to me his greatness stood over and behind the reality of his
life, like some splendid servant, thinking his own thoughts, who waits
behind a lesser master's chair....

8

Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the organised state
becoming so finely true to practicability and so clearly stated as to
have the compelling conviction of physical science, he spoke quite after
my heart. Had he really embodied the attempt to realise that, I could
have done no more than follow him blindly. But neither he nor I embodied
that, and there lies the gist of my story. And when it came to a study
of others among the leading Tories and Imperialists the doubt increased,
until with some at last it was possible to question whether they had any
imaginative conception of constructive statecraft at all; whether they
didn't opaquely accept the world for what it was, and set themselves
single-mindedly to make a place for themselves and cut a figure in it.

There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the great
peers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa, Framboya--Cromer,
Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example. So far as that easier
task of holding sword and scales had gone, they had shown the finest
qualities, but they had returned to the perplexing and exacting problem
of the home country, a little glorious, a little too simply bold. They
wanted to arm and they wanted to educate, but the habit of immediate
necessity made them far more eager to arm than to educate, and their
experience of heterogeneous controls made them overrate the need for
obedience in a homogeneous country. They didn't understand raw men,
ill-trained men, uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these are
the things that matter in England.... There were also the great business
adventurers, from Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord Paddockhurst).
My mind remained unsettled, and went up and down the scale between
a belief in their far-sighted purpose and the perception of crude
vanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar competitiveness, and a mere habitual
persistence in the pursuit of gain. For a time I saw a good deal of
Cossington--I wish I had kept a diary of his talk and gestures, to mark
how he could vary from day to day between a POSEUR, a smart tradesman,
and a very bold and wide-thinking political schemer. He had a vanity
of sweeping actions, motor car pounces, Napoleonic rushes, that led to
violent ineffectual changes