went on, with a faint smile,
"brought me to Paris, where we met.--Then came Parliament--afterwards
the war and a revolution in all my ideas. I suddenly saw the strength
and power of England and realised whence it came. I realised that it
was our democracy which was the backbone of the country. I realised the
injustice of those centuries of class government. I plunged into my old
socialistic studies, which I had taken up at Oxford more out of caprice
than anything, and I began to have a vision of what I have always since
looked upon as the truth. I began to realise that there was some
super-divine truth in the equality of all humans, notwithstanding the
cheap arguments against it; that by steady and broad-minded government
for a generation or so, human beings would be born into the world under
more level conditions; and with the fading away of class would be born
or rather generated the real and wonderful spirit of freedom. My
parliamentary career progressed by leaps and bounds, but when in '15 the
war began to go against us, I turned soldier."

"You don't need to tell me anything about that part of your career," she
interrupted, with a little smile almost of proprietory pride. "I never
forget it."

"When I came back," he continued, "I was almost a fanatic. I worked not
from the ranks of the Labour Party itself, because I flatter myself that
I was clear-sighted enough to see that the Labour Party as it existed
after the war, split up by factions, devoted to the selfish interests of
the great trades unions and with the taint of Miller retarding all
progress, had nothing in it of the real spirit of freedom. It was every
man for his own betterment and the world in which he lived might go
hang. I stayed with the Coalitionists, though I was often a thorn in
their side, but because I was also useful to them I bent them often
towards the light. Then they began to fear me, or rather my principles.
It was out of my principles, although I was not nominally one of them,
that Dartrey admits freely to-day he built up the Democratic Party. He
had been working on the same lines for years, a little too much from the
idealistic point of view. He needed the formula. I gave it to him.
Horlock came into office again and I worked with him for a time.
Gradually, however, my position became more and more difficult. In the
end he offered me a post in the Cabinet, induced me to resign my own
seat, which I admit was a doubtful one, and sent me