There was a sensible optimism about James Runciman, Conservative
though he styled himself,--although there are probably few who would
suspect that from such an essay as the bitter description of English
life in "Quiet Old Towns" or his lamentation over the unequal
distribution of wealth. His sympathy with the suffering of the
poor--of the real poor--was a constant passion, and he showed it quite
as much by his somewhat Carlylean denunciation of the reprobate as by
his larger advocacy of measures that seemed to him best calculated to
prevent the waste of child-life.
More than anything else there is in these essays the oozing through of
the bitter but kindly cynicism of a disillusionised man of the world.
His essay, for instance, entitled "Vanity of Vanities," is full of the
sense of vanity of human effort. And yet against the whole current of
this tendency to despondency and despair, we have such an essay as
"Are we Wealthy?" in which he declared the day of declamation has
passed, but that all things are possible to organisation. "In many
respects it is a good world, but it might be made better, nobler,
finer in every quarter, if the poor would only recognise wise and
silent leaders, and use the laws which men have made in order to
repair the havoc which other men have also made.
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