architectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an air of absolute
indifference to mortal ends.

Those shapes and large inhuman places--for all of mankind that one
sees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the industrial
monsters that snort and toil there--mix up inextricably with my memories
of my first days as a legislator. Black figures drift by me, heavy vans
clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a motor bicycle, and presently,
on the Albert Embankment, every seat has its one or two outcasts huddled
together and slumbering.

"These things come, these things go," a whispering voice urged upon me,
"as once those vast unmeaning Saurians whose bones encumber museums came
and went rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives."...

Fruitless lives!--was that the truth of it all?...

Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parliament in front of the
colonnades of St Thomas's Hospital. I leant on the parapet close by a
lamp-stand of twisted dolphins--and I prayed!

I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string of
barges presently came swinging and bumping round as high-water turned
to ebb. That sudden change of position and my brief perplexity at it,
sticks like a paper pin through the substance of my thoughts. It was
then I was moved to prayer. I prayed that night that life might not
be in vain, that in particular I might not live in vain. I prayed for
strength and faith, that the monstrous blundering forces in life might
not overwhelm me, might not beat me back to futility and a meaningless
acquiescence in existent things. I knew myself for the weakling I was,
I knew that nevertheless it was set for me to make such order as I could
out of these disorders, and my task cowed me, gave me at the thought of
it a sense of yielding feebleness.

"Break me, O God," I prayed at last, "disgrace me, torment me, destroy
me as you will, but save me from self-complacency and little interests
and little successes and the life that passes like the shadow of a
dream."

BOOK THE THIRD: THE HEART OF POLITICS

CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN

1

I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this next
portion of my book for many days. I perceive I must leave it raw edged
and ill joined. I have learnt something of the impossibility of History.
For all I have had to tell is the story of one man's convictions and
aims and how they reacted upon his life;