hat had
arisen to guide the younger generation out of the darkness. When,
therefore, the Chairman, Mr. John Felton, M.P., who had held minor
office in the last administration, had concluded his opening remarks,
having sketched briefly the history of the League and intro duced Mr.
Paul Savelli, in the usual eulogistic terms, as their irresistible
Organizing Secretary, and Paul in his radiant young manhood sprang up
before them, the audience greeted him with enthusiastic applause. They
had expected, as an audience does expect in an unknown speaker, any one
of the usual types of ordinary looking politicians--perhaps bald,
perhaps grey headed, perhaps pink and fat--it did not matter; but they
did not expect the magnetic personality of this young man of
astonishing beauty, with his perfect features, wavy black hair,
athletic build and laughing eyes, who seemed the embodiment of youth
and joy and purpose and victory.

Before he spoke a word, he knew that he had them under his control, and
he felt the great thrill of it. Physically he had the consciousness of
a blaze of light, of a bare barn of an ungalleried place, of
thickly-set row upon row of faces, and a vast confused flutter of
beating hands. The applause subsided. He turned with his "Mr. Chairman,
Your Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen," to the circle behind him, caught
Miss Winwood, his dearest lady's smile, caught and held for a hundredth
part of a second the deep blue eyes of the Princess--she wore a great
hat with a grey feather and a chinchilla coat thrown open, and looked
the incarnation of all the beauty and all the desires of all his
dreams--and with a flash of gladness faced the audience and plunged
into his speech.

It began with a denunciation of the Little Englander. At that period
one heard, perhaps, more of the Little Englander than one does
nowadays--which to some people's way of thinking is a pity. The Little
Englander (according to Paul) was a purblind creature, with political
vision ice-bound by the economic condition of the labouring classes in
Great Britain. The Little Englander had no sense of patriotism. The
Little Englander had no sense of Empire. He had no sense of India,
Australia, Canada. He had no sense of foreign nations' jealousy of
England's secular supremacy. He had a distinct idea, however, of three
nationalities; those of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The inhabitants of
those three small nations took peculiar pains to hammer that idea into