obstinately to
party ties. These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations
and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example, or
Dayton. They are the scholars-at-large in life. For them the fact that
the party system has been essential in the history of England for two
hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour. They have read histories
and memoirs, they see the great grey pile of Westminster not so much
for what it is as for what it was, rich with dramatic memories, populous
with glorious ghosts, phrasing itself inevitably in anecdotes and
quotations. It seems almost scandalous that new things should continue
to happen, swamping with strange qualities the savour of these old
associations.

That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall, thrust
himself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once held
Charles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible profanation to
Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I think, like to have
the front benches left empty now for ever, or at most adorned with
laureated ivory tablets: "Here Dizzy sat," and "On this Spot William
Ewart Gladstone made his First Budget Speech." Failing this, he demands,
if only as signs of modesty and respect on the part of the survivors,
meticulous imitation. "Mr. G.," he murmurs, "would not have done that,"
and laments a vanished subtlety even while Mr. Evesham is speaking. He
is always gloomily disposed to lapse into wonderings about what
things are coming to, wonderings that have no grain of curiosity. His
conception of perfect conduct is industrious persistence along the
worn-down, well-marked grooves of the great recorded days. So infinitely
more important to him is the documented, respected thing than the
elusive present.

Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl is
a sound man on a committee, and Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY GAZETTE,
the most gentlemanly paper in London. They prevail, however, in their
clubs at lunch time. There, with the pleasant consciousness of a
morning's work free from either zeal or shirking, they mingle with
permanent officials, prominent lawyers, even a few of the soberer type
of business men, and relax their minds in the discussion of the morning
paper, of the architecture of the West End, and of the latest public
appointments, of golf, of holiday resorts, of the last judicial
witticisms and forensic "crushers." The New Year