o mediatise all this stuff, all
these little crowns and boundaries and creeds, and so on, that stand
in the way. Just as Italy had to be united in spite of all the rotten
little dukes and princes and republics, just as Germany had to be united
in spite of its scores of kingdoms and duchies and liberties, so now
the world. Things as they are may be fun for lawyers and politicians
and court people and--douaniers; they may suit the loan-mongers and
the armaments shareholders, they may even be more comfortable for the
middle-aged, but what, except as an inconvenience, does that matter to
you or me?"

Prothero always pleased Benham when he swept away empires. There was
always a point when the rhetoric broke into gesture.

"We've got to sweep them away, Benham," he said, with a wide gesture of
his arm. "We've got to sweep them all away."

Prothero helped himself to some more whiskey, and spoke hastily,
because he was afraid some one else might begin. He was never safe from
interruption in his own room. The other young men present sucked at
their pipes and regarded him doubtfully. They were never quite certain
whether Prothero was a prophet or a fool. They could not understand a
mixed type, and he was so manifestly both.

"The only sane political work for an intelligent man is to get the
world-state ready. For that we have to prepare an aristocracy--"

"Your world-state will be aristocratic?" some one interpolated.

"Of course it will be aristocratic. How can uninformed men think all
round the globe? Democracy dies five miles from the parish pump. It will
be an aristocratic republic of all the capable men in the world...."

"Of course," he added, pipe in mouth, as he poured out his whiskey,
"it's a big undertaking. It's an affair of centuries...."

And then, as a further afterthought: "All the more reason for getting to
work at it...."

In his moods of inspiration Prothero would discourse through the tobacco
smoke until that great world-state seemed imminent--and Part Two in the
Tripos a thing relatively remote. He would talk until the dimly-lit room
about him became impalpable, and the young men squatting about it in
elaborately careless attitudes caught glimpses of cities that are still
to be, bridges in wild places, deserts tamed and oceans conquered,
mankind no longer wasted by bickerings, going forward to the conquest of
the stars....

An aristocratic world-state; this political dream had already taken
hold of