and Birthday honours
lists are always very sagely and exhaustively considered, and anecdotes
are popular and keenly judged. They do not talk of the things that are
really active in their minds, but in the formal and habitual manner they
suppose to be proper to intelligent but still honourable men. Socialism,
individual money matters, and religion are forbidden topics, and sex and
women only in so far as they appear in the law courts. It is to me
the strangest of conventions, this assumption of unreal loyalties and
traditional respects, this repudiation and concealment of passionate
interests. It is like wearing gloves in summer fields, or bathing in a
gown, or falling in love with the heroine of a novel, or writing under a
pseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg....

It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the great
past that is embodied in Westminster and its traditions; we are not so
much wanting in the historical sense as alive to the greatness of our
present opportunities and the still vaster future that is possible to
us. London is the most interesting, beautiful, and wonderful city in the
world to me, delicate in her incidental and multitudinous littleness,
and stupendous in her pregnant totality; I cannot bring myself to use
her as a museum or an old bookshop. When I think of Whitehall that
little affair on the scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivial
and remote in comparison with the possibilities that offer themselves to
my imagination within the great grey Government buildings close at hand.

It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now. I think
of St. Stephen's tower streaming upwards into the misty London night and
the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which the hansom cabs
of my first experiences were ousted more and more by taxicabs as the
second Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I think of the
Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts sending out
invisible threads of direction to the armies in the camps, to great
fleets about the world. The crowded, darkly shining river goes flooding
through my memory once again, on to those narrow seas that part us
from our rival nations; I see quadrangles and corridors of spacious
grey-toned offices in which undistinguished little men and little files
of papers link us to islands in the tropics, to frozen wildernesses
gashed for gold, to vast temple-studded plains, to forest worlds
and