movements which
indeed have never so much lived as suffered chronic resuscitation. These
were days when Tariff Reform was only an inglorious possibility for the
Tory Party, and Young England had yet to demonstrate its mental quality
in an anti-socialist campaign. Seen from the perspectives of Cambridge
and Chexington, the Tory party was still a credible basis for the
adventure of a young man with an aristocratic theory in his mind.

These were the days when the strain and extremity of a dangerous
colonial war were fresh in people's minds, when the quality of
the public consciousness was braced up by its recent response to
unanticipated demands. The conflict of stupidities that had caused
the war was overlaid and forgotten by a hundred thousand devotions,
by countless heroic deaths and sufferings, by a pacification largely
conceived and broadly handled. The nation had displayed a belated regard
for its honour and a sustained passion for great unities. It was still
possible for Benham to regard the empire as a splendid opportunity,
and London as the conceivable heart of the world. He could think of
Parliament as a career, and of a mingling of aristocratic socialism
based on universal service with a civilizing imperialism as a
purpose....

But his thoughts had gone wider and deeper than that....

Already when Benham came to London he had begun to dream of
possibilities that went beyond the accidental states and empires of
to-day. Prothero's mind, replete with historical detail, could find
nothing but absurdity in the alliances and dynasties and loyalties of
our time. "Patched up things, Benham, temporary, pretentious. All very
well for the undignified man, the democratic man, to take shelter under,
all very well for the humourist to grin and bear, all very well for the
crowd and the quack, but not for the aristocrat--No!--his mind cuts like
steel and burns like fire. Lousy sheds they are, plastered hoardings...
and such a damned nuisance too! For any one who wants to do honourable
things! With their wars and their diplomacies, their tariffs and
their encroachments; all their humbugging struggles, their bloody and
monstrous struggles, that finally work out to no end at all.... If you
are going for the handsome thing in life then the world has to be a
united world, Benham, as a matter of course. That was settled when
the railways and the telegraph came. Telephones, wireless telegraphy,
aeroplanes insist on it. We've got t