Possibly Blair-Orwell was corrected too often in youth to brook it afterward. Though he tots up for the record the mistakes in prophecy he has made in his “London Letter” to Partisan Review, he is generally convinced of his own rightness. Once he has changed his mind he seems to be unconscious of having done so and can write to Victor Gollancz early in 1940, “The intellectuals who are at present pointing out that democracy & fascism are the same thing depress me horribly,” evidently forgetting that he had been saying that himself a year earlier: “If one collaborates with a capitalist-imperialist government in a struggle ‘against fascism,’ i.e., against a rival imperialism, one is simply letting fascism in by the back door.” On the occasions when, conscious of a possible previous injustice, he starts out to write a reappraisal, as in the cases of Gandhi and Tolstoy, he slowly swings around to his original position, restated in less intemperate language. In “Why I Write,” he declared “I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood.” This is loyal and admirable in the man, but it is a grave limitation on thinking. Lacking religion and mistrustful of philosophy, he stayed stubbornly true to himself and to his instincts, for which he could find no other word than “decency.” The refusal to define this concept (is it innate or handed down and if not innate what is the source of its binding power?) makes Orwell an uncertain guide to action, especially in the realm of politics, unless he is taken as a saint, that is, a transmitter of revelation—a class of person he had a great distaste for.