l that invoked newspaper
articles and heated controversies.

The effect of India upon Benham's mind was a peculiar mixture of
attraction and irritation. He was attracted by the Hindu spirit of
intellectualism and the Hindu repudiation of brutality, and he was
infuriated by the spirit of caste that cuts the great world of India
into a thousand futile little worlds, all aloof and hostile one to the
other. "I came to see India," he wrote, "and there is no India. There is
a great number of Indias, and each goes about with its chin in the air,
quietly scorning everybody else."

His Indian adventures and his great public controversy on caste began
with a tremendous row with an Indian civil servant who had turned an
Indian gentleman out of his first-class compartment, and culminated in
a disgraceful fracas with a squatting brown holiness at Benares, who had
thrown aside his little brass bowlful of dinner because Benham's shadow
had fallen upon it.

"You unendurable snob!" said Benham, and then lapsing into the forceful
and inadvisable: "By Heaven, you SHALL eat it!..."

8

Benham's detestation of human divisions and hostilities was so deep in
his character as to seem almost instinctive. But he had too a very clear
reason for his hostility to all these amazing breaks in human continuity
in his sense of the gathering dangers they now involve. They had always,
he was convinced, meant conflict, hatred, misery and the destruction
of human dignity, but the new conditions of life that have been brought
about by modern science were making them far more dangerous than they
had ever been before. He believed that the evil and horror of war was
becoming more and more tremendous with every decade, and that the free
play of national prejudice and that stupid filching ambitiousness
that seems to be inseparable from monarchy, were bound to precipitate
catastrophe, unless a real international aristocracy could be brought
into being to prevent it.

In the drawer full of papers labelled "Politics," White found a paper
called "The Metal Beast." It showed that for a time Benham had been
greatly obsessed by the thought of the armaments that were in those days
piling up in every country in Europe. He had gone to Essen, and at Essen
he had met a German who had boasted of Zeppelins and the great guns that
were presently to smash the effete British fleet and open the Imperial
way to London.

"I could not sleep," he wrote, "on account of