oms of death to light? Had he been too human for an office with
which humanity was no longer compatible? It seemed a confounding charge
to one whose soul was filled with a social hunger which ever went
unsatisfied, whose official isolation from his people was a daily
obsession. His doubt was whether he had been human enough? As he
cogitated on the matter the suspicion grew in him that he had only been
human domestically; outside his domesticity he had resigned his humanity
and become an automaton, a thing in leading-strings. He had allowed
constitutional usage, aye, and constitutional encroachments also, to
crush him down. In constitutional usage he was as harnessed and
bedizened as the piebald ponies who drew his state-coach when he went
each year to open or shut the flood-gates of legislative eloquence.
Constitutional usage, determined for him by others, was the bearing-rein
that had bowed his neck to that decorative arch of mingled condescension
and pride with which he received deputations, addresses, ambassadors.
Constitutional usage had put a bit in his mouth and blinkers upon his
eyes, so that now, even in his own Council Chamber, he was not expected
to speak, was not expected to see unless his attention were specially
invited. More and more the critical and suspensory powers of the Crown
were coming to be regarded as out of place, a straining of the Royal
Prerogative. The growth of the ministerial system had gone on; and he,
shut off from growth in its midst, was being robbed of strength day by
day. And all this was being done, not in the eyes of his people, but
secretly, under smooth and respectful formalities, by a Cabinet
insidiously bent on acquiring as its own that of which it robbed him. In
this unwritten and unnoticed readjustment of the Constitution nothing
was being passed on to the people's representatives. They knew nothing
about it; keeping all that to itself, the Cabinet, like the grim wolf
with privy paw, "daily devoured apace, and nothing said."

So far (barring the quotation from Milton, a purely literary adornment
on the author's part), so far he had got with drifting and despondent
thought, when again that small regal presence, of low statute but ample
form, became clearly defined, and he heard the soft staccato voice
saying sharply: "I won't have it! I won't have it!"

The blood of his ancestors thrilled in his veins. There and then he
formed a resolution--neither would he! He moved to his desk