edom, the United States, by a cunning, lean-faced rascal
in striped trousers and a blue coat. The chief ministers of state
were pickpockets, washerwomen, clowns, whales, asses, elephants,
and what not, and issues that affected the welfare of millions of
men were dressed and judged like a rally in some idiotic pantomime.
A tragic war in South Africa, that wrecked many thousand homes,
impoverished two whole lands, and brought death and disablement
to fifty thousand men, was presented as a quite comical quarrel
between a violent queer being named Chamberlain, with an eyeglass,
an orchid, and a short temper, and "old Kroojer," an obstinate
and very cunning old man in a shocking bad hat. The conflict was
carried through in a mood sometimes of brutish irritability and
sometimes of lax slovenliness, the merry peculator plied his trade
congenially in that asinine squabble, and behind these fooleries
and masked by them, marched Fate--until at last the clowning of
the booth opened and revealed--hunger and suffering, brands burning
and swords and shame. . . . These men had come to fame and power in
that atmosphere, and to me that day there was the oddest suggestion
in them of actors who have suddenly laid aside grotesque and foolish
parts; the paint was washed from their faces, the posing put aside.

Even when the presentation was not frankly grotesque and degrading
it was entirely misleading. When I read of Laycock, for example,
there arises a picture of a large, active, if a little wrong-headed,
intelligence in a compact heroic body, emitting that "Goliath" speech
of his that did so much to precipitate hostilities, it tallies not
at all with the stammering, high-pitched, slightly bald, and very
conscience-stricken personage I saw, nor with Melmount's contemptuous
first description of him. I doubt if the world at large will ever
get a proper vision of those men as they were before the Change.
Each year they pass more and more incredibly beyond our intellectual
sympathy. Our estrangement cannot, indeed, rob them of their
portion in the past, but it will rob them of any effect of reality.
The whole of their history becomes more and more foreign, more and
more like some queer barbaric drama played in a forgotten tongue.
There they strut through their weird metamorphoses of caricature,
those premiers and presidents, their height preposterously exaggerated by
political buskins, their faces covered by great resonant inhuman
masks, the