on't trade
with my friends and I don't make friends with my tradesmen. Natural
enemies--polite of course but antagonists. Are you keen over this Tariff
stuff, Steve?"

"Not a bit," I said. "That too seems a detail."

"It doesn't seem to be keeping its place as a detail," said my father.
"Very few men can touch tariffs and not get a little soiled. I hate all
this international sharping, all these attempts to get artificial
advantages, all this making poor people buy inferior goods dear, in the
name of the flag. If it comes to that, damn the flag! Custom-houses are
ugly things, Stephen; the dirty side of nationality. Dirty things,
ignoble, cross, cunning things.... They wake you up in the small hours
and rout over your bags.... An imperial people ought to be an urbane
people, a civilizing people--above such petty irritating things. I'd as
soon put barbed wire along the footpath across that field where the
village children go to school. Or claim that our mushrooms are
cultivated. Or prosecute a Sunday-Society Cockney for picking my
primroses. Custom-houses indeed! It's Chinese. There are things a Great
Country mustn't do, Stephen. A country like ours ought to get along
without the manners of a hard-breathing competitive cad.... If it can't
I'd rather it didn't get along.... What's the good of a huckster
country?--it's like having a wife on the streets. It's no excuse that
she brings you money. But since the peace, and that man Chamberlain's
visit to Africa, you Imperialists seem to have got this nasty spirit all
over you.... The Germans do it, you say!"

My father shut one eye and regarded the color of his port against the
waning light. "Let _'em_," he said.... "Fancy!--quoting the _Germans_!
When I was a boy, there weren't any Germans. They came up after '70.
Statecraft from Germany! And statesmen from Birmingham! German silver
and Electroplated Empires.... No."

"It's just a part of our narrow outlook," I answered from the hearthrug,
after a pause. "It's because we're so--limited that everyone is
translating the greatness of empire into preferential trading and
jealousy of Germany. It's for something bigger than that that I've
returned."

"Those big things come slowly," said my father. And then with a sigh:
"Age after age. They seem at times--to be standing still. Good things go
with the bad; bad things come with the good...."

I remember him saying that as though I could still hear him.

It must have been after