Republicans.  These, in contrast with the Samurai, had no formal general organization, they worked for a common end, because their minds and the suggestion of their circumstances pointed them to a common end.  Nothing was enforced upon them in the way of observance or discipline.  They were not shepherded and trained together, they came together.  It was assumed that if they wanted strongly they would see to it that they lived in the manner most conducive to their end just as in all this book I am taking it for granted that to believe truly is to want to do right.  It was not even required of them that they should sedulously propagate their constructive idea.

Apart from the illumination of my ideas by these experiments and proposals, my Samurai idea has also had a quite unmerited amount of subtle and able criticism from people who found it at once interesting and antipathetic.  My friends Vernon Lee and G.K.  Chesterton, for example, have criticized it, and I think very justly, on the ground that the invincible tortuousness of human pride and class-feeling would inevitably vitiate its working.  All its disciplines would tend to give its members a sense of distinctness, would tend to syndicate power and rob it of any intimacy and sympathy with those outside the Order...

It seems to me now that anyone who shares the faith I have been developing in this book will see the value of these comments and recognize with me that this dream is a dream; the Samurai are just one more picture of the Perfect Knight, an ideal of clean, resolute and balanced living.  They may be valuable as an ideal of attitude but not as an ideal of organization.  They are never to be put, as people say, upon a business footing and made available as a refuge from the individual problem.

To modernize the parable, the Believer must not only not bury his talent but he must not bank it with an organization.  Each Believer must decide for himself how far he wants to be kinetic or efficient, how far he needs a stringent rule of conduct, how far he is poietic and may loiter and adventure among the coarse and dangerous things of life.  There is no reason why one should not, and there is every reason why one should, discuss one’s personal needs and habits and disciplines and elaborate one’s way of life with those about one, and form perhaps with those of like training and congenial temperament small groups for mutual support.  That sort of association I have already discussed in the previous section.  With adolescent people in particular such association is in many cases an almost instinctive necessity.  There is no reason moreover why everyone who is lonely should not seek out congenial minds and contrive a grouping with them.  All mutual lovers for example are Orders of a limited membership, many married couples and endless cliques and sets are that.  Such small and natural associations are indeed force-giving Orders because they are brought together by a common innate