ce and all their
forms and establishments, is his real task, that is the common work of
knighthood. It is a task to be done in a thousand ways; one man working
by persuasion, another by example, this one overthrowing some crippling
restraint upon the freedom of speech and the spread of knowledge,
and that preparing himself for a war that will shatter a tyrannous
presumption. Most imaginative literature, all scientific investigation,
all sound criticism, all good building, all good manufacture, all sound
politics, every honesty and every reasoned kindliness contribute to this
release of men from the heat and confusions of our present world."

It was clear to White that as Benham progressed with this major part of
his research, he was more and more possessed by the idea that he was not
making his own personal research alone, but, side by side with a vast,
masked, hidden and once unsuspected multitude of others; that this great
idea of his was under kindred forms the great idea of thousands, that
it was breaking as the dawn breaks, simultaneously to great numbers of
people, and that the time was not far off when the new aristocracy, the
disguised rulers of the world, would begin to realize their common
bent and effort. Into these latter papers there creeps more and more
frequently a new phraseology, such expressions as the "Invisible King"
and the "Spirit of Kingship," so that as Benham became personally more
and more solitary, his thoughts became more and more public and social.

Benham was not content to define and denounce the prejudices of mankind.
He set himself to study just exactly how these prejudices worked, to get
at the nature and habits and strengths of each kind of prejudice, and to
devise means for its treatment, destruction or neutralization. He had no
great faith in the power of pure reasonableness; his psychological ideas
were modern, and he had grasped the fact that the power of most of the
great prejudices that strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual
level. Consequently he sought to bring himself into the closest contact
with prejudices in action and prejudices in conflict in order to
discover their sub-rational springs.

A large proportion of that larger moiety of the material at Westhaven
Street which White from his extensive experience of the public patience
decided could not possibly "make a book," consisted of notes and
discussions upon the first-hand observations Benham had made in this