" is more to him than twenty parliamentary returns; "I wonder whether So-and-So has quite the power he thinks he has," and three months later the public is surprised to see that a newspaper has changed its policy.

But let me hasten to reassure you. I am not going to invite you to follow our Case into quagmires either legal or political. I know too little about these things myself. Recent as the judgment on Appeal was, I have to stop and think for a moment before I can remember whether the Scepter people won their case or lost it, and I have only the vaguest idea what the findings of the Accidents Investigation Committees were. For most of these things I have taken Billy Mackwith's word. But he was briefed in one case, and has followed up the others with just the same pertinacity he showed when he tracked down and brought triumphantly home again those early prodigal pictures of Philip Esdaile's.

And, as I had begun to see it, Charles Valentine Smith, whether on oath in the Scepter case or at the invitation of one or other of the private inquiries, was engaged on something enormously more important than the immediate results of an aeroplane crash. He was contributing his mite to something that would live when he and all else about him had been forgotten—to the labor and knowledge and unparalleled discovery of his time.