you'll like to read them over one of these days.... You
see, there's not been a soldier in the family since the Peninsular War,
and so I've been particularly interested.... You must tell me all the
things you're thinking of, and what you mean to do. This last
stuff--this Chinese business--it puzzles me. I want to know what you
think of it--and everything."

I did my best to give him my ideas such as they were. And as they were
still very vague ideas I have no doubt he found me rhetorical. I can
imagine myself talking of the White Man's Burthen, and how in Africa it
had seemed at first to sit rather staggeringly upon our under-trained
shoulders. I spoke of slackness and planlessness.

"I've come back in search of efficiency." I have no doubt I said that
at any rate.

"We're trying to run this big empire," I may have explained, "with
under-trained, under-educated, poor-spirited stuff, and we shall come a
cropper unless we raise our quality. I'm still Imperialist, more than
ever I was. But I'm an Imperialist on a different footing. I've no great
illusions left about the Superiority of the Anglo-Saxons. All that has
gone. But I do think it will be a monstrous waste, a disaster to human
possibilities if this great liberal-spirited empire sprawls itself
asunder for the want of a little gravity and purpose. And it's here the
work has to be done, the work of training and bracing up and stimulating
the public imagination...."

Yes, that would be the sort of thing I should have said in those days.
There's an old _National Review_ on my desk as I write, containing an
article by me with some of those very phrases in it. I have been looking
at it in order to remind myself of my own forgotten eloquence.

"Yes," I remember my father saying. "Yes." And then after reflection,
"But those coolies, those Chinese coolies. You can't build up an
imperial population by importing coolies."

"I don't like that side of the business myself," I said. "It's detail."

"Perhaps. But the Liberals will turn you out on it next year. And then
start badgering public houses and looting the church.... And then this
Tariff talk! Everybody on our side seems to be mixing up the unity of
the empire with tariffs. It's a pity. Salisbury wouldn't have stood it.
Unity! Unity depends on a common literature and a common language and
common ideas and sympathies. It doesn't unite people for them to be
forced to trade with each other. Trading isn't friendship. I d